The Tory attack on ‘white privilege’
Why Britain’s Conservatives have adopted the logic of fascism
A report from the UK parliament’s Education Committee has slammed the concept of “white privilege” and warned schools and charities that they may breach the 2010 Equality Act if they teach children about its existence.
Coming just weeks after a government-inspired quango denied the existence of systematic racism in Britain, the direction of travel in the culture war is clear. The “white working class” — a sociological fiction now portrayed as fact — will become a group with “protected characteristics” under the law, making nonsense of forty years of anti-racist activism and legislation.
Discrimination against white people, always unlawful under the Act but most often alleged by complainants on an individual basis, will be elevated to the status of a structural and systemic problem, even as the systemic and structural oppression of black people is denied.
That is the logic of the report. Those claiming that this is just a re-run of the backlash against political correctness that began in the 1990s, or a transitory point-scoring exercise by a partisan right-wing MPs, are dead wrong.
The Tory Party is no longer fighting a rearguard action against the advance of racial and social…
