I was recently engaged with a lively discussion with a PISA Nigerian about the futility of ‘integration’. The conversation took the usual path; they proudly presented statistics about ethnic minority attitudes towards cannabis, chests were beaten over the GCSEs of Carribeans - I parried with crime and social housing. Instead of the receiving this attack with the offence I had intended, they grievously wounded me with a single word.
“Vaccines”.
Reader, to my shame, I staggered. They had struck upon a nerve I had not the courage to confront myself. What could be the rational explanation for the high compliance of White British to the needles of poison? I recoiled, and stuttered something about age and demographic change (the elderly being more obsessed with Astra Zeneca). But in that moment it was Game, Set and Match, and he smiled smugly at me, as he rubbed those health inequalities in my trembling face.
I’ve realised since what the correct answer is - organisational compentence. Consider the transcontinental communicability of the phrase ‘black people time’ and you can begin to understand the logistical explanation for why there is a ‘meningitis’ belt between Senegal and Ethiopia, a disease for which vaccines have existed since the 1970s. Consider the real reason for the differential in maternal mortality rates. There were likely millions to tens of millions of appointments for MRNA murder pens missed by our Windrush heroes, lost to the maggy and nephew haze outside of the Betfred.
Nonetheless. This conversation led me to much reflection on the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. Badenoch is always at her worst, in my view, when she attempts to reject her ‘otherness’ as a Nigerian. Talking about how she worked in McDonalds and how she, a woman born into a senior political family in Nigeria, and grew up partly in the United States, had only a hundred quid to her name when she moved to Wimbledon as a sixteen-year-old. You’d have to be incredibly Scottish/gullible to be taken in by such a transparent misrepresentation, and it genuinely offends me when she trots it out. I just do not believe that the electorate are that absent-minded.
I find her to be a much more sympathetic character when she uses her background to escape chummy Jimmy Savilisms like eating sandwiches. You can just picture the look on “Smiffies” face when he hears that the leader of the Opposition doesn’t care for ‘Tuna Mayos’ - mate, mate, come on Kemi, you can’t be having all that sugar in your tea mate, have a builders, yeah. Her privileged background in Nigeria, particularly the political framing (for those who do not know, her mother is the cousin of a former Vice President of Nigeria, and her late father was a prominent Yoruba politician) gives her a more interesting personal narrative than that of Keir Starmer, the carbohydrate/gluten addled provincial lawyer who is clearly no stranger to sandwiches.
She would be better off presenting herself as a foreign luminary untainted by the perversions of mid 20th century Britain - the class of Kincora ’84 - unbeholden to taboos about ‘human rights’ or capital punishment. Symbolically separate from the Elite which destroyed the economy and forcibly injected twenty somethings with a malignant ‘medicine’ whilst lying, lying again and again.
It’s a tired Hound trope that Leaders get once chance to make an impression on the public, but in these specific circumstances it is indeed the case that there was a very short window for the Tories to try and neutralise Reform and it has been completely missed. Nonetheless, as she stumbles, it’s worth pointing out that there was another path.
In the final months of those fourteen years, much was made of ‘education’ being the only Tory legacy that could be put forward. This is wrong-headed, in my view, as education taken in the round became worse over the fourteen years as the worst elements of mass education were expanded. The school leaving age was raised and nothing was done to reduce the growth of polytechnics like Royal Holloway. Most importantly, the opportunity to reintroduce selective education, for which there was a window not only in 2010 but also later, during the May premiership, was not taken.
The relative performance of Britain during lockdown would have been a better starting point. The British State did not follow it’s initial instinct, which was the same as Sweden, but relative to other countries across the World it took a much better stance on Civil liberties. It avoided outdoor masking, compulsory vaccinations for restaurants, and also avoided a lockdown over ‘Omnicron’. These are not crowning achievements - but they could have formed the beginnings of a stronger line against Labour during the twilight months of the Tory Government. That is because an attack on lockdowns and vaccines is a spiritual assault on ‘Starmerism’, on Starmer, who would have happily have locked us down and forced vaccines into our veins, but also onto the worldview of his people.