CONSERVATIVE boasts of the most diverse Cabinet yet — with none of the four “great offices of state” now held by a white man — pose a dilemma for the left.
They must prompt a return to class politics — not because racial and sex-based oppression no longer exist, but because they operate in the context of class society and only through this can we understand and thus resist racist and sexist oppression from a government with women and black people at the helm.
At the same time, only by a serious effort to address racism and sexism on the left do we stand a chance of being taken seriously as champions of race and sex equality.
From a class perspective, Liz Truss’s Cabinet is as elite as they come: 23 of its 31 posts have gone to the privately educated.
This reflects Britain’s position as one of the most multiracial societies in Europe, but also one of the most stratified by class inequality — as well as the way the City of London’s status as a hub of world finance has created an ethnically mixed capitalist elite.
Though women and ethnic minority members of the wealthy elite certainly encounter sexist and racist prejudice, they are far less affected by sexist and racist oppression in a Marxist sense, expressed through super-exploitation of their labour (identifiable through segregated labour markets, lower wages and unwaged labour prescribed by gender role).
Increasing the number of women or black people in boardrooms (or round Cabinet tables) has not evened out the income distribution. Office for National Statistics data show black British workers still earn nearly 10 per cent less than white workers, while the pay gap between women and men has actually widened in recent years.
We have also seen that installing a woman of south Asian origin as home secretary does not interfere at all with the government’s pursuit of a “hostile environment” for immigrants.
It’s key that women and black people are empowered in leading positions, but also that the policies implemented address the oppression they face.
A tokenistic approach based solely on elevating individuals does not liberate working-class women or black people.
The left needs to focus on combatting oppression, by raising pay and removing barriers which entrench social segregation by sex and race.
It cannot do that without the active leadership of women and black people in the process.
For Labour, it is a real problem that the Tories have had three female leaders and it has had none. That the Tory front bench is more ethnically diverse than its own.
The Labour right does not take this problem seriously. That can be seen by the opportunistic way it is periodically deployed: with plenty of liberal pundits and MPs saying the left should support Yvette Cooper against Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 to give the party its first female leader, for example, but none making that argument against Keir Starmer in 2020.
Confronted with genuine, shocking evidence of anti-black racism pervading Labour HQ — detailed in the Forde report — Labour’s current leadership has done nothing and promised nothing. It does not care.
Nor has Labour shown much inclination to listen to women’s concerns over threats to sex-based rights or women’s spaces.
This is not a party that can challenge Tory tokenism on race and sex with a serious anti-racist, anti-sexist programme, and it won’t be until its highly individualist approach to equalities is replaced by a collectivist one that recognises the links between oppression and the class system.
The decline of class politics has stripped movements against oppression of their revolutionary character over decades. In the process “diversity” has become a badge used by some of the most ruthless corporations — and governments — on Earth to whitewash their crimes.
Only a politics of liberation, necessarily anti-capitalist, will break the chains.
