It turns out that Britain is so systemically racist that
we just can’t see it. We are blind to the infinite number of ways that our very
existence is an affront to decent people of a different ethnicity. White people
need to be trained, coerced, convinced of the harm we do with every breath we
take, much as Hans Christian Anderson wrote in 1837 about the emperor, his
courtiers and the clothes of materials so fine they were invisible to all but
the educated eye.
In the original two conmen posing as weavers and tailors
manage to convince the emperor, his officials, his government and all who
surround him that only the stupid cannot see the magnificent new wardrobe they
have conjured up from literally nothing. The looms clack but no thread is woven.
The sewing machines purr yet no cloth is stitched. Money changes hands and at
every turn, despite their being no substance at all, the self-importance of all
involved prevents them from seeing what their eyes are telling them.
This is, of course, a well-loved fairy tale and a caution
against the folly of arrogance and ready acceptance of charlatans and
mountebanks. It is told to children in their formative years, or at least it
was. I wonder if it has been quietly put aside because heaven forfend we
prepare kids to exercise an open mind as they enter the wider world. Not everything
is as it seems. Not every tale you hear is true and nobody is too clever they
can’t be fooled.
So, you might be forgiven for assuming that Keir Starmer,
of a certain age, would be entirely familiar with this principle. But, steeped
in the rarefied broth of the legal human rights industry and desperate to garner
votes from every corner he has volunteered to submit himself to ‘unconscious bias training’. The principle job of a salesman is to persuade you of your need for
his product. The principle job of a snake oil salesman is to part you from your
money for nothing of value in return.
In the 1990s we were alerted to false memory syndrome after
a series of cases where women had been hypnotised in therapy and miraculously ‘remembered’
abusive events from their childhood which had never happened. Families were
broken up and ancient trusts were shattered by this traumatic false remembering.
In 1991 the police and social services embarked on a dawn raid and took into
care the children of families in the Orkneys on the false premise that they had
been involved in ritual child abuse. This is some sick shit.
Unconscious bias training sounds an awful lot like ‘re-education’;
the kind of thing engaged in by despotic communist regimes many times over. Mao,
Pol Pot, the Romanian communist prisons, the Russian gulags; all had programmes
to break and reconfigure the thinking of its citizens in a way that better
fitted their purpose. The Chinese Communist Party, North Korea and to an
arguably less extreme extent, the European Union, have all coerced their populations
to love Big Brother, embrace the party doctrines and accept the edicts.
Actually, it is little surprise that Starmzy is setting
this example to his troops because the Labour movement has a track record in
creating this kind of ‘industry’. Take another recent headline: “Lack of BAME
councillors 'perpetuating racial inequality' says report.” It goes on to say “Campaigners say the findings are a ‘wake-up call’ and that communities
feel like these institutions don't belong to us". Well, that is because ‘these
institutions’ don’t belong to those who live by different rules from the rest. The
fault is theirs, not ours. But that is what unconscious bias training seeks to
reverse.
Taken to its extremes we could end up with whole sectors involved
in ‘training’ about diversity and why white is bad, about inclusion and how
white is bad, equality and how whites have more of it… We could see entire academic
faculties engaged in discovering all the ways that BAME people suffer and have
always suffered at that hands of white people. We might even discover that the
judiciary seems to represent the perpetrator more than they do the victim,
something from which Mr Starmer has profited in the past.
The Keir is in the altogether...
Oh, wait, isn’t this what we – the child in the crowd –
have been yelling about for years, only for our protestations to be dismissed
as ignorant, racist and hateful? Haven’t we pointed out, time and time again,
how diverting so many resources to this burgeoning promotion of malcontent is
counter-productive, costly and even malevolent? Learn the past so you don’t
make the same mistakes, we say. But in the original story even though the crowd
realises it has been tricked the emperor walks on, as proud as ever. It’s not
looking good.
