Although I think we’re getting friendlier again, I fell out with Sunny over what I thought was a surprising and wrong headed blog post about the failed Tory leadership candidate, Davis Davis.
The post was entitled It’s time for brown people to switch to Tory, and concluded:
[G]iven that New Labour wants to extend anti-terrorism legislation until every brown person in the country is locked up until proven innocent (or once the police can be bothered to let you out), it makes more sense for brown and black people, who will overwhelmingly face the brunt of this police-state legislation, to vote Conservative. At least the Tories have finally found some balls regarding the erosion of our civil liberties. And yes, I felt slightly sordid saying that. But its worth thinking about – if you’re brown, then its not worth voting Labour for the sake of your own security.
I freely admit that I’m just a teensy bit tribal in my politics. Although some of my best friends are Tory, I’m a supporter of the Labour Party.
That said, I strongly resist the notion – as I thought Sunny did as well – that a person’s ethnicity should direct the way one votes. Indeed, one of the things that I really like(d) about Pickled Politics is that it sought to challenge the notion of a monolithic religious or ethnic identity, and in particular, the alignment of that identity with a particular political party or tradition.
I also thought that the premise of Sunny’s argument was misconceived:
The number of people who have been arrested under terrorism legislation – compared to the number of people who have been arrested overall – is small.
In the last few years, only, “brown” people have been disproportionately represented among those arrested and convicted of very serious terrorist offences. That has been for a very simple reason. We are living in an era in which the number of white Irish people and mostly white animal “rights” activists involved in terrorist activities has declined, sharply: while the number of Muslims engaged in terrorism, who are often, but not always, brown, has increased. In addition to “brown” (and “white”) Muslim people, there have been a relatively small number of arrests connected to Tamil terrorism and Sikh terrorism. Also “brown” people.
However, that will not necessarily always be the case. Until Islamist terrorists began to organise seriously in the United Kingdom, the most active purveyors of political violence were animal “rights” terrorists: who were usually, but not always, white.
So, if the balance swung that way again, what would Sunny’s advice be? That because “brown” people are disproportionately represented in the medical professions, and “white” people are disproportionately represented among animal “rights” terrorists, that “brown” people should vote Labour, because “brown” people need to be protected from “white” terrorism?
And what if the Good Friday Agreement broke down, and the IRA returned to terrorism? If I recall correctly, the last person in England to be murdered by the “white” IRA was a “brown” newsagent, who died in the Canary Wharf bombing.
The argument rolled on, and this is how I left it:
You’re not advocating voting Tory because of the principle of the matter. You’re calling for people to vote Tory because of your misperception of your own self-interest.
You’re a man who, in the final analysis, sees the world as “brown” and “not brown”. Isn’t this precisely what you’ve spent the last five years arguing against?
Seriously mate, have a think about this again.
Well, Sunny has now changed his mind about Davis Davis. In an article entitled Davis Davis Shows Why We Can’t Trust Tories, he says:
John Harris reports from the Conservative Party conference:
Richards asked him if there was a specifically Tory story on civil liberties, at which point he went on about poppies, Churchill, and – once again cranking up the testosterone – the supposedly unreliable ways of lefties. “If we had relied on Guardian-reading vegetarians to defend liberty,” he reckoned, “we’d all be speaking German.”
You’ll remember that last year when David Davis decided to resign from his seat to re-fight it under the banner of civil liberties – many of those same “Guardian-reading vegetarians” decided to support him because they also cared for civil liberties (me included).
Many of us on LibCon were split because a sizeable contingent were of the opinion that you can never trust a Tory. I’m afraid they have been proven right.
Davis Davis is wrong. The war was opposed, initially, not by Guardian reading veggies: but by Communists who followed the Soviet line, which was to defend the pact with Hitler, and by the mixture of pacifists and Hitler-sympathisers who made up the Peace Pledge Union. Guardian readers joined up, were conscripted, and fought alongside soldiers of Britain and the Empire of all stripes and colours.
But I do kind of get what Davis Davis is talking about. Liberty does have to be fought for, and will sometimes need to be defended at a high cost. It is foolish to think that this is not so. “Guardian reading vegetarians” is an offensive and unfortunate term – it describes Sunny – but as a metaphor, I do understand his point.
