THE UK Government has been accusing of starting a “culture war” to distract from its failures and win back Tory support lost in the wake of the Dominic Cummings row.
Boris Johnson yesterday announced a new commission on race and ethnic disparities across the UK – but Labour’s David Lammy said the review had been “written on the back of a fag packet yesterday to assuage the Black Lives Matter protests”.
Anti-racism demonstrators have taken to the streets across the UK for the last fortnight in protests triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
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Lammy said the findings of his own commission into the treatment of ethnic minorities, published three years ago, had not been implemented. The MP said: “Implement them, that’s what Boris has to do. And then the Black Lives Matter protests can stop and we can get on with dealing with coronavirus.”
The MP also accused the Prime Minister of stoking cultural divisions to distract from other issues, pointing to last week’s focus on Winston Churchill’s statue. The Tory leader expressed anger after the monument was vandalised with graffiti accusing the former PM of being “a racist”.
Lammy said: “They want a culture war because they want to distract from the real issues.”
The “culture war” term describes debate based mainly on personal identity and view of the world rather than policy differences, as was traditionally the case in UK politics. The Remain/Leavers divide is an example – which many people see as a decisive metric for people’s opinions on other issues than Brexit.
While senior Tories agree tackling racism should be a priority, others in the party see the anti-racism movement as making “far-left” demands that are not reasonable.
Writing in the Telegraph yesterday Johnson played to this side of the row, focusing on calls to remove statues of slave traders and saying the UK “cannot Photoshop its history”. He said he would resist efforts to remove the statue of Churchill with “every breath in my body”.
In Number 10 the Prime Minister’s inner circle is said to be pushing him to engage in this kinds of debates and want a “war on woke” to win back Tory support which many polls suggest has plunged amid the coronavirus crisis – particularly triggered by the Dominic Cummings row.
The Prime Minister’s top adviser travelled from London to his parents’ Durham home during lockdown while sick with Covid-19.
Munira Mirza, the head of Downing Street’s policy unit, has influenced the PM’s views on the cultural war, an insider told the Financial Times.
Mirza has written several times for online libertarian magazine Spiked and has previously attacked the Labour government for its policies on multiculturalism and integration within the Muslim community.
Recently she criticised Lammy’s 2017 review in an article titled “the myth of institutional racism”.
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