Cast your mind back to the furore when the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, was revealed to have said that he “didn’t see another white face” in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It was reported as if it would be of real consequence to his political future – but enough time has passed, I figure, to confirm that it was not. Why did some seriously consider this a turning point? Because Jenrick had said something genuinely explicit and unambiguous – no dog whistle, no gesture, no disguise, no metaphor. Though he claimed “it’s not about skin colour”, it was a naked reference to race and an evident rebuke to British communities where there was a predominance of people of colour.
The lack of consequence, however, was unsurprising, because within the public sphere the question of racism has been rigged for quite some time and the rules around who gets to say what about race in Britain have been rewritten. What Jenrick did, then, was to truly test the boundaries by outraging them – and signal what those in public life can now get away with saying after a concerted effort to erode the dignity of public racial discourse. His colleagues have wasted no time in answering this call. Katie Lam, a so-called rising star of the Conservative party, last week called for legally settled families to be deported to make the UK “culturally coherent”. How quickly the goalposts move.
