Having already asked this morning whether Reform's policies are racist and having noted that most people in the UK think that they are, it seems worth asking the same question of Tory policy when the Telegraph notes this in an email which highlights what the Shadow Chancellor (who is, apparently, Sir Mel Stride) is going to say to the Tory party conference today:
Sir Mel Stride will attempt to wrestle back the Conservatives' reputation for fiscal responsibility when he addresses Tory conference delegates in Manchester today.
The shadow chancellor does so with a £47bn spending cuts package and a raft of proposed changes, not least in welfare. Sir Mel will announce that, if the Tories return to office at the next election, only British citizens will be allowed to access benefits such as Universal Credit (UC) and disability payments.
It means the 470,000 people claiming UC who have been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, limited leave to remain, refugee status or humanitarian status will lose out.
Sir Mel will say: “A fairer system ... means ensuring that only British citizens can access welfare, because citizenship should mean something.”
So let's ask these questions:
- Does this policy discriminate on the grounds of citizenship, which is being identified with race?
- Does it discriminate on the likely grounds of ethnicity as a result?
- Is that deliberate?
- Is that deliberate act being sold to the electorate as a positive course of action, favouring them over others?
- Is there, implicit in that sense of favour, an element based on the race of the person advantaged as a result?
- Does the person promoting this seek political advancement as a consequence?
The answer is, of course, yes, in all cases.
This policy is being deliberately promoted to divide people when it is widely known that most of those non-EU nationals with indefinite leave to remain in the UK are either Indian or Pakistani nationals.
So is this a racist policy? Yes, of course it is.
It is also, however, important to ask, based on its framing, whether it might also be a fascist policy. Does it seek to suggest that some people are from super-human groups and others are sub-human as a result? The answer is that, again, this is very obviously the case. So this is also a fascist policy, in my opinion, for the reasons I lay out here.
This is how far our official opposition in the UK has sunk.
The party of Churchill is now actively promoting fascism.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Sadly I agree 🙁
In the light of your other posts I think it is worth noting that the Labour party’s actions, in supporting Israel in the face of genocide, also seem racist. 🙁
What have we come to when most of the main parties appear to be racist?
“£47bn spending cuts package”……….so UK serfs will “enjoy” fewer services & get less money (for those that are “true Brits” and need support). & they will vote for this why?
470,000 people claiming UC……..will get nothing. Starving on the streets? I am confident the Tories will put them into camps where they can work before being deported.
Nothing surprising from what was the Stupid Party & is now the Tory-Fascist Party. If ever a party deserved to be eradicated @ the ballot box its this lot. But there will still be morons (muttons? baa baa) that will vote for them.
Maybe they will re-introduce workhouses?
Conservatives and Reform saying they will leave the the European Court of Human Rights and deport 150,000 a year. I asked Wikipedia how many deportations are stopped by the ECHR. This is what wiki AI said “Official reports show that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has stopped very few UK deportations. The perception that the ECHR frequently halts deportations is inaccurate. Most deportations that are successfully challenged are stopped by UK courts, not by the ECHR in Strasbourg.
Direct interventions by the ECHR
The European Court has intervened to halt UK deportations only 13 times since 1980.
Of these 13 cases, just four related to family life issues.
The ECHR rarely issues interim measures (urgent injunctions) against the UK to block removals. For instance, between 2022 and 2024, only six such requests were granted, and none in 2024.
The ECHR did issue an interim measure that stopped the first flight of the government’s Rwanda deportation policy in 2022.
and… the success rate for human rights-based appeals against deportation is very low. Over a six-year period to June 2021, only about 2.5% of Article 8 appeals by foreign national offenders were successful.
Total numbers: Between April 2016 and June 2021, 922 foreign national offenders successfully challenged their deportation on human rights grounds in the First Tier Tribunal. However, Home Office data shows that 26,091 foreign national offenders were deported during the same period. ”
One of my friends who is a Green councillor thinks the move to leave the ECHR would be the first step to a trump like authoritarian state.
This is staggering.
I asked ChatGPT and basically got the same result.
The counter argument of course, is that BECAUSE we ARE signatories to the ECHR, then both the UK Home Office and UK Courts make ECHR-compliant decsions. Hence the low success of challenges.
It’s still the case that Reform racist demagogues lie, lie, and lie again, to ruin the country they claim to love, but what they want is to remove that ECHR constraint on UK gov & courts, so they can institute nasty, cruel, racist, inhuman, crazy deportation policies. Like Trump’s ICE lethally armed stormtroopers are doing right now.
Those stats prove that Reform lie, but they aren’t enough of an argument against their filthy naked racist fascism. We need better pragmatic arguments AND a constant supply of constructive moral outrage aimed at the right targets.
I don’t think Fa***e likes accusations of racism aimed in his direction. I consider anyone or any party who cynically blows dogwhistles aimed at inciting racism, is racist.
Sadly, that covers Reform UK Ltd, the Tories, and Starmer’s Labour, especially our current Home Secretary.
Good point
The Tories have been out and out racist since Theresa May’s vans and the emergence of the Windrush scandal. They are being utterly consistent and it has been open season on non-whites for some time IMHO. The East Europeans? Well BREXIT has seen them off, so now the next redoubt is over brown skinned people from everywhere.
Forward Britain! To the beaches!!
Pathetic.
Of course it is racist.
But the question I wanted someone to ask Mel Stride was, “What do you think the effect on local communities will be of withdrawing £47bn from circulation?
Of course neither he nor the press want to discuss THAT. Racism is far more likely to get headlines.
This sort of gutter politics should be condemned as dangerous and despicable. But its also economically destructive. Which is why Mel Stride is in a failed broken party, with nothing to offer except dogwhistled hatred.
He would not have a clue how to answer that.
It is, though, the right question.
The interview he gave on the Today Programme was just embarrassing, particularly what he was saying about forcing people with mental health conditions back into work. He clearly had no idea what he was talking about.
Totally agreed.
It is just unfettered callousness.
Bit of course, mental ill health never impacts superior beings.
The Tories always have been racist, from Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech to Theresa May’s hostile environment migrants policy.
Now there are three ” Getting Rid” of parties Conservatives, Labour and Reform. They want to get rid of immigrants, benefits, public services, and any notion of equitable taxing of the rich. They’ve already “got rid” of affiliation with a large trading block (the EU) despite it now being obvious with Trump’s tariffs this puts the UK in an invidious position of having no clout in a global trading world. This is all happening because an elderly generation is racist to the core. Talk about a dumb generation failing to think about consequences!
Churchill is probably not the best example of historical Conservative reasonableness
Churchill certainly believed in racial hierarchies and eugenics, says John Charmley, author of Churchill: The End of Glory. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the top, above white Catholics, while Indians were higher than Africans, he adds. “Churchill saw himself and Britain as being the winners in a social Darwinian hierarchy.” BBC 2015
his own India secretary, Leo Amery, an arch-imperialist who crushed wartime Indian anti-colonial rebellion ruthlessly, found Churchill’s racist defenses of his decision — that Indians breed like rabbits, that if the famine was so bad why was Gandhi still alive, that the starvation of Bengalis mattered less than starvation of “sturdy” Greeks — remarkable. Churchill was “not quite sane” on India, Amery concluded, finding little difference “between his outlook and Hitler’s.” By Priya Satia, Berggruen Institute, 2021
His opposition in the inter war years was more about the prospect of war from German rearmament than ideological
“I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hope we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations.” (the Aberdeen Press and Journal, 7 November 1938, p7)
“I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism.” Hansard 14 April 1937 Vol 322 cc1029-145
“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Palestine Royal Commission 1937
Churchill was not a very nice man, let’s be honest. And without Attlee he could not have won the war.
“Does this policy discriminate on the grounds of citizenship, which is being identified with race?”
Isn’t that the whole basis of citizenship, to discriminate? Do you favour abolition of the concept?
Not in the grounds of race it isn’t.
And the concept is of use only when associated with mutually accepted rights, including the universal acceptance of human rights that are more important.
Why are you denying that?
Tom, I would find it helpful if you could give us your working definitions of:
Race
Nationality
Citizenship
and for clarity,
Discrimination
I’ve never linked citizenship with race, and discrimination can be both benign (not everyone gets a blue badge, or qualifies for children’s rates on public transport) and it can be malign (“no blacks, no dogs, no Irish”).
I should add that I don’t like term “race” except for “the human race”, and on ethnicity questionnaires where I get the chance, I describe myself as “human race” rather than “White British” (which country/state/UN member is “Britain” anyway?)
I did not link citizenship with race, Richard did when he said:
“Does this policy discriminate on the grounds of citizenship, which is being identified with race?“
I did so, deliberately, because I thought the link was being made, but not by me
Can we please send all these psychopaths, disconnected from the real world, those currently in charge or waiting in the wings, to an uninhabited island where they can test their “great ideas” on themselves? I’m sick of hearing their hate-filled rhetoric. They should be living on the edges of society, not running a nation. Instead of solving the problems that make life difficult for the majority, they keep promoting ideas that inflict harm. Rant over.