‘Unbearable tension’: what have key Tories said about race?

Boris Johnson’s senior adviser on ethnic minorities, Samuel Kasumu, wrote in a leaked letter of “unbearable” tension within Downing Street.

Sources claim that the divisions centre on the way the government is trying to reset the debate around equality, and comments made by several individuals who have been promoted into key positions by Johnson.

Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, told MPs in October: “Some schools have decided to openly support the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group, often fully aware that they have a statutory duty to be politically impartial.

“We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt. Let me be clear that any school that teaches those elements of critical race theory as fact, or that promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

Tony Sewell, the newly appointed chair of the government’s commission on race and ethnic disparities, wrote in 2010: “What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour. They are not subjects of institutional racism. They have failed their GCSEs because they did not do the homework, did not pay attention and were disrespectful to their teachers. Instead of challenging our children, we have given them the discourse of the victim – a sense that the world is against them and they cannot succeed.”

Liz Truss, the minister for women and equalities, said in December that the equality debate should not be dominated by “protected characteristics” – age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

“Too often, the equality debate has been dominated by a small number of unrepresentative voices, and by those who believe people are defined by their protected characteristic and not by their individual character.

“Underlying this [approach] is the soft bigotry of low expectations, where people from certain backgrounds are never expected or considered able enough to reach high standards.

“This diminishes individual humanity and dignity. Because when you choose on the basis of protected characteristics, you end up excluding people.”

Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s race adviser, wrote in 2018 about the weaponisation of victimhood: “The common denominator with all these stories is the simplistic conclusions that we are supposed to draw. Men are beasts. Whites are oppressors. Britain is bad.

“There are many other incidents of mistreatment or conflict in our society that never make headlines because they don’t feed these narratives. A trivial dispute between neighbours; an act of unkindness by a shopkeeper; a sick joke by a colleague – all bad but hardly worthy of general concern. Unless there is a ‘social justice’ angle that can be divined (or manufactured), no one else gets involved.”