So, the Tories’ choice for leader lies between two Right-wing (even by Conservative standards) candidates: anti-EU, anti-human rights legislation, anti-welfare, very anti-immigration, and anti-what they call ‘woke’.

That one of these is a black woman should not give us (on the Left) any comfort. The Conservatives have a recent record of appointing brown people to top posts in their party and in government – the eliminated and marginally more liberal candidate James Cleverly is another example – which says much for their open-mindedness on questions of ‘race’; just as their choice of Margaret Thatcher as leader 46 years ago indicates that they may not have been quite as sexist as they had often appeared.

But that is to misunderstand the importance of race (or gender) in British politics – and perhaps British life generally – in recent years. I’ve always thought that these two factors, especially the first, were exaggerated, by those who wished to portray Britain as an eternally racist society, either arising out of or contributing to her imperial experience; despite some indications to the contrary. So far as the Conservative party is concerned, ‘identity’ has always been rooted more in values than in ethnicity: values that were sometimes portrayed as ‘national’, but were in fact essentially class-based. So, Kemi Badenoch is accepted because of her entrepreneurial back history, just as those awful brown-skinned female politicians Priti Patel and Suella Braverman were; and on the other side, the new black Foreign Secretary David Lammy is welcomed for his typically ‘Labour’ background. Jews have also been accepted on both sides for similar reasons. ‘Race’ has little to do with it; so long as you can show that you have imbibed the dominant culture of whichever team it is you want to join.

Unless, that is,your race or gender makes you feel that you need to express that culture more openly and extremely than you would if you were white and male; simply in order to confirm your credentials. Which may have been a factor in Thatcher’s case (‘the only one in the Cabinet with balls’); and could be one today for Badenoch, Patel and Braverman. But to suggest this seems patronising. (What can I know about their psychologies?)

Still, and whatever their views, the prominence of these women and men in present-day British politics must be one in the eye for those who claim that ‘immigrants’ can never integrate. They can, and do, even if they don’t always integrate into the parts of British society – the particular British ‘cultures’ (there are of course many) – that we might prefer to see them in.

More generally, I’ve been struck by this recent speech by the socialist Prime Minister of Spain, going right against the xenophobic trend in Europe today, to laud the economic and – yes – cultural benefits of immigration into his country; with a view to easing migrants’ way into Spanish society. (See https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-sanchez-touts-benefits-migration-european-neighbours-tighten-borders-2024-10-09/.) I only wish that Starmer could do the same. Britain of course has taken in migrants for most of her history, and broadly welcomed them. In general they have enriched her culture and society, as much as Sanchez says they have in Spain’s case; and benefitted her economy. That’s another topic, perhaps for a future post. (But you could start by reading my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics, 1979; and Britain’s Contested History: Lessons for Patriots, 2022.)