The next British prime minister won’t be a white man. The final runoff is between Rishi Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor of the exchequer prompted Boris Johnson’s downfall, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary. Sunak’s parents were born into the British diaspora of East African Indians; Truss’s were left-wing teachers.
Of the 11 candidates who put themselves forward for the top slot, six were not white. For context, this is in a country where white people are around 86% of the population.
And you know what? It was no big deal. The British media were vastly more excited by the prospect of Barack Obama becoming the first black president of the United States, or of Hillary Clinton becoming the first female president, than they are by their own country getting either its first nonwhite or third female prime minister.
This partly reflects the British obsession with American identity politics, which I’ve lamented before in these pages. Mainly, though, it is because these are the wrong kind of women and the wrong kind of ethnic minorities. Being conservatives, they refuse to be defined by their melanin or their gametes.
As one of the candidates, Attorney General Suella Braverman, put it: “Don’t vote for me because I’m a woman. Don’t vote for me because I’m brown. Vote for me because I love this country.”
Needless to say, the contest has scrambled the sensors of some leftist pundits. They can’t come to grips with the idea that the hated Tories have overtaken them in the only measure they care about. “Can you imagine a Black or Asian person leading the Conservative Party?” asked the woke journalist Nadine White, suggesting that “the very concept is diametrically opposed to the party’s core values.”
Some anti-Tory commentators cope with the cognitive dissonance by denying the authenticity of the candidates, circulating ugly memes that show them with white spouses, for example. Others go further. Gus John asked in the Jamaican newspaper the Gleaner: “Why should I rejoice because ‘massa’ has recruited a bunch of house negroes and handed them whips to keep me in bondage and under control?”
Even relatively moderate commentators make some breathtaking assumptions. Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik savaged another Tory leadership candidate who had been brought up mainly in Nigeria for being anti-woke and for quoting Thomas Sowell. Then she condescendingly allowed, with the air of a woman making a great concession, “This is not to imply that there is no place for people of color on the Right.”
To see what is wrong with that sentence, try inverting it: “This is not to imply that there is no place for white people on the Left.” How extraordinary to assume that people should have a default setting based on skin color.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem that many leftist parties have. They think in blocs, collectives, and tribes. One of the reasons minority candidates have risen further and faster in the Conservative Party than the others is that they are not confined to ethnic ghettos.
The Labour Party tends to put its West Indian candidates in seats with big West Indian electorates, its Bangladeshis with Bangladeshis, and so on. They look for community leaders, especially in local elections, who are able to deliver bloc votes, a system known among Pakistanis as “Baradari.” The Tories, prizing individualism, do no such thing, and most of the minority candidates contesting the leadership represented white, rural constituencies.
There are two problems with the Left’s approach. First, it is incompatible with the notion of personal freedom, which is why many young people from minority communities, fed up with being expected to vote for others on essentially tribal grounds, are walking away from it.
Second, it is incompatible with pluralist democracy. There is a reason why representative government evolved largely in ethnically homogenous states — including, though it is now unfashionable to say so, 18th-century America. Multinational polities tend to produce parties that represent particular religions or language groups. Voters feel obliged to back “their” team, which makes politicians complacent and corrupt and turns government into a scramble for the spoils of office.
There is one part of the United Kingdom where this already happens: namely, Northern Ireland, although the system there is slightly ameliorated by the fact that there are at least two competitive parties within each community.
The question faced by every Western country, including Britain and the U.S., is whether increasing levels of immigration lead, if not to actual balkanization, at least to political tribalism. Is it possible to instill such a strong sense of shared identity that skin color becomes as irrelevant as hair color? Not, I fear, if the Left gets its way.
