Can you be black and Tory?

I opened my weekly copy of Grazia last week, which ran a brilliant piece on women in politics in Britain. In between the pages featuring the credit-card -attacking top ten luxury items of the week, the lust inspiring ads for close to crippling Gucci shoes and punky House of Holland T-shirts, were pages featuring a bevy of new beautiful, shiny, airbrushed women. Like the lavish, opulent products that lay before and after them, they were displayed, one next to the other, packaged in understated stylishness, teeths whitened and drawn into smiles, explaining their views, their motivations and their politics. It was a great piece, but black that I am, it was interesting to see, under the Conservative rubrique, a bit of espresso amid all the lattes.

It was Kemi Adegoke, Conservative candidate for Dulwich and West Norwood, reported as having fled Nigeria at 16, and who “cleaned toilets and flipped burgers before studying engineering at Sussex University” (taken verbatim from the Times). Kemi works as a system analyst in RBS and also studied law at Birkbeck. She is a member of the Globalisation and Poverty Policy Group. She is a keen chess player. I suspect she also enjoys polo.

I am afraid that my view of the Conservative party is keenly shaped by the views of my family and their friends who came to the UK in the 1950’s. They came to the UK in the 1960’s to “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish”. I have read then leader of the Tory party- Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech and my palms became cold and sweaty. He gives the example of what will occur to Britain after it has been” flooded” by immigrants, staunchly defending the rights of a UK person to refuse to take in Negro lodgers on the grounds of race. He says, of his case study widow-:

“She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist", they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder”

This would not sound out of place in a BNP Manifesto. This, after West Indian and African soldiers fought alongside British soldiers in World War II, after we sacrificed healthcare and manpower in our own countries to send the best of our nurses and doctors and teachers to work in the hospitals and post offices and transport services because we wanted to help to build the Great Empire. This was a surprising and hurtful U-turn from the party that was noted for its slave abolitionist movement in the 18th century. Since then black people have traditionally spurned the Conservatives. Margaret Thatcher was actually responsible for creating a lost generation through the economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s which ignored black people living in the poorer parts of Britain. She introduced the Race Relations Bill but then betrayed us by introducing, a few years later, the Commonwealth Immigration Act.

David Cameron’s message is that his party has changed and that he is all-inclusive. However, even he has admitted that his efforts to introduce black and female candidates into the party has been met with solid resistance.

His article in the Guardian on 17 March (weeks before the election) pledges his commitment to Black Britain. He proposes to replace welfare with an ill-thought out black entrepreneurship scheme which will work via mentoring and access to finance- his targets are undoubtedly the mainstay of his party’s focus- upper and middle class black people, who have the wherewithal to start businesses in the first place. I am not opposed to his idea of a total revamp of the welfare and benefits system but as usual, his policy will not work in large inner city areas where there are serious problems of exclusion and ghettoisation. This is the party which stopped and searched two black lawyers who were attending a local Tory party AGM only two years ago, forcing them to empty their pockets and treating them like common criminals. This is the party whose officials started a huge smear campaign against Sam Gyimah, a black Conservative candidate which has ended in an admittedly racist bid to “ditch the Black candidate”(verbatim from the Daily Mail).

Sam, a past President of the Oxford Union and a former employee of Goldman Sachs was used as the poster boy for the Tories’ diversity campaign. However, more recently, over 100 MPs have claimed that Sam had “iffy’ business dealings because two of the companies he had some involvement in, failed. This from MPs who employed creative accounting to claim bogus, inflated expenses. On an internet blog, Conservative benchers complain that a few candidates do not have “English” sounding names. The Blue candidates have shown what they truly think of colour.

Last week, I doubted the veracity of David Cameron’s reference to a supposedly archetypal 40 year old black man who was concerned that immigration was out of control. Said man has now said that he is actually 51 and has never said such thing. This obvious “I have a black man on side” was so patronising that I found it disingenuous and misleading. This was similar to his 2008 “babyfather” comment where he urged absent black fathers not to neglect their responsibilities. Whilst I believe that this is probably one of the more serious issues to address in Caribbean communities, every race has parents who are not parents in the true sense of the word and sometimes it’s not about the message, it is about the tone. We know our own problems and we are painfully aware of what we need to do. What we do not need is a white man from Eton telling us what we already know, a man who I may add who does not bother to attend his local church or the opening of his local school, to lecture us on community. We need to know what support we can count on from the State. We have no word on what the State is doing to make TRIDENT more fair, police searches more targeted, and to reduce high unemployment figures for black British young men. The Tory party has taken no responsibility for tackling these issues.

Certain things just do not go. Like fluorescent tights and work (don’t ask). Like Posh Spice and flat shoes. And dare I say, Tories and black people. There are a few anomalies- like Loanna Morrison, a black Jamaican who says calls Britain "hideously diverse".  I would not go so far as to say that the organisation is institutionally racist. It isn’t. All I am saying that when a woman who sucked the breasts of the quintessential Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, feels totally comfortable calling an international tennis player a golliwog, then maybe this isn’t a party where I can feel comfortable and that maybe in the words of the Kitchener “[Tory] is not the place for me”.