It seems that Labour MP Dawn Butler has not got the ‘woke is dead’ memo. Last week, she demonstrated her continued commitment to identity politics by announcing the launch of a ‘black caucus’ in the UK parliament.
According to Butler, this ‘cross-party gathering of black and minoritised’ MPs and lords will tackle the ‘challenges disproportionately faced by black and minoritised communities’ and combat ‘institutional racism’. So just when it seemed like Britain was moving beyond the hyper-racialised narratives that flourished during the early 2020s, along comes Butler, determined to keep the identity wars burning.
At this stage, it’s not clear how many MPs or peers will actually join Butler’s caucus, although quite a few are already listed as participants.
Still, this is a monumentally tin-eared move on the part of Butler. The very idea of a ‘black caucus’ is an American import. In her launch statement, she proudly admitted that she modelled the grouping on the US congressional black caucus of 1971, even choosing to launch it on the final day of American Black History Month. What it is not is an answer to the problems faced by citizens in the UK today. They don’t want their politicians to indulge in racial grievance politics. They want them to address issues that affect everyone, regardless of race, from housing to healthcare to education.
Not that we should be surprised by Butler’s latest identitarian wheeze. If anyone was going to come up with an initiative as racially divisive and achingly woke as this, it was always going to be the Labour MP for Brent. After all, she has built a career on seeing racism absolutely everywhere.
In August 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter hysteria, Butler was in her element. In an interview with the Guardian, she called for an end to the police practice of ‘stop and search’, on the grounds it is supposedly ‘discriminatory’ against black people. She gave no thought to the fact that working-class black Brits are disproportionately affected by violent crime – both as victims and perpetrators.
That same month, she also accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutional racism’ and even of racially profiling her specifically, after officers stopped a car she was in, mistakenly believing it was registered in North Yorkshire. That the car had tinted windows, meaning the police could not have known the skin colour of its occupants before pulling it over, did not seem to matter to Butler. She was determined to exploit an innocent error for political gain – something the Police Federation vice-chair eventually called her out for.
Some of her more recent public interventions have been frankly bonkers. Last October, she delivered some spoken verse on X for Black History Month. ‘You see this skin I’m in? / This beautiful mahogany brown?’, she said to the camera, before referring to black people as ‘the chosen ones’ and ‘the first ones’. It amounted to borderline black supremacism.
In November, when Kemi Badenoch became Conservative leader, as well as the first black person to head up any major UK political party, Butler retweeted a post describing Badenoch as ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’. It was an intervention that was as offensive as it was crass.
Racially charged nonsense such as this only fuels division. Yet Butler seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that she’s promoting racial equality. She is utterly delusional.
Racial discrimination still exists in the UK, of course, and genuine inequalities must be addressed. But Butler’s determination to pit people against one another on racial grounds, from her attacks on Badenoch to the launch of her ‘black caucus’, helps no one.
It is time to move past the divisive identity politics of the past decade. Britain does not need a black caucus. It needs a political class that sees people as citizens, not as members of racial groups.
Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.
