It Could Be Said #58 Defending Equality Is A Battle Labour Cannot Duck

Elon Musk is a diplomatic challenge, confronting Islamophobia is a political imperative

Sir Keir Starmer makes no secret of his love for football, and yesterday saw him follow the old adage of playing the ball not the man with aplomb. After several days of Elon Musk becoming ever more aggressive in pushing racist conspiracy theories about him and his government, Starmer sought to counterattack without being drawn into a war of words with one of the world’s leading industrialists, who has since November set himself up as the foremost advisor to President-Elect Donald Trump.

In defending his record on prosecuting child sexual abuse as Director of Public Prosecutions a decade ago, and the approach his Government is now taking on the issue, Starmer pushed back against Musk’s lies in a firm but limited way. He didn’t grandstand against foreign interference nor take personal shots at Musk, but calmly laid out the facts about how he had secured greater prosecutions against grooming gangs, why Tommy Robinson is a bad-faith actor, and the importance of implementing the recommendations of 2022’s Jay Report. He will be hoping that by responding to Musk in this way, he has hopefully avoided polarising the issue, turning what seems to be an idiosyncratic obsession of a tycoon busily using social media when he should be sleeping, into an argument between the British and American Governments. It is striking that neither President-Elect Trump nor Vice President-Elect Vance has rowed in behind their ally’s attacks on Starmer.

However what Starmer sacrificed by constructing the narrowest, deepest defence possible, was the opportunity to push back more broadly on the idea that Britain deliberately overlooked crimes perpetuated by Asian men. Here he risks playing into the hands of the likes of Robert Jenrick, who seek to portray the problem of child sex abuse as one that disproportionately involves the British Pakistani community, something for which there is no evidence. Indeed, Jenrick’s Islamophobic outburst over the weekend about Britain having imported people from “alien cultures” with “medieval attitudes” is not just an outrageous slur against millions of his fellow British citizens, but specifically ignores that the lawyer who did the most to secure justice for the victims of the grooming gangs was a British Pakistani himself; Nazir Afzal.

The sad reality is that there were a series of overlapping and interlocking failures with the policing of child sex abuse that meant victims of all ethnicities and faiths weren’t taken seriously, and that abusers of all ethnicities and faiths were given the benefit of the doubt. Starmer is right to want to focus on addressing the state failure to protect all victims of child sex abuse by implementing the recommendations of the Jay Report rather than let the likes of Jenrick create a gerrymandered review of the cases they can turn into a platform for their lurid fantasies. But he has to do a better job of explaining this to the British people.

Sir Keir Starmer is surely right to be striving to avoid an open breach with the incoming American Government, but it cannot be seen to be unwilling to fight its domestic opponents on this issue. And I don’t mean the sloppy “Underpants Gnomes” thinking that often leads ministers to claim that whatever vaguely equalities-related hobby horse they particularly care about is crucial to securing economic growth. Instead they need to aggressively jump on loose remarks from the right, both explaining why their increasingly wild claims are untrue, but exposing the hateful ideologies that motivates such paranoia.

For while it is easy to be angry at what Musk is saying about our country, and how he is using his own personal social network to amplify these damaging lies about our country, such anger obscures the fact that Musk is often only repeating what he has read or watched from British outlets or commentators. With Reform UK entrenched in parliament, and Kemi Badenoch doubling-down on hard-right rhetoric on culture war issues, it seems inevitable that arguments on race relations or other aspects of equality will be a defining characteristic of this parliament. Not only does such arguments confuse and coarsen our political debate, but they threaten and harm minority communities that look to Labour to be their representative and protector.

But the Government is hamstrung in its ability to be either, by its failure to create a standalone Equalities ministry they had once promised. Indeed they actually took a backwards step by technically removing the ministry from its home in the Cabinet Office and instead having it squat in the Department of Education and Skills. It then compounded the issue by asking Anneliese Dodds to combine being Minister for Women and Equalities with also being the Minister for Overseas Development, with Bridget Phillipson as her nominal boss. Both busy with responsibilities elsewhere, neither has advocated for equalities since their appointments, making no attempt to push back on bigotry in the public sphere, including during this recent argument over child sex abuse.

We cannot continue with such a distracted, low-energy Equalities ministry. It risks leaving Labour’s supporters feeling demoralised and abandoned, whilst other voters are persuaded by conspiracy theories pushed by increasingly extreme conservative commentators and politicians. Sir Keir Starmer needs to get himself a wartime consigliere at Equalities, someone he can trust to get out there and defend the government’s principles on equality, and push back on the grubby attempts by the right to sow division and discord. This is not a battle his opponents on right, whether they live here or abroad, are going to let him duck.

Cooling Content Consumption Collation Corner

So my new year resolution is to try and substack on a weekly basis, and to include at the bottom some notes on what media I’ve consumed in the previous week. This is an attempt to my break my twin bad habits of spending too much time on Blue Sky or YouTube.

So this past week…

…I read Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency. Years ago I read Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun, which was an enjoyable look at Britain in the second half of the 1970s, and so was greatly looking forward to reading this book about the rise and fall of Ted Heath’s Government. And I found it….surprisingly stodgy in places. Much of the book is these long fiftysomething page chapters on a given theme, which Sandbrook actually covers far beyond the four year period the book is nominally focused on. I actually compared the two books, and the average chapter in State of Emergency is more than 16 pages longer than its successor. Sandbrook is good at capturing the growing sense of helplessness that gripped Heath’s Government, with members being mentally and physically ground down by the never-ending battles with the trade union movement. Given his conservative perspective, he is studiously fair when writing about the trade unions, repeatedly coming back to the fundamental issue that the trade unions were repeatedly open about their inability to be the corporatist partners that Heath wanted them to be. It’s just that you often find yourself trapped in a never-ending pop history chapter that even the author feels fed up with by the time you’ve finished it.

…I watched Doctor Who: Joy To The World and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Foul, which I thought were both delightful. What they both have in common is that they touch on political themes without becoming so didactic that you feel you’re being lectured to. Doctor Who got a lot of praise from critics of the previous government for Joy’s blistering rant about how the people in power partied whilst she wasn’t able to say goodbye to her mum because she followed lockdown rules. What I feel they missed is the strong implication that Joy’s rant is motivated by feeling ashamed at having not said goodbye to her mother in person, shame that was ultimately shown to be misplaced when we see how happy her facetime message had actually made her mother. Likewise, Wallace and Gromit is clearly a warning at not just how technology can be manipulated by bad faith actors but that doesn’t stop the good guys final victory coming when Wallace is persuaded to get out of his self-reflective funk and start inventing again. Even the need to sell the other message about how technology shouldn’t get in the way of life’s simple pleasures and our relationships with one another, doesn’t quite get Gromit control of his garden back.

…I played Mortal Kombat 1 on the PS5. More accurately I watched my son play through the story mode and then had some matches against him the week before. As always I find Mortal Kombat incredibly stiff to play, with none of the standard motion controls being as intuitive for me to pull off as in Street Fighter. But what I will say about this, is that the game is truly gorgeous in ways that watching clips online do not do justice. The fine details and colours of the backgrounds really do pop on a 4K Television in a way that streaming just can’t capture. Given that flashy graphics are fundamentally a marketing tool, this is a real problem, and MK1 has indeed underperformed sales wise.