Priti Patel and the ugly prejudice of her critics

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Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Home Secretary Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti....

Coffee House

Priti Patel and the ugly prejudice of her critics

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill
24 February 2020
The Spectator

Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Home Secretary Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti.

So for years we have been told that we shouldn’t call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. Those are sexist insults against women who have simply shown the kind of resolve and determination that men are celebrated for, feminists say. And they have a point. But this rule against calling powerful women bitches never applies to Patel. She is constantly depicted as ruthless and scheming.

Witness the latest claims about her ‘bullying’. Apparently she has been bullying the poor old blokes in the civil service. According to insider reports on Patel’s various reigns of terror in government departments, her bullying has included strutting out of her office and bellowing: ‘Why is everyone so ****ing useless?’ Which, to be honest, is exactly what I would say if I ever had an audience with our increasingly sclerotic civil service.

This isn’t bullying. It’s the person in charge demanding some answers. There is something faintly tragic about the way in which high-pressure work situations are increasingly being redefined as ‘bullying’, to the extent that even seasoned civil servants are blubbing into their macchiatos over getting a bollocking from the boss.

The view of Patel as a sharp-elbowed schemer, a ruthless invader of a world she doesn’t really belong in (hmm, interesting), is also captured in the obsession with what is referred to as Patel’s ‘smirk’. Who can forget Andrew Marr reprimanding Patel live on air for laughing during a discussion of the apparently terrible consequences of a no-deal Brexit, when she clearly wasn’t laughing at all: her resting face is simply a smile. If Marr had so ungraciously upbraided any other female politician for showing disrespect, there would have been uproar. But not with Patel. Say what you like.

The prejudice that Patel is a nasty smirker, a kind of smiling witch, lives on. This weekend, the Guardian’s Marina Hyde referred to her as the ‘perma-smirking’ home secretary. I’m not being funny, but for Hyde to criticise others for smirking is rather like Elton John criticising people for being spendthrifts. Aren’t Hyde’s columns really just 1,000-word smirks?

More strikingly, Hyde refers to Patel as ‘madam’. Oof. This captures one of the key liberal-elite prejudices about Patel: that she really thinks she’s something. That she has ideas, or at least mannerisms, above her station. I really hope they don’t go any further down this critical route in particular.

And then there’s the race thing. One good rule of political life is that you shouldn’t focus on an individual’s race or heritage. Instead, you should judge them by what they believe and what they do. Yet even this civilised, post-racial ideal gets brushed aside where Patel is concerned.

In the Guardian, Kehinde Andrews said Patel is simply one of Boris’s ‘ministers with brown skin wearing Tory masks’. What a convoluted way to say Uncle Tom. A writer for the Huffington Post says Patel is being ‘used as a pawn in white supremacy’. This utterly denudes Patel of her agency, reducing her to an unwitting stooge in a grand scheme she doesn’t truly understand.

Musa Okwonga describes Patel as a ‘racial gatekeeper’ who acts as the public face of ‘a group of white people with racially regressive views’. Most shockingly of all, Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal suggests Patel is a product of ‘cultural eugenics’, in that she is ‘Indian in blood and colour’ but English in every other respect.

Some people might refer to that as successful integration. Not the Patel-bashers. To them it’s a species of eugenics, and Patel — being so keen to please her white masters — is its most successful product. This is really ugly stuff.

The double standards in the woke lobby can be glimpsed if we think about their reaction to some of the terrible things that have been said about Diane Abbott. There are some idiots on the internet who don’t only criticise Abbott’s political views — which is absolutely fine — but who view her as a stooge of white socialist men or who obsess over her skin colour and her ‘madam’-like tendencies (posh voice, etc). And leftish commentators have rightly called that stuff out.

And yet now they do the very same to Patel. They reduce her to her skin colour. They depict her as dumb. They hint that she is a bitch, or at least a bully. There is an undeniably sexist and even racist component to the obsession with the wicked, smirking nasty woman in the Home Office.

Some on the left seem to believe that all people of colour should share the left’s increasingly narrow, PC views, and if they don’t they are traitors. This is a demand for racial conformism, for racial groupthink. It fails to see people of colour and people of Asian heritage as individuals, with agency and autonomy, capable of deciding for themselves what political views they should hold.

Fundamentally, what these people hate about Patel is that she is taking a stand against their worldview. In being tough on crime, outspoken about terrorism, and determined to make good on the vote for Brexit, Patel grates against the beliefs and attitudes of the liberal, leftish sections of society. She is reintroducing firmness, authority and judgement into a public realm that had become riddled with relativism and moral cowardice, and they will never forgive her for that. So it’s gloves off. They’re out to get the bitch.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/priti-patel-and-the-ugly-prejudice-of-her-critics/

 

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DAN HODGES: Why does the Left hate Priti Patel so much? Because she's an Asian woman who dared make a success of herself - without asking their permission

By Dan Hodges For The Mail On Sunday
1 March 2020

Priti Patel doesn’t like to dwell on the racism she used to experience as a child. ‘She doesn’t talk about it much,’ a close friend told me.

‘But she used to get a lot of name-calling at school and when she was out with her parents. She has told me it was pretty horrible.’

That was back in the late 1970s and early 80s, and when she was appointed Home Secretary a few months ago, Patel was entitled to think such abuse was in the past. But as has just been dramatically demonstrated, if she did, she was wrong. Even before Sir Philip Rutnam’s explosive resignation, Patel was being lined up for a ritualistic, progressive punishment beating.

Priti Patel should go back to where she came from. Better yet, she should never have been allowed here in the first place. That was according to Will Straw, the former executive director of Britain Stronger in Europe.

‘At last, a compelling reason to support this policy,’ he tweeted, in response to an article headlined: ‘Home Secretary Priti Patel admits own parents may not have been allowed into UK under her new immigration laws.’

Home Secretary Priti Patel delivers a speech during the National Police Chiefs' Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners joint summit, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, in London

She is also an emotionally unhinged, self-obsessed thug. At least in the eyes of New European journalist Zoe Williams, who last week detailed ‘her tantrums, her alleged bullying and swearing, bouts of narcissistic rage in which everybody is stupid apart from her’.

Interestingly, this vitriol echoes the criticism levelled by Sir Philip, who strenuously denies any form of negative briefing against his Minister.

Worst of all, Priti Patel is from a Ugandan-Indian family. Not just anyone with an Indian background, but one who actually has the temerity to serve as a Conservative Cabinet Minister. Which as far as the in-house magazine of liberal Britain, The Guardian, is concerned, is one of the worst crimes of all. ‘How did British Indians become so prominent in the Conservative Party?’ the paper wailed last week, before commissioning Neha Shah, an ‘activist and researcher at Oxford University’ to supply the answer.

‘The old colonial tactics of divide and rule,’ Shah concluded, while adding bafflingly: ‘The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, and the three other British Indians appointed to Johnson’s Cabinet will only embolden Tory racism.’

Let’s imagine for a second if a senior member of Vote Leave had tweeted about barring a senior black or Asian Labour politician from the country. Or a journalist from a Conservative- supporting paper had used such vicious language about a female Labour Cabinet Minister. Or a Conservative- supporting newspaper produced a headline: ‘How did Muslims become so prominent in the Labour Party?’

Actually, we don’t need to imagine. As the liberal Left were queuing up to stick their hand-stitched brogues into Britain’s first female Asian-heritage Home Secretary, her opposite number Diane Abbott was announcing her own retirement from front-line politics. Abbott is a divisive figure, but I’ve always liked and respected her.

When she was elected as the first black woman MP, she represented a challenge to the political elite that was years ahead of its time.

But she also made mistakes. And when she did – and her critics highlighted them – the response from the liberal Left was instantaneous and ferocious. ‘Abuse of Diane Abbott driven by racism and misogyny, says [Chuka] Umunna’ – The Guardian. ‘Diane Abbott may be flawed. But this is bullying’ – also The Guardian. ‘Diane Abbott accuses BBC Question Time of legitimising racism – Labour MP’s spokesperson claims she was mocked and interrupted more than other panellists’ – you guessed it, The Guardian.

To be honest, I believe many of these charges are accurate. Much of the abuse Abbott received was racist and misogynistic. But if we’re going to acknowledge that, we also have to be honest about the campaign now being waged against Priti Patel – by both her enemies and those who are supposed to be her allies. People who have worked with her say she has a ‘robust’ manner. But anyone who wants to drive through change in a major department of state can’t do so without having finely chiselled elbows. And if you follow the career of any senior woman MP, the allegation that she is a bully is never far behind.

It’s worth remembering Patel is not the first Home Secretary who has fallen foul of Sir Philip. His officious and obstructive manner brought him into conflict with Amber Rudd, who also mysteriously found herself the subject of negative briefing as the Windrush crisis unfolded.

RUTNAM abandoned her during Windrush,’ a Rudd ally says. ‘He p****d off Amber and he p****d off Priti. He’s got an equal opportunities attitude towards p*****g off his Ministers.’

Patel’s critics are also wrong on a key point. Her parents wouldn’t have been stopped from entering the UK under her new immigration proposals, because they were Indian Ugandans escaping the regime of a man who used to boast about eating the flesh of opponents. They weren’t coming to the UK as economic migrants, but fleeing for their lives.

Home Secretary Priti Patel arrives at the National Police Chiefs' Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners joint summit, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, in London

Yet strangely, Patel’s enemies don’t feel encumbered by these facts. Remember the woke brigade’s instruction to those of us that haven’t shared the ‘lived experience’ of Britain’s migrant communities that we must ‘check our privilege’ before passing comment. Well, don’t worry, because so long as it’s a black or Asian Conservative Cabinet Minister you’re attacking, you get a pass.

In fact, they don’t have to be a Cabinet Minister or an MP at all. As The Guardian demonstrates, you can dismiss hundreds of thousands of first and second generation migrants as John Bull’s patsies just for daring to support a party that isn’t Labour. And this is what actually lies at the heart of the attacks being launched against Priti Patel. Yes, much of it is underpinned by racism or sexism. But even more, it’s the product of liberal Britain’s seething resentment at anyone of colour who makes a success of themselves without asking permission first.

‘Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and minority ethnic people,’ Jeremy Corbyn boasted before the Election. But Priti Patel didn’t want or need his help. And that’s something the modern missionaries of the liberal Left simply cannot forgive. Because if she can succeed without their patronising beneficence, so can anyone else.

‘I can’t see why you’re laughing,’ Andrew Marr famously taunted Patel, before he and the BBC were forced into a grovelling apology. I can. Priti Patel will continue to laugh defiantly in the faces of the racists and the sexists and the entitled liberals and the usurped Sir Humphries. Let’s hope she has the last laugh.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8060925/DAN-HODGES-does-Left-hate-Priti-Patel-much.html