Rupa Huq: Kwarteng “superficially” black

27 Sep
Posted on Author steel city scribe 6

Amid the most egregious display of governmental incompetence of my lifetime – and this right after Boris Johnson! – with Team Truss waging class war at a scale and tempo Mrs Thatcher would have called out as extreme, Britain’s Labour Leadership is busy doing what it does best: eschewing all talk of class to assure an identity politics obsessed Westminster bubble it will continue to stamp down hard, in that re-run of McCarthyism in progressive garb we’ve come to know and loathe, on idPol heretics and deviationists.

Without fear or favour as regards creed, skin colour, sartorial taste or sexual identity.

After disproportionate expulsions of Jewish members for “antisemitism“, we learn today that Rupa Huq, Labour MP and former shadow Home Office Minister, has had the whip withdrawn for “racism”. She called Kwasi Kwarteng – his outlandish remedies for failing British capitalism reminiscent of Thabo Mbeki’s for AIDS – “only superficially black”.

She made the remark to a Labour Conference fringe before going on to say that Kwarteng went to Eton and “if you hear him on [radio] you wouldn’t know he’s black”.

Returns from my extensive survey on this very point haven’t yet been gathered in and crunched, but I dare say a good few million Afro-Caribbean Britons would wholeheartedly concur. That did not prevent Conservative Party Chairman Jake Berry from venting his glee “disgust” in a swiftly drafted letter to the Leader of Her His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

I trust you will join me in unequivocally condemning these comments as nothing less than racist and that the Labour whip be withdrawn from Rupa Huq as a consequence,

“Well of course I will”, TweedleLab shot back. With the virtual ink on TweedleCon’s missive not yet dry, Ms Huq had had the whip withdrawn.

Oddly enough, while every section of Britain’s media is today giving the incident front page treatment, I’ve yet to see coverage of Sunday’s Al-Jazeera revelations that its

Investigative Unit has obtained documents that look behind the scenes of the “crisis of anti-Semitism” that engulfed the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

An analysis of internal party documents, social media data and covert recordings reveals how senior Labour officials attempted to undermine support for Corbyn and, on some occasions, to silence debate about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Could that be because every section of Britain’s media was an eager party to the McCarthyite smears? Nah. You’d have to be one of them there conspiracy theorists  to think like that.

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Update. By early evening Rupa Huq had offered Kwasi Kwarteng her “sincere and heartfelt apologies”. For what, precisely?

As with antisemitism (a tad more prevalent in Kiev than Westminster) Sir Keir and Co wouldn’t know what real racism looks like if it took a piss in their cappuccinos. But that’s not what this is about, is it?

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6 Replies to “Rupa Huq: Kwarteng “superficially” black”

  1. Right now there exists a valid evidence based argument for concluding the top and middle echelons of British society are only superficially adults. Or even human.

    Though given the comotose position of most of the rest of the populace in the face of systemic across the board collapse with no viable fit for purpose practical and workable alternative anywhere to be found you’d probably struggle to find anyone capable of turning the lights out as everybody heads for the exit to escape the unfolding dystopia.

    Not that it would matter as the lights are likely to go out anyway.

    This piece sums it up neatly:

    https://eand.co/what-britains-kamikaze-self-destruction-teaches-the-world-1522def1f1c0

    Something remarkable happened yesterday. At which history won’t know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps it’ll do both. Britain, continuing on its course of self-destruction, finally reverted to back to a developing country…..

    ….The new Chanceller of the Exchequer — think of him as the Treasury Secretary — announced a new budget. And reacting in shock, laughing with disbelief, the markets proceeded to sell off pounds, at an astonishing rate. By the end of the day, the pound had been shredded. It was trading at its lowest levels since 1985….

    …. What really happened here? Something unprecedented in the modern history of rich nations. The guy running the economy had triggered a currency crisis. This is the kind of thing that we see in “emerging markets,” aka developing countries, poor ones. Some crackpot takes control of the economy, the markets get spooked, and bang — there’s a run on that currency. Everyone wants to flee from it, because the crackpot now running the economy is going to torch it…..

    …..Why was there a run on the pound? For a reason that’s almost too absurd to be believed. The guy running the economy — the new Chancellor — announced a new budget. And that budget was made of mega-borrowing — to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. For what? Borrowing in itself isn’t bad — it can and should be used for productive stuff, like fixing a society’s broken systems (of which Britain has plenty, and we’ll come back to that).

    This budget, though, was made of mega-borrowing to fund…tax cuts. For whom? Tax cuts, too, aren’t intrinsically bad — but in this case — get ready to laugh — the tax cuts were so unevenly distributed that someone making a million pounds a year would save $50K, while someone on the average income would save maybe $200.

    In other words, Britain’s new Chancellor had announced a budget…made of mega-borrowing…to fund tax cuts…for the ultra-rich.

    You might think, so what? Here’s the point. That was so far right that it was a giant step too far even for “the markets.” It’s not often that “the markets” — investment banks and hedge funds, or as I call them, sociopaths — think something’s too far right…..

    …..On twitter, the hashtag #KamiKwasi began to trend — the new Chancellor’s name being Kwasi Kwarteng. Bless the Brits for not losing their sense of humor — and yet the description is lethally accurate. Kwarteng had aimed gone full Kamikaze, a man on a suicide mission — his crackpot budget effectively saying “we don’t care, we’ll take the whole country down to get the dystopia we want.”

    The carnage was real yesterday. And now the vicious circle of true economic ruin is going to begin. Why?

    Well, Britain’s a net importer of…everything. Food, energy, clothes, cheese, go down the list. What happens as your currency plunges? That’s right, imports become more expensive. A lot more expensive, in this case. Brits are now going to have to pay far, far more for the very same goods, because their currency is losing its value fast.

    And this is just the beginning of the currency crisis. It’s not going to stop here — the selloff in the pound is likely to continue, because the government hasn’t said anything to reassure anyone. Instead, it’s sticking to the line that “tax cuts equal growth.”

    And the priority of the Official Loyal Opposition is to virtue signal at every opportunity. From a rendition of God save the King to removing anyone within the Party who does not follow The Official Narrative of an Establishment Elite now so far up its own arse it can see the empty space in its own dolls head.

    Apparently, even though Conference is taking place our Labour Ward had a selection meeting tonight. As though this, along with a myriad of – in the now worse than dire context which exists and is unfolding – equally irrelevant going through the motions activities is going to make any difference or even reach the point of an election in six monthstime in the face of the Tsunami rapidly heading towards us.

    The coming months are going to be brutal. Yet the best response of the entire edifice right down to the local level is to continue to operate as though it will be possible to continue as though everything is operating, and will operate, as though the Country is functioning normally.

    Welcome to Zombieland.

    Reply

    • Right now there exists a valid evidence based argument for concluding the top and middle echelons of British society are only superficially adults.

      Nice

      Reply

      • Or questionably even human? The ‘Alien Reptile Rulers’ theory becomes more and more credible every day, except that reptiles generally behave so as to enhance their own survival. And whether KK is a coconut or not, he is certainly an imbecile, even if being a well-enunciated one.

        And is there no end to these clowns? It seems to be against basic Darwinism that so many can be so idiotic for so long.

        Reply

  2. Rupa Huq’s comment was the crassest form of reductive pseudo-left identity politics gibberish. She deserved exactly what she got. But she should have apologised for the mindless identitarianism of her ‘thinking’ rather than for any ‘offence’ her comments caused. The idea that the colour of one’s skin (or any other ‘identity’ characteristic) determines (or ought to determine) one’s political convictions is not only stupid, it’s anathema to any historical-materialist (let alone sane) understanding of how ideology operates and to any credible effort to build a political coalition in support of a redistributive policy agenda. Sadly, the kind of moralistic, knee-jerk identitarianism displayed by Huq is all to common on the millennial left these days. I’m disappointed to see our blogger (whose views and analysis I generally admire) try to defend it.

    Reply

    • You put two and two together to derive a five. Nowhere in this post do I defend Ms Huq. You miss the point.

      Where we do differ is that you say she should have apologised sooner, while I say she should not have done so at all. I suspect our difference here is too great for us to bridge but that is on this matter only. Am delighted to hear we see eye to eye on other matters.

      Reply

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