The veteran broadcaster Andrew Marr quit the BBC in 2021 after twenty years, claiming he needed to get his voice back. ‘I’m free to speak my mind now,’ he declared, following his departure.

According to Marr, the ‘insane’ impartiality rules imposed on BBC journalists were impacting on his private life: ‘I was self-censoring on air, and then self-censoring in front of family and friends, and even not saying what I really thought in the pub with friends.’

It sounds ironic in retrospect, given the extent of the BBC’s partiality, as revealed in Michael Prescott’s leaked internal memo. This showed that Panorama had ‘doctored’ a speech by President Trump; that BBC Arabic had given hundreds of on-air appearances to anti-Semites, including a man who once suggested Jews should be burned ‘as Hitler did’; and that BBC News’s ‘specialist LGBTQ desk’ ensured that stories that shed a critical light on the trans agenda were not covered. The revelations contained within the memo led to the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief Deborah Turness.

Indeed, the partisan outlook of the BBC was already the stuff of legend, long before Marr finally felt the need to liberate himself from its alleged impartiality rules – something he himself noted as far back as 2006: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias.’

Representing a type of media man and a particular worldview, Marr is worth looking at in a bit of detail. He captures the fate of an archetype – that of an ageing left-ish journalist, clinging to a media establishment and an elite worldview that are both now crumbling.

Marr spent 16 years of his BBC tenure fronting BBC One’s Sunday morning politics show, The Andrew Marr Show. His take on journalism is covered in his 2004 book, My Trade, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the following year. (I finished first with The Likes Of Us – if memory serves, Marr attributed my win to the meritocracy of Blair’s Britain in his Telegraph column the following day.) He believes that journalism is ‘nine-tenths being in the right places at the right time’. At the BBC it was helped by moving in the right circles while holding the right views. Coming from an upper-middle-class background, complete with a private-school education, a degree from Cambridge and the obligatory leftist politics, Marr was ideal BBC fodder. Although he describes himself as ‘slightly to the left’, he was nicknamed ‘Red Andy’ during his student years. In this he was not alone.

The ailing mainstream media is littered with similar middle-class men in late middle age, who were once left-wing students of a similar standing and background, but who softened in their politics or suppressed their voices, because their ambition to be columnists or anchormen was greater. As they drift towards their dotage, they appear to have been boosted by a renewed verve that’s ignited the revolutionary zeal of their agitprop years. Much of this is relayed in their social-media accounts: I’m free to speak my mind. These days they continue to sign in as radicals, railing against the ‘nationalists’ and ‘Brexiteers’ who challenge their views and status. Despite their radical posturing, the relic from the past they cling to, the institution that summons the reactionary within them, is the BBC.

Alongside Marr in this camp, there’s journalist and sometime BBC broadcaster David Aaronovitch, and former BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason, who according to some has regressed to the role of a student revolutionary. They have minor differences on political points, but they are united when outsiders criticise Auntie Beeb. They’re backed up by fellow travellers in the same trade, such as Will Hutton, John Simpson and Adam Boulton. The latter believes that the right-leaning GB News should be shut down as it affects the ‘delicate ecology’ of British broadcasting.

They are all, in their different ways, opposed to the populist revolt that has gripped Britain since Brexit in 2016. Mason implied recently that the Union flag-flying ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in September recalled the rise of Nazism during the 1930s. ‘Paul Mason is running out of insults for the ordinary working man and woman who refuse to pander to his obsequious endorsement of the criminal uselessness of the Labour Party’, wrote Austin Williams, co-editor of The Future of Community, in response. David Aaronovitch re-posted Williams’s tweet on X, commenting: ‘an architecture critic writes’. The implication being Williams was not a journalist with the calibre and BBC pedigree of Mason. Or of Aaronovitch himself, a former president of the National Union of Students, who once appeared on University Challenge, where his team made the radical move of answering every question wrongly with the name of a revolutionary: Trotsky… Lenin… Che…

Aaronovitch is the Hampstead-born, middle-class child of well-connected communists, while Mason stems from humble northern origins, although he’s now arguably more vocal in expressing his contempt for the white working class – a demographic he previously dismissed as a conceit. ‘To me, “white working class” is like the word “coolie” – created by imperialists to impose an identity on the people they wanted to rule’, Mason informed the Idler magazine in 2019. ‘Michael Collins started using the term in the early 2000s with The Likes of Us’, he said, referencing myself, ‘and what he describes is real: the antipathy towards modernity and the white flight from the inner city to places like Essex. But it is driven by a disappointment and nostalgia for the many good parts of that world that have gone.’

If the term was created by anyone, it was created by a left-leaning cultural elite that controls the narrative on race, faith and class. Created, that is, by those who paradoxically claim that the white working class doesn’t exist while casting it as the fall guy. Marr at least reflected on this constituency’s concerns in his book, A History of Modern Britain (2007), be it grudgingly: ‘The majority of British people did not want the arrival of large numbers of blacks and Asians, just as they did not want an end to capital punishment, or deep British involvement in the European Union, or many of the other things the political elite has opted for.’ David Aaronovitch at least concedes that self-righteousness is a shortcoming of the middle-class left, as he notes in a 2017 piece about Corbynistas: ‘When you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic of so many of the younger middle-class people in Britain, you can end up with an impatience with compromise coupled to a belief that anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted.’

Writers such as Marr, Mason and Aaronovitch were once left-wing student activists, highlighting the plight of the proletariat. That was before the working classes failed to fit the image they and the rest of the middle-class left had imposed on them. Now these pundits harbour a contempt for those within this demographic, whatever their ethnicity, who express the wrong views on mass immigration, asylum hotels, the EU and the BBC. Reflecting on the Unite the Kingdom march in September, Marr wrote:

‘The much-photographed crowds waving St George’s and Union flags are statistically tiny compared with the wider electorate who are quietly watching. And yet a single misstep, a death, a fire, could change the mood. The same “small crowd” point is true of the periodic public displays by Islamists.’

Diminishing the numbers of disaffected Britons, along with the crimes committed by Islamist extremists is at least an improvement on castigating the former as racists, and the latter as victims. Even middle-class, left-wing broadsheet journalists and BBC loyalists are starting to acknowledge that members of the ‘correct’ identity groups sometimes do bad things.

Still, a contempt persists for the current breed of working-class protester, accompanied by an abhorrence for citizen journalists, online news media and podcasters addressing the issues that have forced them on to the streets.

‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’

But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.

Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.

Andrew Marr, meanwhile, prides himself on being able to take on people from all walks of life. An editor-at-large of the New Statesman, he’s now at LBC, stablemate of another fellow traveller and former BBC panjandrum, James O’Brien. ‘Verbally, I’m quite fast on my feet’, Marr informed us in 2017. ‘I could embarrass or anger most people if I wanted to.’ He attempted this on his LBC show Tonight with Andrew Marr in March last year, while interviewing John Lydon, the former Sex Pistol, whose championing of anarchy in the UK would have appealed to ‘Red Andy’ throughout his agitprop years in the age of punk. The former Johnny Rotten railed against mass immigration, illegal or otherwise, and the impact on the urban working-class stock that made him. Marr was thinking on his feet, ready to embarrass and anger this former Sex Pistol, by reminding Lydon his parents were Irish immigrants. His interviewee subsequently schooled Marr on the difference between being Irish in England, sharing the same culture and values, and being a migrant opposed to integrating with the citizens of the country that takes you in.

A further example of Marr thinking on his feet was evident on his return to the BBC as a panellist on Question Time, following the election of the Labour government in 2024. He was free from the self-censorship he imposed on himself when working for the BBC, and indeed in the company of friends, and even in the company of family at the Primrose Hill home he shares with his wife, former Guardian journalist Jackie Ashley. ‘For the first time in many of our lives’, he sighed, as the select BBC audience nodded sympathetically, ‘Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability’.

One year later, the serenity Marr detected is less apparent. Yet it’s not the failures of the current administration that concern him, but those who dare to highlight these failures beyond the confines of mainstream media and regime journalism. Marr accuses social media of ‘selling ringside seats for a carnival of hatred, designed to tear us all apart’, while acknowledging that migration is changing the country at ‘a scale and velocity we’ve never seen before’. This implies he believes the ‘Pink Ladies’ protesters outside asylum hotels might have a point. ‘There are many decent people among the protesters, just as there are inside the migrant hotels’, he wrote recently in the New Statesman. ‘Though [the protests] are spectacles, and fuel for social-media polemic.’

There it is again, the predictable, safe response that’s almost an attempt at impartiality. Marr, like many other ageing upper-middle-class media types, overlooks the ordinary women and men who dominate these protests, who don’t have the luxury of assuming that illegal male immigrants arriving on their streets are all decent people. What concerns them are the knife attacks that don’t have an impact on media pundits holed up in Primrose Hill, and the sexual assaults that don’t affect their Guardian wives. These protesters have never before been forced to take to the streets to have their voices heard. They don’t have that middle-class sense of entitlement that David Aaronovitch alluded to when writing that ‘anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted’.

Following last week’s proposals from home secretary Shabana Mahmood to tackle the immigration crisis, Marr delivered a rant on his LBC show, that concluded:

‘Let’s be real. This today, is a massive victory for all of those who waved English, Scottish and British flags outside asylum hotels. And for the politicians and broadcasters, who cheered them on. And all of those around the country who said to pollsters they were going to vote Reform. The so-called Overton window, if you like, of the acceptable, has well and truly shifted.’

This is not the view of a journalist who thinks on his feet, but the rhetoric of a middle-class man who’s dragged the political posturing of his student years into late middle age, like other former Red Andys of his era who campaigned for the world to change. Well, it did change, but they didn’t. They offer no new solutions to these problems, preferring instead to shower tired slurs and insults on those that need solutions, because they live with the problems.

It’s not the protesters outside asylum hotels who are clinging to the past, it’s the likes of Marr, Aaronovitch and those fellow travellers in the same trade, loyal to the memory of a BBC that is no more, and a wider legacy media that is crumbling around them.

Originally published in Spiked

Before a number of Britons took to the streets protesting against asylum hotels, raising the flag, painting the red cross at roundabouts, online agitators in the UK looked to the US for a lead, longing for a similar Trumpian regime change.

There were calls for our American cousins to colonise us, free us, or at least support us in the battle royal between the Labour government and the people it was elected to represent.

The historic ‘special relationship’ took on a new form, one that is less an official solidarity between the nations and more a natural allegiance between the natives. Currently, a large contingent of Britons are continuing to take to the streets to bring about not so much a ‘revolution’ but what David Starkey recently referred to as a ‘restoration’. To paraphrase Alexander Pope: Hope springs internal. Of course if Britons have to fight this war alone they will, but assistance from America is welcome. Particularly if it comes sooner rather tha…

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In recent weeks, two types of women in revolt have been sighted on the streets of Britain, defined by opposing outlooks and experiences. One group rails against Israel, the other objects to illegal immigration.

What they have in common is their sex. They are mothers, wives, grandmothers, but there the similarities end. What divides them is class.

Provincial middle-class protesters have become a spectacle in a market town in Somerset, a county colonised by the Lib Dem vote perhaps more than any other. In the market square of Wells, the smallest city in England, they gather on Saturday mornings banging pots and pans, accompanied by a sandwich board calling for sanctions on Israel, much to the annoyance of the stall holders attempting to earn a living. That’s not an issue for this handful of women, as they’ve passed pensionable age. Two of them, former teachers, returned to Wells as conquering heroes following their arrest at a rally in support of Palestine Action in Cardiff, with their adventurous day out becoming a major story in a minor local newspaper.

These are the same ancient activists who block roads for Just Stop Oil, or cling to ‘Refugees Welcome’ signs between bread-making classes. A type as I say. They shop at Waitrose (while boycotting the Israeli goods), they buy shapeless tops from Seasalt and sport hairstyles that belong on Colette or Mary Beard. The women of Wells on pan duty for Palestine wear a shade of burgundy reminiscent of that required by devotees of the bygone religious cult of free love, Rajneeshpuram.

‘Who radicalised Nan?’, began Tom Slater, when examining this breed of silver-haired female activists in the Telegraph recently. It’s a type, a trend, a cult. Rumour has it that there have been sightings of similar women, of a similar age, armed with similar pots and pans, in similar settings. But larger crowds of females from another class with their own pressing concerns are evident in other towns and cities, swelling in numbers with each passing week.

In London’s East End, working-class women taking to the streets don’t have the luxury of returning to rural middle-class homes after a day of demonstrating. What needles them, what has propelled them to protest, doubtless for the first time, is an immediate threat that’s on their doorstep: illegal immigrants housed in hotels and buildings on the streets in which they have spent their lives.

These women are all ages. The younger are accompanied by their children, with the elders supported by walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs and mobility scooters. They are captured on camera doing the conga, breaking into a rendition of ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’, holding a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. These happenings followed in the wake of protesters congregating outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, a postcode familiar to those who were part of the diaspora when East Enders made the voyage out to Essex, to become home owners.

Events in Epping have pressurised the district council to apply for an injunction to close down the asylum hotel, but this is yet to be acted upon. In Westminster, government ministers have been silent on the impact of these protests, and those in Waterlooville, Diss, Bournemouth and elsewhere. This is also true of the mainstream media, leaving a clearing for citizen journalists, activists and GB News reporters to cover the story.

Beyond the Labour government’s silence exists a sinister attempt to censor these protesters and prevent similar events – largely using the Online Safety Act, which introduced age restrictions on content in July, having been passed into law by the Conservative government in 2023. The police at these protests threaten those gathered with arrest for public-order offences that could result in lengthy sentences. This further confirms the two-tier policing operation that takes a far softer approach to counter-protesting interlopers – from other postcodes, other classes – masked by balaclavas and keffiyehs.

The face coverings conceal the identity of ‘Antifa’ activists who are as interchangeable as the marches and counter-demonstrations they join to bring about disruption and confrontation. They lack the impetus that has roused the women assembling with local men outside asylum hotels throughout the country. They are motivated by the detrimental impact an influx of strangers will have on their neighbourhoods and on local services. As one of the organisers of the Canary Wharf demonstration is quoted as saying, they are well aware that not all these migrants are paedophiles or rapists, but they are unwilling to ‘play roulette’ with their children’s lives.

The women returning to protest at Canary Wharf have earned the title ‘pink ladies’, because they turn up wearing assorted pink garments, which bring a softer, amenable look compared with the cult of the ancient sisterhood in a certain market town. Yet they are referred to as ‘far right’ by left-wingers who have never lived in the streets native to these women, and never will. In response to the predictable name-calling, they march behind a banner bearing the words: ‘We are not far right but we’re not far wrong. Stop the boats.’ Yet still the slurs occur. At the prospect of a protest in Bristol, Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and co-leader of the Green Party, declared:

‘Today a far-right protest is expected to take place outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Bristol. Let me be clear: the far right are not welcome in Bristol. They don’t represent us, or what we stand for.’

Arguably, the politics and pedigree of a middle-class woman like Denyer, daughter of a scientist mother, with a father who worked for the Ministry of Defence, do not represent the majority of Britons – particularly the working-class women taking to the streets of the East End.

The attacks on these women, and the men they march alongside, are reminiscent of the verbal assaults on Leave voters who triumphed in the EU referendum from middle-class Remainers, hinting that the background and social status of the victors should have prevented them from having a say. It’s an attitude that goes back even further, to the age when Matthew Arnold popularised the term ‘populace’ in the 19th century, and later when the poorer classes from the London docks took to West End streets, flags raised, to celebrate the relief of Mafeking in South Africa, following a seven-month siege during the Boer War. One observer compared them to ‘rats emerging from a sewer’.

Centuries pass, times change and still the bleat goes on. Figures from the left post their reactions on X to the recent protests, referring to these characters as the worst of Britain, as jobless scroungers and benefit cheats. Leading trade unionists not only support those antagonising these working-class men and women, but also reputedly fund them. At an Epping protest, Ed Harlow, vice-president of the National Education Union, addressed the ‘Stand Up To Racism’ demonstrators with a comical, tone-deaf speech that knowingly overlooked the class and concerns of the locals protesting nearby: ‘The enemies of working people in this country are not staying in hotels in Epping. The enemies of people in this country are floating around the Med on super yachts.’

Among those relevant to the new trade unionism of the late 19th century were the unskilled ‘matchgirls’ from the Bryant & May factory, who famously went on strike for better working conditions in 1888. Then as now, East End local working-class women are taking on a contemporary challenge. One that they are generally fighting alone, with an absence of support from women from other parts, other classes. Many, but not all, feminist writers and pundits from the middle class and upwards, rightfully forthright on misogyny and male violence, are silent on the hotels issue.

To their detractors, the women protesting are as much a type as the provincial middle-class women wearing Crocs and banging pots in the West Country. If so, it’s a type many of us salute. Their voices, accents and histories are familiar to us, as are the streets they walk and the city that formed them. The elders among these women are from the last generation of men and women who witnessed or were privy to harsh times, deep struggles and a conflict that saw the East End ablaze during the London Blitz. They have buried parents, husbands and maybe children long before their time. This might be their last battle, but it’s one they won’t retreat from.

For the younger ones it could be the first fight of many, in a city in which they have been discarded, and their history erased, by officials who hold them in contempt, and a London mayor who continues to cart around the washed-up corpse of multiculturalism, while ignoring key issues that are destroying the nation’s capital.

These women, these men, are part of a silent majority seeking a voice, just as their distant relatives and ancestors were, for other reasons. They have been stirred into action. Something has been awakened in them and their number elsewhere. It may be the beginning of a new dawn. As Edward Carpenter wrote in his famous ‘Socialist Marching Song’ from 1886: ‘England, arise! the long, long night is over.’ Or it may be the last gasp of a diminishing people in a dying nation. But if they’re going down, they’re taking this ship with them.

Originally published in Spiked.

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It’s more than two years since the death of Queen Elizabeth II at her beloved Balmoral Castle, and, in May, it will be two years on from the coronation of her first son, Charles.

The period of mourning that engulfed the House of Windsor has passed. The honeymoon period for the new monarch has come to an end. So, what kind of king is Charles at this juncture? It has been neither an easy run nor an easy reign for him thus far. There were the cancer diagnoses that threatened to take him out along with the Princess of Wales, and the domestic dramas that threatened the stature of the monarchy. Prince Andrew has become akin to a tumour the royals are keen to remove, or relegate to a frugal exile at Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. (His links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continue to haunt him.) Meanwhile, the manoeuvres of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become less malignant, and may soon be in remission.

For some of us, the mona…

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There is much about the modern Labour Party to make the stately politicians from its past turn in their graves.

Think of Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, embarrassing themselves at the Pride Parade in London in 2022. Gay anthems played as Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll, before Keir Starmer followed suit. This was before his current incarnation as ‘Starmer the Statesman’. This was ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks. He even sported his customary Barney Rubble look of confusion as though struggling with two thoughts simultaneously. Perhaps he was trying to remember who the Weather Girls were, and what made them biological women.

But it is London mayor Sadiq Khan who is surely most responsible for sending those regal figures from Labour’s past spinning in their graves. His identitarian posturing is ceaseless, his support for voguish causes tireless. He embodies perhaps all that is wrong with the modern Labour Party.

He was also at Pride on the same day as Starmer and Rayner, rallying the crowds while welcoming his comrades to his fiefdom, his Trumpton. ‘The great thing about London is that if you’re different, you aren’t simply tolerated, you’re respected, celebrated and embraced’, he said. ‘That’s who we are: open-minded, outward looking.’ Yet he was oblivious to just how provincial this outlook is. He seems to assume that those in London, and beyond it, who challenge this fantasy, who don’t share his worldview, are the enemy. And this is the main problem with the current mayor: he is arguably the most divisive leading politician in Britain today.

Not that this would concern a figure of Khan’s imagined stature. He seems to believe his position is more presidential than municipal. He even has a security team which provides, as he himself put it last year, ‘the same level of protection the prime minister and the king receive’. He effectively surrounds himself with metaphorical henchmen, too, ready to fend off justified criticisms of his crass political posturing and unpopular policies. The many opponents of his expanded Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) have been attacked and demonised a ‘far right’. And those drawing attention to his failure to tackle the ever-rising rates of knife crime or the capital’s deepening housing crisis – despite his pledges to do so way back in 2016 – have been wilfully ignored.

On paper, Khan has forged a brilliant career, a product of application, ambition and, above all, impeccable timing. Born in Tooting, south London, in 1970 to a working-class Muslim family, he studied to become a lawyer when human-rights law turned the profession into a truly lucrative industry. And he became the member of parliament for Tooting in 2005, when New Labour was on a winning streak.

Good timing also aided his first mayoral bid in 2016. He may have been mocked for making much of his father being a bus driver, but in that moment it provided a welcome contrast to the upper-class pedigree of previous mayor Boris Johnson and of then Tory opponent, Zac Goldsmith. Khan won the 2016 mayoral election with ease, before winning again in 2021 with slightly less.

He has profited from the rise of social media, too. Indeed, the tweet is Khan’s communication of choice. He was one of the first politicians to capitalise on its usage when he chose it to announce his appointment as transport minister in 2009 when Labour were in government. And he has continued to use X, as it’s now called, ever since – mainly to wage his self-aggrandising culture wars, from endlessly attacking Brexit to grandstanding against Donald Trump.

Khan may have been a moderate Labour MP and minister in the 2000s. But his mayoral tenure has been defined by virtue-signalling self-promotion and militant identitarianism. Take his response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. He used it as an opportunity not to unify Londoners, but to spout critical race theory and talk of ‘structural racism’. Or take his oafish anti-sexism campaigns, ‘Have A Word’ in 2022 and ‘Say Maaate to a Mate’ in 2023. The TV adverts for both implied that ‘toxic masculinity’ is the condition of white men, with their black and brown brothers tasked with enlightening them.

While Khan looks the other way on the scourge of knife crime, he eagerly talks up the terror threat of the far right, and was quick to use the T-word after a Welshman drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers, causing one death, in Finsbury Park in 2017. ‘London stands united against terrorism’, he said at the time. Yet his language has been far more tentative when it comes to addressing Islamist attacks – attacks that have destroyed too many lives to list.

It seems that Khan is similar to too many other figures on the ‘modern’ left who once fought against actual racism and sexism. Now change has come about, bringing progress in the main, he is lost for a cause. And so in the name of identity politics, he busily reignites the embers of old grievances and revives old battles.

Khan takes an approach to London’s past that is as selective and divisive as his approach to present-day issues. Last summer, he tweeted that London ‘was built by migrants’ and ‘refugees’. This came as a surprise to Londoners whose ancestry is synonymous with the city – particularly the white working-class Londoners who were seen as a blot on the landscape of multiculturalism when they lived there, and provincial racists when they made the voyage out of the city during the second half of the 20th century. Many of them were born in the poorer postcodes of the capital long before these became gentrified and colonised by self-entitled cyclists. These Londoners, or their relatives, worked in the docks, factories, markets and warehouses. They laboured on building sites, laid the tarmac for roads and the cables that ran beneath them.

Londoners knew them. They were our families, our ancestors. Now, those of us who evacuated the city return as ghosts to familiar streets to visit ancient relatives. They too will soon join those whose bones lie beneath soil and stone on cemetery plots beyond the urban streets where they lived their lives, and in the suburbs where their children lived theirs. They are dust and ashes now. But the memory of them is immersed in the city many remember and which some attempted to capture in poetry, pop and prose. As WB Yeats wrote: ‘This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.’

Mayor Khan seems to think he can re-write and ‘improve’ this history of London. In 2021, as part of his Diversity Commission’s ‘Untold Stories’ project, he claimed that ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength but for far too long our capital’s statues, street names and buildings have only shown a limited perspective on our city’s complex history’. Just this month, he announced that several London Overground lines are to be renamed along predictably right-on lines, with Windrush, Lioness and Mildmay lines arriving among others in the near future. They are a nod, said Khan, to London’s diverse history.

To this mayor and other figures on what passes for the left today, it seems that London’s and indeed Britain’s familiar history is a source of shame. It is useful only when it is being renamed, refashioned and often simply fabricated to satisfy the ‘diverse’ fantasies of our cultural elites.

And so Khan claims that multiculturalism has always defined London. He suggests that the waves of mass immigration into the city and the country more broadly in recent decades have forever been the norm rather than an anomaly. This argument, like the lexicon around race to which the left plays lip service, is risible.

In spite of the revisionism, the factual history of London as many experienced it is there for those prepared to look, listen and learn. London and the traditional concept of the Londoner was once defined by the working class. This was the demographic most likely to remain in the capital, because of a lack of options. They were likely to be born there, raised there and end their lives there, very likely within the same neighbourhood. Although tribal and localised, they incorporated whatever changes were imposed upon them and the city, whether it was the eradication of the infrastructure of their neighbourhoods or the shift in demographics, attributable to the high level of immigrants moving to beleaguered postcodes.

From the 1980s onwards, the official emphasis ceased to be on the integration of immigrants. Instead, policymakers demanded that the natives accommodate themselves to the new arrivals, even when the newcomers’ tribalism was more rigid than that of the established Londoner. This resulted in communities defined by faith, and sometimes race, dominating parts of London – as it did in other cities, too. This lack of integration has been cheered on by a white middle class, eager to flag up the edginess and vibrancy of the capital from the comfort of their leafy or gentrified postcodes. And it has been observed contentedly by super-rich foreigners, perched high up in their shielded Ballardian towers.

Mayor Khan hails this division, this factionalism, with the mantra, ‘Diversity is our strength’. It’s rhetoric that deafens the ears it falls upon, and dies on the lips of Khan’s supporters. The conflictual reality of ‘diverse’ London does sometimes bubble to the surface. Such as last year, when a crowd descended on an Asian shopkeeper’s business in Peckham, south London, because he retaliated when attacked by a black shoplifter he challenged. But like crime statistics, particularly the knife crime for which young black men are disproportionately the perpetrators, but not always the victim, such events are sidelined by the mayor’s office.

If the multiculturalism Sadiq Khan celebrates had emerged from London itself, a product of a city’s inhabitants absorbing influences from outside and evolving over time to form a new Londoner, that would be one thing. But Khan’s multiculturalism is not organic. It’s an elite imposition, a result of encouraging and incentivising minorities to cultivate and ‘celebrate’ their difference.

In 2022, Khan attended the ceremony for the launch of the Bangladeshi signage on Whitechapel Tube station – a first, as no other station has the official name in anything but English. ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength’, Khan announced, as though road-testing a tweet. ’The revamped signs at Whitechapel station celebrate the vital contribution Bangladeshi Londoners have made in shaping the community in Tower Hamlets and throughout our city.’ Exactly what contribution has this community made that warrants a privilege never accorded to any other immigrant group? Surely Khan should be promoting a common language, shared values and aims to bring the people of the capital together? But instead he seems intent on emphasising the differences that drive Londoners apart.

Predictably, any effort to highlight the failures of multiculturalism in London and Britain more broadly is met with the standard insults from the usual pundits. Last year, the then UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed that the ‘misguided dogma of multiculturalism’ now threatens social cohesion. The rhetoric of the Tories when highlighting the flaws in multiculturalism may be empty. But no more so than the slogans of Labour apparatchiks celebrating it. In response to Braverman’s criticism, wealthy celebrities flagged up curries and carnivals. Others knowingly conflated the fact of living in a diverse society with state multiculturalism, the very policy that emphasises cultural difference over common values, and that is helping to divide the capital. ‘Diversity is our strength’, they said again.

This phrase, and Sadiq Khan’s use of it ad nauseam, epitomises the crassness that has defined his time as mayor. Like Queer Keir’s glittered cheeks, it’s an embarrassing attempt to tie his wagon to relevance and modernity. He has even reached for it in response to the now habitual ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, brimful with anti-Semitism, that have erupted on to our streets. In October, Khan tweeted that ‘anyone inciting violence or hatred in London will have strong action taken against them’, without mentioning who the victims or the perpetrators might be. Yet the day an estimated 100,000 people marched through the streets of London against anti-Semitism, he neither commented nor responded.

It’s a grim irony. Despite rambling on about diversity and repeatedly informing Londoners ‘they’ will never divide us, Khan remains the most divisive politician we have.

Through his identitarian politicking, he has helped to sow antagonism throughout London. Khan has created a divide between those who believe in the values of freedom and tolerance and those who do not. And now many of the latter are calling for jihad and venting their hatred of the Jewish State on the streets of London.

Unlike the useful idiots attending these ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, the old Labourites now turning in their graves held conviction for the causes they supported. The current mob of graduates and grifters will either leave London and grow into the people they loathe, or remain the people that everyone else loathes, by dragging their psychoses, cosplay and homemade placards into middle age. They will hopefully prove irrelevant in the greater history of a once great city.

Mayor Khan, meanwhile, will be a footnote, because of the office he held, and because he was the first Muslim to hold it. In an interview with The Big Issue last year, he claimed he was ‘proud’ of ‘a number of things’. These ‘things’ seemed to consist of reaching air-pollution-reduction targets, planting trees and installing electric-car charging points. No mention of increasing the housing stock, tackling violent knife crime or improving a dilapidated transport system. When it comes to the fundamental changes required to improve the lot of Londoners who are not well-heeled electric-car drivers, his legacy can be covered in the length and depth of one of his tweets, if that.

Originally published in Spiked.

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Today is Stephen Lawrence Day. It commemorates the 30th anniversary of the lethal stabbing of 18-year-old Lawrence in Eltham, south-east London, at the hands of a gang of young men.

Initially, six suspects were arrested but not charged, before the Lawrence family launched an unsuccessful private prosecution against five of them in 1994. It was not until 2012, after a change in the law allowing individuals to be tried twice for the same offence, that two of the gang were eventually convicted of Lawrence’s murder.

Do I need to add more details? Isn’t this one instance where the name of the victim – Stephen Lawrence – is enough to conjure up a tragedy and summon a sequence of events?Many will be able to immediately recall that photograph of the teenager in a blue and white striped top. It is sometimes cropped to remove Lawrence’s slightly raised fist, as if some fear this gesture would take away from the severity of the crime in some way. But arguably, the canonisation of Lawrence has already done this. By elevating him to the status of a saint, he has been reduced to the standard of a brand. This has diminished both the savagery of his murder and the seriousness of the issues raised in its aftermath.

To the younger, agile generation, the name of Stephen Lawrence may resonate on some level, yet for us fragile elders it is lodged in the national psyche. We remain affected by the story. We recall the column inches taken up in broadsheets, tabloids and supplements. We have seen television dramas, documentaries and even a stage play. His mother, Doreen Lawrence, has remained in the public eye. Initially, because of her valiant efforts to have her son’s killers brought to justice, and later as a campaigner against racism, which led to a seat in the House of Lords. High-profile figures and consumer brands eager to declare an affinity with the cause have been keen to court her and call upon her services. She modelled with Emma Thompson for Marks & Spencer in 2014, advised Coronation Street producers about a storyline on race in 2020, and she carried the Olympic flag alongside fellow Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti at the opening ceremony for London 2012.

In the mid-1990s, race was not the booming industry it is today. However, there was an emergent race lobby, in the shape of the Commission for Racial Equality and other caucuses. At the time, the evidential racism these quangos and groups had originally been formed to address was abating. And so, to continue to justify their existence, they had begun redefining racism. This process accelerated following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and especially Sir William Macpherson’s ‘Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence’. The 1999 Macpherson report recommendations were instrumental in widening and changing the meaning of racism. The Labour government introduced legislation to address ‘institutional racism’ in the police force and ‘unwitting prejudice’ in everyone else.

Since then, the race industry has flourished. Efforts to tackle ‘institutional’ and ‘unwitting’ racism have left few areas of life untouched. It has certainly brought out the grifters and chancers, especially in recent years. The lexicon of the race lobby, the terms used to silence or censor, have now become as hollow as soundbites and catchphrases. If people recoil from terms such as ‘white privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias’, it’s not from fear of being accused of them, but boredom from being browbeaten by them. It’s another development that further diminishes the just cause the race lobby came about to address – that is, actual prejudice and inequality. And so we arrive at the point we’ve reached today, where an autistic schoolboy in Wakefield has to go into hiding for scuffing a copy of the Koran, as zealots circle and issue death threats. Yet the schoolboy himself is investigated for committing a ‘hate incident’.

On the day Stephen Lawrence was killed, Herman Ouseley, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, telephoned the Metropolitan Police commissioner and told him it was imperative ‘[Lawrence’s murder] should be investigated as a racist crime’. The lawyers taking up the case in the Macpherson inquiry took the same approach. No matter how brutal the outcome of a crime, if the motivation was racism the punishment should be tougher; the sentence longer. In the absence of evidence, a hate crime became one that was perceived to be such by those with the grievance, or by others present (the ‘Macpherson principle’). We were in the territory of thoughtcrimes, with the accused having to prove their innocence rather than others having to prove their guilt. As Malcolm X once said: ‘They put your mind right in a bag, and take it wherever they want.’ Now the prospect of innocence is not even a consideration when it comes to the systemic racism and white supremacy said to be endemic in society at large.

Perhaps the frankest take on the Lawrence case and the high-profile inquiry is Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000) by Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi. It’s a measured and forensic account that goes beyond the official line. It argues that material cited as evidence of societal racism in the Macpherson report related to the American experience of race. ‘Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US’, the historian David Olusoga has said, ‘is a bad habit with a long history’. Yet from Macpherson onwards, making the comparison with the US, and sidelining the differences, has become a career steer for pundits whose shtick is to see British bigotry everywhere.

In a move that has diminished the tragedy further, Stephen Lawrence became the face of the race industry in the UK. Many were quick to graft their agenda on to the tragedy, even before the family had time to process the nature of his death, let alone begin to mourn the loss. No sooner had the story broke than representatives from the Anti-Racist Alliance, along with foot soldiers from left-wing fringe groups, were heading to the suburban home of the Lawrences, much to the bemusement of the occupants. A fortnight later, the teenager’s parents were at the Athenaeum Hotel in Mayfair for a press call with Nelson Mandela. Mandela went beyond comparing racial tension in the UK with that in the US – he likened the UK to South Africa, where ‘black lives are cheap’.

For many of us lower-case whites – then, now and always – Black lives are no cheaper than white lives when they are taken out by the blade, the bullet or the bomb. Those black lives might belong to our partners, spouses, lovers or friends. Not that this point was made at the time. The blood was said to be on the hands not solely of the white culprits, but also the residents of Eltham, and the white working class generally. Those who were spared this, those who were not culpable, were the ones leading the charge by way of op-eds, articles and think-pieces. These writers may have shared their ethnicity with the legions of whites on trial, but they were distinguished by their class, pedigree and education – along with the postcodes they could afford to live in.

Paradoxically, these liberal, leftish figures, perched on the top of broadsheet columns, writing from west-London townhouses or eyries in Islington, had previously taken the patrician approach towards the poor huddled masses. But viewed through this new, racialising lens, the very elements that made the urban working class endearing now made them grotesques. The Lawrence murder suspects were cast as common and illiterate, without school exams or a university degree to their name. It was pointed out that some of their mothers were both bottle blondes and smokers. By highlighting these traits as though evidence of guilt, and turning to caricatures and stereotypes, the broadsheet commentariat were guilty of all the prejudice they accused the tabloids of when black men were in the dock.

These liberals and radical stalwarts were as ignorant of the people of Eltham as they were of its location on a map. Even those of us who grew up in the urban netherworld of south London, and believed the countryside began at New Cross, had a better idea. In the 1980s, our relatives and neighbours were part of the exodus from inner London council homes to home ownership in the less salubrious postcodes surrounding Eltham. Some of them had children that went to the same school as Stephen Lawrence. They exchanged as many stories and rumours and myths about the case as others raised about the reasons the suspects hadn’t been charged or convicted. Much of which went unsubstantiated. There was a lot of sympathy for the family and little support for the suspects, contrary to reports from writers from other classes and postcodes. The media, the race industry and countless political opportunists tarred a whole community. As one white London cabbie once put it: ‘When Stephen Lawrence was murdered I thought it was terrible. Three years later, I thought I’d done it myself.’

Those most vocal in their justified condemnation of the killers were rightly frustrated at the failure to convict them. But their response was marked by hypocrisy, too. Left-wing activists were calling for the repeal of the double-jeopardy law, and arguing in favour of the principle of joint enterprise. Previously, they’d been opposed to each of these, largely because they believed this would lead to the unfair imprisonment of young black men. Those that highlighted these hypocrisies in print were cast as racist or ‘far right’ in some quarters. I addressed this in my 2004 book, The Likes of Us. The majority of critics were hugely complimentary, but a minority all but compared it to Mein Kampf. A black academic described me as ‘an intellectual outrider for the BNP’. A hoary white academic dismissed me as ‘a poetic hooligan’. The reliably predictable Yasmin Alibhai-Brown accused me of ‘proffering an intellectual alibi’ for the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.

During the writing of The Likes of Us, the publishers telephoned with concerns. They’d been informed a team of lawyers were on tap ready to pounce on anyone that wrote about the Lawrence case. In 2005, I presented a Channel 4 documentary based on The Likes of Us. The Lawrence sequence was written by the network’s lawyers, behind closed doors and without me present, after they expressed similar fears.

It should have been possible to have criticisms of the outcome of the Macpherson inquiry, and reservations about the reporting of the murder, and still feel sufficient contempt for the killers, sympathise wholeheartedly with the plight of the teenager’s parents, and believe the Metropolitan Police should be held to account if proof emerged that negligence or racism had thwarted the investigation. Or so you’d think.

Lawyers, campaigners, civil-liberties groups and race caucuses maintained at the time that the Metropolitan Police were responsible for jeopardising the efforts to bring justice for the Lawrence family. Yet this collective lobby was itself responsible for jeopardising justice in the case of Richard Everitt.

In the early 1990s, an inter-ethnic school-yard rivalry had taken hold in Somers Town, north London. It reached its tragic culmination in August 1994, when 15-year-old Everitt was stabbed to death by a gang of Bangladeshi teenagers. It was very similar to the Stephen Lawrence murder, except the victim was white and the perpetrators were not.

The racialising argument central to the Lawrence case was that the teenager would not have been murdered if he was white. Yet the race industry never even considered if Richard Everitt was murdered because he was. Race was swiftly removed as the motivation for Everitt’s killing, perhaps because the Metropolitan Police were still reeling from the fall-out of the Lawrence murder.

Prosecution lawyers in the Lawrence case took up the case for the defence in the Everitt murder. They rallied Labour MPs and affiliates with a background in law for support. Human-rights charity Liberty, Camden Racial Equality Council and the Society of Black Lawyers added weight to a campaign (‘Free the King’s Cross Two’) when two of the boys from the Asian gang accused of murdering Everitt were arrested – one of them was later sentenced for the murder. While condemning the use of ‘joint enterprise’ in this case, the lawyers and the broader race lobby celebrated when in 2012 it was used to bring about a guilty verdict for two of the gang members in the Lawrence murder.

Ultimately, neither Stephen Lawrence’s nor Richard Everitt’s parents truly received justice. Neither discovered who held the knife that took their son’s life. The Everitt investigation was closed decades ago; the Lawrence case was classified as ‘inactive’ in the summer of 2020. Both families had their lives changed and fractured by the loss of a teenage child in a brutal and senseless manner. That loss remains with them today, and will remain with them always.

In this they are not alone. The murder of Stephen Lawrence had such an impact that there is a commemorative plaque on the street where he was murdered, and the anniversary of his murder has been commemorated since 2019. Today, as we’re encouraged to remember a teenager’s murder that attracted so much interest and media attention, maybe we should also reflect on Richard Everitt and other innocents, black or white, whose lives were cut short by the blade or the bullet, but whose deaths didn’t warrant the column inches and the screen time. Perhaps because they didn’t fit the customary narrative on race. Share their stories. Say their names

Orginally published in Spiked.

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Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent.

Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin.

Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the class she was born into.

Yet in some ways they are each a caricature of the political extremes within that class. He is the Eton-educated, Bullingdon club Tory; she is a variation on those Lady Bountiful socialites of old that embraced socialism and slummed it in posh houses in poor postcodes. Johnson’s rise was fuelled by the belief that he was born to rule, and maybe Harman’s was too, as she has described politics as a “vocation” rather than a career.

Ultimately, he succeeded with a brutal ambition that outweighed his ability and an affability that gave him a common touch that Harman never possessed. In the 2019 election the Tories scooped the lion’s share of low-income voters, and Labour officially became the party of wealthy metropolitan liberals and middle-class graduates — the demographic that Harriet Harman has appealed to since entering parliament in 1982.

Having served in a number of front-bench roles in government and opposition, including leader of the House of Commons, deputy leader of the Labour Party (and acting leader on two occasions), it was expected that Harman might become the first female Labour prime minister. Her reasons for not putting herself forward as party leader vary.

Primarily, she didn’t wish to place herself under scrutiny having taken a “battering” throughout her time in parliament. “I didn’t feel that I could take the Labour Party through that transition from opposition into government,” she later said. “Partly because I’d always been challenging: challenging the press, challenging everybody and demanding progress, and that doesn’t make you very ‘leadershipy’, it makes you more like an outsider and a challenger.” This may also explain why she failed in her attempt to replace John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons in 2019.

Grassroots members of the Labour movement never seemed to warm to her. She ascribes this to her campaigning so fervently on women’s issues and equality. Arguably it’s less the issues that were the problem — many of which needed to be addressed — than her manner. Harman maintains she was always a feminist, having grown up with three sisters, but her activism emerged when the women’s movement was in the ascendant in the early 1970s. Here was a marginalised group she could identify with as both heroine and victim.

She may not have the charisma and showmanship that began to define popular politicians from the 1990s, but she possesses the commitment and conviction of many that had gone before; while being adept in the art of prevarication.

Colleagues claim she has a talent for reinventing herself, while critics saw this as a means of distancing herself from policies she had previously supported that are no longer popular. There is that moment when she is seen cheering Ed Miliband’s acceptance speech on being elected Labour leader in which he condemns the invasion of Iraq. David Miliband, his defeated brother, leans towards Harman and says: “What are you clapping for? You supported it.”

Harman studied politics at York university as the student activism of the late 1960s took a further turn to the left. Unlike some fellow radicals of the period, she was smart enough to recognise that the left-wing tradition of refusing to compromise with the electorate was not necessarily a vote winner. This was the Damascene conversion that came to those who, like Harman, blossomed into Blairites.

She says of those years in government: “It sounds rather basic, but it was a big transformation, instead of us waiting for the public to ‘wake up’ because they were just so wrong and so stupid to keep voting Conservative, we were like, ‘hmmm, perhaps the problem is with us, and perhaps we need to change’.”

Yet once New Labour were in government and on a roll, the administration ignored the electorate when it came to immigration and introduced legislation that has contributed to the divisive identity politics now proving detrimental to addressing major concerns affecting the lives of the many rather than the few.

The minority issues that take precedence and the laws introduced to address them have their origins within the Left that Harman was part of in the early Seventies, and the lawyers that saw an opening in civil liberties and human rights.

Harman was an eager, earnest young legal officer at the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL, which later renamed itself as the catchier Liberty). Over time the objectives remained, but the nature of human rights and the concept of equality expanded to keep the industry a going concern. Harriet Harman became synonymous with this quango culture, particularly when, as equalities minister she played a part in introducing the Equality Act of 2010. This legislation consolidated previous anti-discrimination laws, shielding groups with protected characteristics from discrimination, harassment and victimisation. The nature of evidence shifted from the concrete and factual, to reliance on how events were interpreted and perceived by the aggrieved.

This has brought us to the age of subjective truth, which features in the inquiry Harman will oversee as part of the cross-party Privileges Committee. The testimonies of witnesses are being sought, along with actual evidence, but in making the case for his defence Boris Johnson maintains his innocence is based on what he believed to be true. In short, his truth.

Certain Tories have objected to Harman as chairperson, citing bias as the reason. (She previously tweeted that Johnson appeared to have misled the Commons.) Like much of the criticism that has come her way, this is deflected and dismissed. The writer and fellow feminist Joan Smith once offered a succinct take on Harman’s reaction to criticism. “She has a patrician testiness,” she wrote, “which doesn’t respond to being challenged.”

Harman managed to evade many of the charges that have been levelled at her, including those little hypocrisies associated with the privileged Left when it comes to exercising socialism in their personal lives; notably the education of their children.

Having attended a comprehensive school in the constituency that Harman represents in Camberwell and Peckham, I was keen to see where her priorities lay when it came to the education of her own children years later, in the 1990s. She opted for schools in Kent, and the London Oratory in Knightsbridge where Tony Blair’s son was a pupil, and which has been investigated for operating an entry policy based on “social selection”.

It was an odd yet inevitable move from someone so opposed to the private education she herself had benefitted from; someone so enamoured with the diversity that summarises the place she represented and where she lives — albeit a postcode in which she once chose to wear a stab vest when going walkabout among her constituents.

A more serious charge emerged in 2014, with the Daily Mail exposé referred to as “Paedogate”. Harman denied she had been an apologist for the advocacy group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which was rallying for changes in the law when the Campaign for Homosexuality made headway in the 1970s, and PIE became affiliated with the NCCL. Jack Dromey was chairman of the NCCL when Harman started there in 1978. She said PIE had been marginalised by that point, and that Dromey had been influential in bringing this about. Yet PIE was an affiliate until 1983, and it was endorsed at the NCCL’s 1978 AGM, on the grounds of defending the principle of free speech.

A recommended amendment to the 1978 child protection bill, declaring “images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject suffered”. Harman defended herself by arguing that she was protecting parents from being charged for photographing their children in swimwear. (It is telling that actual proof should be essential here, when it comes in a poor second in contemporary laws relating to discrimination and hate crimes.) On her webpage, she added: “We also proposed that the definition of indecent was too wide and instead proposed ‘obscene’ as indecent was very broadly defined.”

The problems that arise from different interest groups muscling in on minority rights has led to fragmentation rather than solidarity, as is evident with the Harman-steered Equality Act, the first to give trans people explicit protection against discrimination. Harman maintains she anticipated the conflict between those demanding women-only spaces and the transgender rights that might encroach on them. But she was clearly unprepared for the fallout that ensued.

Many feminists feel the rights being eroded are those fought for in the nascent days of the women’s movement of which Harman was a part. She has given her backing to trans women (without gender recognition certificates) standing as prospective Labour MPs on all-women shortlists. Having been vocal on women’s issues she — like many female Labour party MPs — has been uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of biological women.

When Harman arrived in the House of Commons in 1982 there were only 19 other women MPs. It was the third year of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister. Thatcher, like Harman, attempted to change her accent and remove herself from the class she was born in so as to fit in with those that shared her political beliefs. But to feminists such as Harman, Thatcher was the wrong type of woman, with the wrong views.

Harman believes the rise in the number of female MPs has been among the most significant changes she has witnessed in her political career. The reason the Labour Party has not yet elected a female leader is because Labour women are more subversive than those on the Tory benches, she has said on numerous occasions.

It’s a weak argument but not a surprising one, as she has followed it by demanding the next Labour leader be female. That this should be paramount, rather than ability and merit, is hardly surprising from someone who — unwilling to stand herself — nominated Diane Abbott in the 2010 leadership election.

Her decision to retire as an MP may have less to do with age — she is 71 — than the death of her husband in January this year. Having made several attempts to become an MP, Dromey succeeded in 2010 and landed a Commons office next door to his wife. The pair met on a picket line in the 1970s and married the year she entered parliament. It seems an uncharacteristically conventional relationship for one who has cast herself as the maverick outsider, but one that resulted in a longevity and loyalty that doubtless makes her loss a particularly difficult one.

Harriet Harman’s achievements have been impressive in terms of the roles she has held, including the first Minister for Women. She also championed the identitarian politics responsible for the divide between traditional working class Labour supporters and the metropolitan liberal class now synonymous with the party. She began her career within an organisation so intent on defending free speech it permitted a paedophile pressure group to be one of its affiliates, but ultimately brought about a Britain where people are censored, cancelled and demonised for their views. Commendably, Harman set about changing a parliamentary system that was dominated by men, many with a background as privileged as hers. But she has been instrumental in replacing it with another form of privilege where protected identity status takes precedence. Ironically, in owing so much to quotas and shortlists, the next generation of Labour MPs might not necessarily have the same commitment, conviction, or calling as the retiring “Mother of the House”. But they will be women, and the right kind of women — with the right views — even if some of them are biologically male.

Originally published in The Critic.

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When it comes to race and the left – certainly the wealthy white left, definitely the middle-class left – it is as if left-wingers have not progressed since being unceremoniously exposed as a type by Tom Wolfe, in his mammoth essay, ‘Radical Chic’, over half a century ago.

Other writers also had their number, including black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The event Wolfe documents may not be familiar to a rising generation charting similar territory as chic revolutionaries on social media. It’s therefore worth providing a summary here. In the season of radical chic, as Wolfe refers to it, super-rich celebrities and socialites were indulging in a political cocktail of nostalgie de la boue and noblesse oblige, by staging fundraising parties – where sumptuous hors d’oeuvre were served – at New York duplexes on Park Avenue. Their pet causes were those raised by ethnic groups who were politicised – often rightfully so – by grievances that needed airing, axes that needed grinding.

Wolfe was present at a gathering hosted by hip maestro Leonard Bernstein in January 1970 to highlight the plight of the Black Panthers, some of whom were present, tucking into meatballs petites au Coq Hardi being dished out by white servants. The wealthy, wide-eyed guests were in awe; they had never met a Black Panther before. (Arguably, some of them had never met a black person before, apart from those handing them meatballs petites au Coq Hardi at Park Avenue parties before black power and white servants were de rigueur.) They were smitten: the Cuban shades, Shaft leathers and Afro Sheen. The lithe Panther wives could have stepped from the pages of Vogue which, as Wolfe points out, was in on the act with a ‘Soul Food’ column listing the ingredients for sweet-potato pone, and the interview in which an inane socialite excitedly announced, ‘the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes’.

Wolfe’s essay, for New York magazine, is brutal and forensic in exposing the crass hypocrisy on display. (Wolfe recalled: ‘The English, particularly, milked the story for all it was worth and seemed to derive one of the great cackles of the year from it.’) Bernstein was ostracised by some, ridiculed by many more, and, along with other rich Jewish radicals, distanced himself from the Panthers when it transpired their anti-Semitism was as virulent as their animosity towards ‘the Man’, the bourgeoisie and goys in general.

Well, that was 1970. More than half a century on, the left’s take on race, over there and over here, is still at the stage of those socialites waxing lyrical about ‘baby blacks’. In fact, it’s worse. For the left, black men and women continue to fall into one of two categories, often both: the poor victim oppressed by Big Bad Whitey; and the soulful exotic, with a natural sense of rhythm and a covetable spicy diet. It’s the contemporary equivalent of casting them as the slave or the maid. It’s old. It’s tired. But it never stops. Society has moved on in relation to race, but the white radicals who campaign for change have not.

In the decades since Wolfe’s essay was published racism has diminished rapidly, while laws introduced to tackle it have increased apace. A lucrative cottage industry has become a booming global business. Think of the unemployment if ‘racism’ were truly eradicated, particularly in the public sector. What would become of this massive protection racket that has capitalists, technocrats and mediacrats fearful the mob will come for them if they don’t pay up, by way of fulfilling diversity quotas and taking the knee? These days everyone is on the bus, and no one has to give up their seat.

Yet the goalposts are forever shifting because with racism, unlike with the end of, say, segregation, there is no finish line. The remit of the term is redefined as often as the words to describe ethnic minorities are rewritten. In ‘Radical Chic’, Wolfe refers to the racial etiquette that plagues ‘cultivated persons’ on the left: ‘one says blacks, of course. It is the only word, currently, that implicitly shows one’s awareness of the dignity of the black race.’ This went the way of ‘coloured’ for a while, to be surpassed by BAME and then POC, to fully represent the diversity and solidarity of the ethnic demographic. But these are no longer au courant, such is the moveable feast that is racial etiquette. ‘Black’ has now struck out on its own again, bigger and bolder than before, with the distinguishing feature of an official capital B.

The meaning of racism has come a long way since solely being identified with evidential prejudice and discrimination. It has covered the waterfront: institutionalised racism, unwitting prejudice, systemic racism. It landed on white privilege, which is pretty much where we are now according to figures in the civil service and elsewhere. Everything from art galleries to rambling and knitting circles are racist, even though there are no Klansmen or water cannons preventing anyone from entering or participating. But actual evidence is not needed as proof when projection will suffice. Like Meghan Markle’s version of the truth, it is entirely subjective.

‘If you believe that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards’, Thomas Sowell has said, ‘that would have gotten you labelled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today’. A more positive development in that time is that the race debate no longer divides people along racial lines. On both sides of the divide created by identity politics, there is a crowd of diverse colours, faiths and affiliations. It’s simply that those critical of the detrimental impact of identitarianism are also diverse in their opinions and outlook. Coming out in this corner are lower-case uppity whites, Asians accused of ‘brown silence’, and Jews expecting to be subjected to anti-Semitism when, momentarily, white gentiles get a breather from being the beast of burden. Also here, black men and women – like those contenders in the Conservative leadership race – are cast as honorary honkies at best and ‘coons’ and ‘house niggers’ at worse. A white academic coined a phrase for their condition: ‘multiracial whiteness’. No, they are experiencing something black men and women have never ever intentionally subjected themselves to throughout their entire history… embarrassment. They are mortified by all that is being done in their name, and often by white people with the subtlety of the rich socialists and thick socialites Wolfe once mocked. Ralph Ellison’s words were written for a darker time, a different climate, but they strike a chord in the present with those being cast as the wrong type of black person. ‘What and how much had I lost’, he wrote, ‘by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?’.

It’s as though those on the left, so enamoured with multiculturalism and racial diversity, are equally insecure and uncertain around it. They rightly champion equality but are uncomfortable in treating ethnic groups as equals; whites are demonised and everyone else is canonised. Black is forever brilliant and beautiful; people with brown skins never do bad things. It’s a luxury, their caucasian compatriots, born on the wrong side of the tracks (for some of us – the wrong side of the Thames) don’t have. In the baby years of this century, I wrote in The Likes Of Us how the urban white working class had experienced black people as lovers, spouses, partners, neighbours, friends and carers, as well as racists, rapists, muggers and murderers. They saw in them the good, the bad and the ugly. In short, themselves.

I’ve rolled out this routine before, but to the equivalent of a matinee crowd in a half-empty house, so it’s worth reprising it here. Those of us who went to those schools and lived in those neighbourhoods had to accommodate immigration and confront race issues on real terms. We were not our parents. We had better opportunities and different outlooks. Our friends looked different to theirs. We had mates who were black and brown. Some of us took black boyfriends and homosexuality home when we were barely out of our teens. Years later, long after former partners had died long before their time, to rest beneath soil and stone in up and coming postcodes, the memory of them returns on anniversaries and autumn afternoons, and a line from Morrissey comes to mind: ‘My one true love is under the ground.’ But apparently even white people with black partners, who they’ve laughed, cried and climaxed with, can be unaware they are inherently racist. Maybe the love and the loyalty blinds them to the news that they are bigots.

Returning to that familiar routine, and that familiar theme, I’d add this: wecovered race years ago because of where we lived; because of who we lived among; because we had to. Yet here we are years later being schooled on this topic by provincial middle-class white people who lived white lives in white worlds until they graduated, moved to the city, moved into the media, politics or the equalities industry, and began educating us about racism. You couldn’t write it down – but some of us did, in a book now 18 years old. You couldn’t write it down – but we do, even though we bore ourselves as much as those on the left who see us as race pundits, grifters and uppity whites. We do so in the hope that one day we will drive the italicised point home, and park it. Like Wolfe, Baldwin, Ellison and a cast of millions: We have your number. We’ve had it for decades.

We had it in the 1970s, during the moral panic around ‘mugging’, when the assailants were disproportionately black, while those attacked were disproportionately white. This trend was dismissed as a myth, which meant the far right could claim it and create further racial division. The riots of the 1980s were written up by the left as the modern Peterloo, while the chaos, the violence, that devastated working-class neighbourhoods and the morale of the locals went overlooked. You could once argue that the failure of those to be critical of these episodes was attributable to being ignorant or disingenuous, but ultimately such excuses diminished when this became the official take, and then something of a tradition on the left. Years after the 2011 riots that decimated Clapham Junction, a fellow writer told me of a dinner party peopled by Guardian loyalists, during which guests expressed surprise that every shop had been raided except Waterstones. ‘That’s because the book is sacred’, one of those present put in, with no hint of irony. (Or perhaps the looters took off with plasma screens, consoles and computers because they didn’t have the manpower to lift the unabridged Proust.) Like I say, you couldn’t write it down, but we do, to constantly remind ourselves of the stupidity we’re up against.

The official point at which crimes where victims were white and perpetrators were not were deracialised followed the murder of Richard Everitt in London in 1994, the year after Stephen Lawrence was killed. The two tragedies were strikingly similar, except that Everitt was an innocent white teenager murdered by a gang of Bangladeshis. The organisations, the quangos, the lawyers who took the prosecution side in the Lawrence case, took the part of the defence in the aftermath of the Everitt murder. Where racism became central to the Lawrence case, actual proof of racism was deemed irrelevant in the Everitt case. When one of the culprits in Everitt’s murder was charged on the principle of joint enterprise, because blood on his clothing put him at the scene of the crime, the anti-racist lobby took to the streets in protest. In 2012, that same lobby was celebrating when clothing with specks of blood, belonging to the Lawrence suspects, came to light. Lawrence’s killers were sentenced on the principle of joint enterprise.

This marked a tradition that has continued ever since for crimes in which perpetrators are black, brown or Muslim and the victims are – generally or largely – white. We’ve been privy to it after too many Islamist attacks to list here, where the lone-wolf motif and mental illness are swiftly introduced, as race and ideology are removed from the equation. We solemnly remember those slaughtered and forget the motivation of the culprit. A similar ritual, a similar silence is found each time another exposé on Pakistani grooming gangs emerges. For the contemporary left it is as if racism, rape and terrorism only warrant rage when those responsible are white.

It’s not that the lives of the white victims of these crimes don’t matter, it’s that the ethnicity or faith of the perpetrators does, which is why we’re expected to keep schtum and move on. It’s not that lives of white victims in race crimes don’t matter, it’s that they can’t be seen to matter as much as when the victims are black – unless the murderer is as well. Then silence descends, and we’re expected to keep schtum and move on… again. ‘To yell “black-on-black crime”’, author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, ‘is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding’. Even if they – or any of us – could make sense of this statement, it would be of little comfort to the family of Sasha Johnson. The British Black Lives Matter foot soldier remains in a hospital bed, paralysed, taken down by bullets from a black man with a gun. As soon as news of the attack spread, the usual race pundits and grifters rallied. In a misguided moment of lucidity, Labour MP Diane Abbott implied in a tweet that Johnson had been shot by racists because ‘she stood up for racial justice’. In the clearing, before the truth came to light and the obligatory silence shut everything down – because some black lives matter more than others – it looked like the season of radical chic could be upon us again. Venues set; hors d’oeuvres assembled. Can you imagine?

But it is 50 years later, society has evolved, yet we are left with slogans, placards and chants as archaic as the Black Panther cosplay of Cuban shades, berets and raised leather fists. The theatrical antics of a discredited 21st-century movement that swept up a rising generation of spoilt white kids, who cast themselves as online revolutionaries, and wealthy elders reviving the radicalism of their youth. They are of a similar class, but generations apart, unified by their efforts to ‘rethink their attitudes’. To educate themselves. Just like that American socialite on the pages of Vogue, in less enlightened times, they are in awe of the sophistication of the baby blacks.

Originlly published in Spiked.

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Drag has come a long way since television presenter Robert Robinson, speaking on the BBC arts series The Look At The Week in 1967, implied it was a shady phenomenon creeping through respectable society.

Robinson, more wary than wry, referred to this burgeoning trend as something previously confined to the illicit world of homosexuality, which was legalised that year.

Homosexuality had spread to vicars and scout masters according to the press — now drag was muscling in on dockers and stevedores in cockney hinterlands. The programme featured the drag act Phil Starr at the City Tavern, Millwall. Starr, a wallpaper salesman by day, and someone akin to a brickie in a wig at night, explained how his best audience were women. They were even more appreciative than the male prisoners at his Wormwood Scrubs performances.

In Britain, drag was finding its way out of gay clubs and into east end pubs, as well as onto the stage of the Royal Variety Performance, where Danny La Rue was a regular sight into the 1970s. But Robert Robinson’s concerns were premature. It’s in the 21st century that drag has become “a new and concerning phenomenon”, as well as a familiar fixture as light entertainment. Beyond RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s in ads, art galleries and on the catwalk.

More recently, and more worrying for some, it has found a footing elsewhere. From this month (in which the world celebrates International Drag Day) through to September, Drag Queen Story Hour UK will be touring British schools and libraries, holding classes for 3-11 year olds. Established in 2015 in the US, it claims to “inspire a love of reading, while teaching deeper lessons on diversity, self-love and an appreciation of others”. Sceptics are unsettled by this justification, believing that it contradicts safeguarding principles and government guidelines. Others level charges of misogyny.

In this high season of identity politics — with Stonewall exhausting every avenue in an effort to remain relevant and boost its revenue — you wonder if it’s a question of time before drag queens establish themselves as an imperilled and marginalised minority. Their politicisation has been in the offing for a while, as is evident with events like Drag Con, which began as a meet and greet for drag aficionados. Will there soon be a place on the Progress flag? Further hate crime legislation in the offing? Beyond the diminishing right wing evangelicals, always the folk devils in these fights, coming out fighting in the opposite corner are women who have an issue with female impersonation in whatever form it takes, whether drag or transgenderism.

Writing for The Critic in 2021, Dr Em had this to say: “Drag performers frequently reduce women to hyper sexualised, big breasted, big haired bimbos. Celebrated men in drag have names that objectify, sexualise or make light of women’s issues.” Women are split over the concept of drag — but perhaps they always were.

Those that found it misogynistic were overshadowed by the feminists and queer theorists in academia who perceived it to be an art form that subverted gender norms. In the 1990s, Camille Paglia referred to herself as the forerunner of “Drag Queen Feminism”, citing the transvestism of Warhol superstars like Candy Darling as her introduction to the form.

Before that there was Susan Sontag and her infamous essay which gave Camp the academic seal of approval, listing drag and androgyny — two very different things, actually — as central to the canon. In “Notes On Camp” (1964) she describes Camp as a sensibility, a private code among small urban cliques. Homosexuals were synonymous with this in her view, but capitalism and consumerism also played a part. Camp can only truly thrive in an affluent society.

Drag and camp are interchangeable because each derives from themes central to Sontag’s thesis: a love of the unnatural by way of artifice and exaggeration, particularly regarding sexual characteristics and personality traits. Things being what they are not. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style, according to Sontag, and style that is artifice is ultimately epicene. “Not a woman, but a ‘woman’,” she writes.

What has changed since the publication of Sontag’s essay is that the quotation marks have disappeared. Disturbingly, the very notion of what constitutes a woman is up for grabs. Meanwhile, the concerns and grievances of minority groups have found a voice in the mainstream, where the solidarity presumed to exist among them in the margins has imploded. At a time when the charge of cultural appropriation is a serious one, and the crime of “blackface” rallies the lynch mob, gay men become parodies of women and straight men graft themselves onto the trend for a cheap thrill or a cheap joke.

Following Ant & Dec appearing in drag on Saturday Night Takeaway, Julie Burchill expanded on the crudeness of the current take on “womanface”: “The drag queens of today do not seek to embody the elegance of women — as did Danny La Rue, the first drag queen to find fame on primetime TV — but a crude misogynistic stereotype, reflected in their names: Cheryl Hole, A’Whora and worse.”

Drag is no longer a harmless homage to the Hollywood of old, an act fuelled by blue jokes and bawdy innuendo. It’s taken on a sinister aspect, in which women’s bodies and genitalia are the punchline. The recent McCain ad featured drag queen Baga Chipz talking about “my big knockers”. The middle class graduates at the fore of alternative comedy attacked this approach when it was the schtick of working class comedians in the 1980s. Now their contemporary equivalents are its audience.

The prominence of drag in mainstream culture is part of a trend that embraces Sontag’s take on camp. But it also breaks with it. According to Sontag it was never political; it made the serious frivolous. Contemporary camp also makes the frivolous serious. It has lost its outsider status despite fervently clinging to it; it is no longer a subversive subculture. In 2013, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce wrote an essay in which he revised and updated Sontag’s original. He took her to task for arguing that Camp was apolitical, claiming that’s exactly what it was — until now, an age in which he sees “bad straight camp” and “conservative camp”.

Several years on, bad camp sums up what radical politics and political activism have become. The serious has become frivolous. The exaggeration, theatre and artifice of camp and drag colour the antics of Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the supporting cast of agitators that take to the streets, whether it’s women dressing as extras from The Handmaid’s Tale or Black Lives Matter foot soldiers reprising Black Panther costumes. In the aftermath of his death, George Floyd was inducted into the contemporary canon of bad camp. Even before his canonisation his open golden casket was displayed for the curious crowds — there was keening; there was mourning — as though he were Mandela or Evita.

Over here, British culture has been consumed by bad camp, particularly in the realm of politics and activism. This plummeted to new depths last month during Pride, when Progress flags were suspended across Regent Street (when there were Union Jacks during jubilee celebrations, “progressives” compared the country to Nazi Germany). On those same streets for the big finale, pantomime dame Keir Starmer with glitter on his cheeks and “Pride” on his t-shirt led the big parade accompanied by Angela Rayner dad-dancing to the outmoded, but obligatory, gay anthem as the London Mayor whipped up the crowd.

Where there was once pride there is now embarrassment. In the absence of a clear and valid cause there is bad camp and Drag Queen Story Hour. But as long as the dancing continues and the music plays, no one will hear the praiseworthy feminists, gay activists and civil rights campaigners of the past spinning in their graves. Many of the changes they agitated for have been achieved; many battles they fought have been won. What’s left in their wake is the bad camp, bad drag and cosplay of those that have yet to accept that society has moved on, and the parade has passed them by.

Originally published in The Critic.

Even before Brexit, the attitude of many in the Labour party towards traditional working class voters had been closer to contempt than camaraderie.

Last week was not only the sixth anniversary of the result, but the point when the left momentarily ditched minority issues. Trade unionism replaced transgenderism as a priority, in support of the RMT union — an organisation left-wing Remainers previously condemned for urging its members to vote Leave.

These workers were once again comrades-in-arms, because the industrial action was an opportunity to create chaos and, possibly, bring down a Tory government. Labour has failed to do as much via the ballot box for over a decade. Last week the party also clawed back a seat in the red wall which it lost in the 2019 general election, and failed to reclaim in the recent council elections. Yet the Wakefield by-election may be a false dawn, as many former Labour voters di…

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In a bid to restore its reputation, widen its remit and replenish its diminishing funds, Stonewall has begun to focus on less familiar groups within the infinite alphabet of LGBTQIA rights.

This follows the withdrawal of financial support for the charity’s Diversity Champions programme promoting inclusivity in the workplace when Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission jettisoned the initiative. Driving Stonewall’s fall from grace has been its belligerent attitude to those with a different take on trans rights. Like society more broadly, Stonewall, which was established in 1989, has come a long way from the riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn twenty years earlier (an event Barack Obama compared with Selma and Seneca Falls, moments that transformed civil rights and the women’s suffrage movement).

In the intervening years, its goalposts have shifted in the pursuit of an elusive “equality” until it has taken a form the founders wouldn’t recognise. The…

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William F. Buckley once said that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams should never be on the same flight because if the plane went down it would mean the death of America’s only black conservatives.

Somehow the right summing up these two brilliant, maverick intellectuals as conservative seemed to sell them short, while their rational stance on race pitted them against a left that expected like-minded views from black Americans on this topic. Even in his dotage Sowell is subjected to this, as when one of his books was reviewed by an academic from the London School of Economics who assumed the author was “a rich white man”.

Sowell has referred to the predominantly white intellectual elite of the left — those quick to classify the minds of minorities — as “the anointed”. He, Williams and the fellow travellers inspired and influenced by these men’s output over the years, have been called other names along the way. In the eyes of say, President Biden, thes…

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Despite the slogan on the child-like cardboard placards held above the heads of Black Lives Matter protesters, the silence of us lower-case whites is not violence.

For a while it was something considered as objectionable as racism — indifference.We neither canonised nor fetishised black men and women as our experience of them was too diverse to classify them as a placid victim or an exotic rara avis. They were ultimately as dull and workaday as the rest of us, harbouring similar hopes and grudges. That’s how it is when you move from society’s margins to the mainstream. (This is the price of equality, at least the equality — it’s an amorphous creature — Britain was trudging towards before identity politics became the pub bore that emptied the bar.)

The upside is you’re not solely knife-wielding, drug-dealing absent fathers (the classical view of the far right); the downside: you’re not simply the carnival-loving soul man in fear of the policeman’s knee and the neigh…

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Some stories stay with you and never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them.

One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.mThe details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton was charged, but films relating to Richard Everitt have been conspicuous by their absence. This is therefore an apposite moment to tell a story I’ve attempted to tell previously.

The first opportunity arose in 2008, when the man sentenced for participating in his murder was released from prison.It was, perhaps, the final chapter in a story of which little was known beyond the basic facts offered as a footnote by broadsheets. The 15-year old was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a group of Asian boys in Somers Town, north London. One of the culprits was now free having served 12 years of a life sentence. He was 19 years old at the time of the trial.

In 2009 I pitched a proposal to the Sunday Times and was commissioned to write an investigative feature for its magazine. From the outset the Lawrence and Everitt murders attracted my attention beyond the futility of the crimes, and the impact on the respective families. I was familiar with the area where Lawrence was murdered; some of my relatives had moved from council homes in south-east London and bought houses in Eltham and the neighbouring suburbs. Their children attended the same school as the teenager. As press interest intensified over time, it struck me how both race and class were central to the coverage. The lack of O-levels of the murder suspects, the revelations that their mothers were neither non-smokers nor natural blondes were cited as though evidence of guilt.

I was criticised for commenting on this by pundit Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote in the Independent that I was “proffering an intellectual alibi for the killers of Stephen Lawrence”. My point was that the residents of Eltham, and the whole of the white working class, were put on trial. A London cab driver expressed it more succinctly: “When Stephen Lawrence was murdered I thought it was terrible,” he said. “Three years later I thought I’d killed him myself.”

Armed with these basic facts I headed to Somers Town, a neighbourhood responding to change with the gentrification of nearby King’s Cross a snapshot of the shape of things to come. (The Shane Meadows film Somers Town had put it back on the map the previous year). Eurostar had been rehoused at St Pancras where the refurbished Midland Grand Hotel, the monumental nineteenth-century Gothic creation of George Gilbert Scott, would soon accommodate the longest champagne bar in Europe.

The art of Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Gormley figured in the piazza of the British Library, which in 1997 relocated to the site of an old rail goods yard that was once a key source of employment for local residents and migrants alike.

In the nineteenth century Somers Town appeared in the fiction of Charles Dickens. After his father’s release from debtor’s prison his son moved to The Polygon, the neighbourhood’s first major housing estate. In Bleak House, Harold Skimpole lives there along with “poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars”.

Further housing projects emerged when a local priest established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society to eradicate slums. The landmark Sidney Street estate was built in the 1920s. Turks, West Indians and Africans arrived over time, with families coming from Sylhet, Bangladesh, in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, white British families were taking up the right-to-buy option with many later selling up and shipping out to Essex or elsewhere. As Pret and Starbucks came, regeneration began to erase the past and one notable chapter in Somers Town history became dust and ashes.

The singular reference to the murder of Richard Everitt was a plaque bought by his parents, Norman and Mandy Everitt, to commemorate their son. When the site where it was displayed was demolished they transferred it to a tiny park tucked in the corner of the neighbourhood. “I knew people would forget Richard,” his mother told me in 2009, “but I didn’t want them to forget the circumstances of his death.” (In June this year the plaque was removed again, due to current redevelopment.)

The Everitts — native north Londoners — moved to Somers Town Estate with their three children in 1986. The Sir William Collins school was another staple of the area, established in the 1890s and re-christened South Camden Community School by the time their youngest son attended. There was a diverse ethnic mix within the classrooms. Close to 60 per cent of pupils were Asian, 25 per cent black and 15 per cent white. Following his death, the annual Richard Everitt trophy was introduced and awarded to two children at the school. According to the department for Children, Schools and Families at Camden Council it was presented to pupils who showed “leadership in promoting community cohesion”.

In the 1990s it was a lack of cohesion and violence between ethnic gangs that led the late Rosemary Harris — a reader in anthropology at nearby University College — to make Somers Town the subject for her research, assisted by field workers and youth club leaders. Camden council expressed an interest, until the findings revealed white racism was not the impetus for the violence of Asian gangs.

“Camden Council wanted nothing to do with it,” she told me. “I think because the Bangladeshis failed to emerge as the totally innocent victims of local racism. What angered me at the time was that the findings were dismissed as ‘racist’.” Some of the research featured in the book Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999) but the original 50-page document remained unpublished. Yet its content might have offered solutions to issues addressed by the authorities following the Everitt murder.

The pattern of violence began in earnest in 1992, according to the report: “A white boy outside the school offended a group of Bangladeshis and they lacerated his back with knives.” One black youth was stabbed ten times by Bangladeshi boys, yet managed to survive. Harris sat in on a meeting between the parents of a white boy and a teacher, after the parents become fearful for their son’s safety. Previously a knife was pulled on him as he queued for his school meal, now seven Bangladeshi boys attacked him as payback for a tackle made during a football match.

Rosemary Harris wrote that teachers were vulnerable to charges of racism, “an accusation that they know is likely to follow any action by them against misbehaviour by Bangladeshis”. The main culprit was temporarily suspended, with the school denying racism played a part in the assault according to the parents. The victim was Richard Everitt.

In the summer of 1994 a gang of Bangladeshi teenagers between 10 and 15 strong went in search of an elusive boy believed to have stolen jewellery from the girlfriend of a gang member. Having assaulted a couple of white boys — attempting to stab one of them — they happened upon Richard Everett and two friends, aged nine and 17, returning from a burger bar. The trio of boys were ambushed. One was head-butted but managed to flee with the younger child. Richard — 6ft and 13st — was killed by a seven-inch kitchen knife penetrating his ribs, lung and heart.

Police descended on the neighbourhood in the weeks that followed. A team of 24 constables patrolled the area to prevent retaliatory attacks or violent flare-ups between gangs. The Everitts appealed for calm, putting their name to a letter distributed to 7,500 local homes, after the firebombing of a halal butcher. An Asian businessman’s offer of a £10,000 reward for the names of the killers proved futile in an investigation hampered by the silence of Bangladeshi families. Several of the suspects were dispatched to relatives in Bangladesh.

The Everitts were targeted with hate mail and moved to a safe house under the witness protection scheme, eventually relocating to the north of England. The family never attempted to capitalise on the racial element of the killing, but were adamant it was a racist murder – a contention backed up by numerous people I interviewed off the record, including former family liaison officers. This was also the line of the crime writer I spoke to at the Sun, one of the few newspapers to investigate the story at length.

At Millbank, I met the family’s local Labour MP Frank Dobson, who believed there was no racist motive to the crime, and to have suggested so would have only inflamed the situation, creating further division. On leaving I asked if he planned to retire before the next election. The party had persuaded him to stand again, he said, because he could “bring in the Bangladeshi vote”.

The groups, quangos and columnists that made anti-racism central to their remit were silent on the racist motivation of the crime and concentrated on fears of a backlash against Bangladeshi families. This was a marked contrast to events following the killing of Stephen Lawrence, when the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Herman Ouseley, telephoned the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to say this was a racist crime, and “it was imperative that it should be investigated as a racist crime”, according to the book Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000).

The following day the Anti-Racist Alliance and representatives from similar groups were on the doorstep of the Lawrences’ suburban home. Two weeks later the couple were at the Athenaeum Hotel in west London for a meeting with Nelson Mandela, who compared the killing to events in South Africa where “black lives are cheap”. The only high-profile person that expressed an interest in the Everitt murder, privately at least, was Princess Diana. She laid flowers on the spot where he was killed.

At Scotland Yard, I spoke to a young Asian officer recently appointed to Somers Town. He voiced his concerns over a reluctance to acknowledge how gangs in the area were divided by race rather than by housing estates and neighbourhoods: “It was much more comfortable to see these things geographically.” The Everitt killing was originally classified as a “racist incident” by those leading the investigation, before becoming one that was no longer “purely a racist attack”, according to news reports. Perhaps they, like the teachers Harris mentioned, feared allegations of racism, a development that has become more commonplace in recent years, most controversially with the delayed exposure of Pakistani grooming gangs.

The police were also reeling from the fall-out from the Lawrence murder in which charges of incompetence and insensitivity were levelled, with the vague allegation of “institutional racism” added during the Macpherson Inquiry. The argument central to the Lawrence case was that the teenager would not have been murdered if he was white. Yet the race industry never considered Richard Everitt was murdered because he was.

I completed the Sunday Times article. Lawyers for the newspaper made amendments. Time passed. The magazine editor left, pegs and hooks fell by the wayside, the story died. It happens sometimes no matter how handsomely a writer is paid for their efforts. Nevertheless, I persevered as there were other angles of interest. The Everitt trial began at the Old Bailey in October 1995, six months before the private prosecution brought by the Lawrence family was staged there.

The Lawrences’ lawyers were the defence team in the Everitt trial. Before becoming identified with the Stephen Lawrence case the eminent QC Michael Mansfield defended the Birmingham Six and the Bridgewater Three; now he represented the Camden Six, as their supporters tagged the accused. Ultimately, two of the gang were convicted: one for being a participant in the murder, the other for violent disorder. They received prison sentences of 12 and three years respectively. The legal principle used was “joint enterprise”, the doctrine that assigns criminal liability to all those present at a crime.

In 2009, I found myself seated at lunch within the old Reuters building on Fleet Street — recently converted to a Conran-style restaurant — pitching ideas to the future editor of the Sunday Times. He was familiar with Somers Town but less familiar with the developments in the Everitt story and my attempts to write about it. Within a fortnight the paper’s news editor had me update my feature and rewrite it as a news story. Days before it was to be published, the anonymous sex blogger “Belle de Jour” opted to reveal her identity to the Sunday Times. As I say, hooks and pegs fall by the wayside, stories die. It happens.

Getting the story published was proving more difficult than getting people to talk about it. (Pitches to other newspapers came to nothing, meetings at Channel Four and Radio 4 didn’t progress beyond the perfunctory development meetings.) Many had been ready, willing but unable to speak because of a lack of legal protection. I’d fared no better with those that supported the campaign to free the teenagers shortly after the sentencing. The human rights charity Liberty, Camden Legal Centre, Camden Racial Equality Council, the Society of Black Lawyers, added weight to the campaign, which accused the jury and the Crown Prosecution Service of racism.

In its literature the plight of the “King’s Cross Two” was compared with that of the “Sharpeville Six” in the South Africa of the 1980s, who were convicted under “joint enterprise”. (The London teenagers charged were not activists protesting against apartheid, nor were they sentenced to death.)

The following decade, on the tenth anniversary of the Macpherson Report (1999) on the death of Stephen Lawrence, Trevor Phillips, then Chairman of the Commission for Human Rights and Equality, claimed the battle against “institutional racism” was not yet won. However, the police would deal with the Lawrence murder differently if it occurred today, he said, citing the murder of Anthony Walker, which was immediately treated as a racist attack.

It was unlikely the killing of Richard Everitt would have been treated any differently. The murder of Christopher Yates in Newham at the hands of an Asian gang around the time of Walker’s death was just one of the many incidents in which the racial motive was not considered a factor when the victim was white. If it took the tragedy of the Stephen Lawrence murder to highlight covert prejudice within the police force, it was the murder of Richard Everitt that finally exposed double standards in the race industry.

In 2012, I spent the night with a government minister on a flight from New York. Coincidentally I’d interviewed him for BBC’s The Politics Show just weeks earlier. He was wearing the best Chelsea boots I’d ever seen and, as I pointed out, taking the Tories’ austerity measures seriously by travelling economy, and finding himself seated next to me. We talked of the news that had dominated in the UK during our absence: the latest chapter in the Stephen Lawrence story provided the headlines. Finally, two of the suspects were convicted of the murder, under joint enterprise. Those that condemned the use of this in the Everitt trial were now celebrating, as it resulted in a verdict they approved of.

I informed the minister of my efforts to tell the Everitt story. He suggested that a back-bencher might take up the cause. The Everitt case could have been reactivated years after the investigation had closed, in pursuit of all those responsible for the murder. (Last month the Lawrence investigation was officially classified as “inactive”). Neither the Lawrences nor the Everitts discovered the identity of the actual murderer of their sons, and others involved escaped prison.

Both families had endured battles they should not have had to fight. Norman and Mandy Everitt never saw their son’s murder elevated to the status of a race crime, and also witnessed attempts to prevent his killers being brought to justice. “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I sometimes wish that Richard had been murdered by a white boy,” Mandy Everitt told me, when I first approached her with plans to write about her son. “Then we’d have had to deal with the murder but not the nightmare of everything else that followed.”

Ironically, under the interpretation of “racism” according to current hate crime legislation, a racial incident is one that is “perceived” to be as such, regardless of the intention or the motivation of the accused. On the strength of this criteria, Richard Everitt was unmistakably the victim of a racist murder. Twenty-six years later, in the absence of an ITV series or a BBC film dramatising his story, maybe we can at least finally allow him that.

This essay first appeared in The Critic.

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In the opening years of this century I wrote a book, The Likes Of Us, on the white working class.

Several newspapers bid to run an excerpt. I opted for the Guardian as it was those on the left from the middle class upwards that were the most disparaging about this particular tribe. They mocked them and demonised them. Currently they order them to check their “privilege”; to kowtow to the false narratives of the Black Lives Matter cult. Yet this class remains the cornerstone of a silent majority whose angry silence makes itself known via the polling booth, rather than toxic riots.

The Likes Of Us won the Orwell Book Prize. The runner-up, Andrew Marr, wrote in his Telegraph column the next day the win was a testament to Blair’s meritocratic Britain. (In short, I was an interloper, a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.) I’d used my experience growing up in south-east London as the springboard for the story of a…

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