I don’t want to reheat Sarah Pochin’s remarks about Black and Asian people on TV, and I don’t want to situate the Reform MP within the new political spaces where it’s acceptable to prefer the sight of faces that are white to those that are not white. I don’t want to ruminate on whether it’s better or worse to say these things on a TalkTV phone-in than at a private dinner. I don’t want to speculate on why shadow home secretary Chris Philp was happy to tell Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday that he wouldn’t have used Pochin’s “language”, yet was unable to call her racist. (He later told Times Radio: “Yes, it was racist.”) I don’t want to wonder which bits of the language he wouldn’t have used, if not for the racist bits. I don’t want to dive into the new bigot-ology – like Kremlinology, only less rewarding – where smart liberal minds apply themselves to what kind of advantage Conservatives and Reform MPs might seek, when they nudge right up to race hate then back away at the last minute, squirming in the margin of space they’ve created for themselves with their meaningless caveats. I don’t want to go near any of this bad-faith slurry, but the problem with racists is that if you ignore them, they don’t go away.
It feels like decades now, because it is, that we’ve spent discussing just how racist you’re allowed to be in public before you get “cancelled”. Since Michael Howard’s “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” election campaign in 2005, with its whiny, arse-covering rider – “it’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” – doing nothing to alter its poisonous innuendo (“are you secretly thinking people of colour are not as good? Shhh, don’t say it, just join our warm, silent embrace”), we’ve been pointlessly engaging on what the angry people aren’t allowed to say. If cancellation worked, how come getting cancelled is often so lucrative? Since when did we all have to start demonising migrants to prove we’re listening to “legitimate concerns”? How is it that calling someone racist is now more verboten than being racist?
