26 October 2024, 16:54
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Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch claims ‘left-wing elites’ using the term ‘black community’ rob people of colour of agency.
Ms Badenoch also claimed Labour and left-wing elites were discriminatory and insulting in their reactions to the Chris Kaba trial.
Martyn Blake, the firearms officer who shot the unarmed Kaba dead in September 2022, was cleared of murder on Monday.
The frontrunner said that the left “have manufactured a narrative around race and victimhood in which black people cannot be anything other than victims”.
Those guilty of this generalisation, according to Ms Badenoch, include the BBC, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, the Labour Party, and even Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley.
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Writing in The Times, Kemi Badenoch claimed that: “These statements all show the same thing: that too many of the predominantly left-wing ruling class still see black people as a homogeneous, monolithic bloc.
“It is insulting, reductive, patronising and discriminatory.”
She added: “grouping members of a race under the catch-all term of a ‘community’ constructs invisible values and principles to which minorities such as black people must adhere, and an implicit cultural warning that those failing to comply are ‘traitors to their race.’”
Ms Badenoch’s comments come amid a wider ministerial row about the reactions to Martyn Blake’s acquittal.
Earlier this week, Labour MP Kim Johnson sent her “condolences to the family, friends and loved ones” of Kaba, “particularly this week while the media are using racist gang tropes to justify his killing”.
In a question to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper during Thursday’s parliamentary session, the MP for Liverpool Riverside asked: “Some 1,900 people have died in police custody since 1990. The police have protections, while our black communities are over-policed and under-supported.
“Will the home secretary give assurances that we and our communities will be kept safe and that the police, who already have the protections they need, will not be given extra protections?”
In the same session, Cooper announced that firearm officers that are investigated for shooting suspects will remain anonymous until convicted.
Ms Badenoch then took aim at policing policy, claiming that community policing” had led to a “two-tier” system, under which people were policed differently “along the lines of race or religion”.
Instead, she proposes “consign the term “black community” to history and define black people, as we do all other races, by their contribution as citizens, not by the colour of their skin.”
Ms Badenoch concluded: “A Conservative Party led by me will deliver principles that create social cohesion, not stoke the sort of division that leads people to celebrate gang leaders and murderers for the colour of their skin”
