Missold on White Privilege

(Photograph: Senedd Cymru – Welsh Parliament, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

With the fêted election of Vaughan Gething as Wales’ First Minister (Europe’s first black head of government incidentally), the British Isles is now exclusively run by those of non-white heritage. And ‘didn’t they do well?!’, as Bruce Forsyth used to say. Rishi’s maxed out your grandchildren’s’ credit cards, so they won’t have to; Sadiq’s managed not to get stabbed after eight years in London (no mean feat); Leo Varadkar (yes I know he’s on his way out, but humour me) made it clear that the only thing worse than five-year-olds being stabbed in Dublin was the bastard locals taking it the wrong way; and Humza – a man whose every syllable is an abomination, has just criminalised ‘hate’ north of the border.

Raise your glasses please then ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it one more time for ‘vibrant diversity’; the Monopoly set is complete. It’s ‘decolonisation’ by colonisation: the wholesale takeover of white nations by (to use the ghastly expression de nos jours) ‘people of colour’. Everyone’s happy now, and we can finally put nonsense terms like ‘white privilege’ to bed, right? No, it would appear not.

There are those on the other side of the political aisle mysteriously unwilling to put down their victim statuses just yet. Take former Chief Prosecutor Nazir Afzal, for whom the decolonisation of Britain does not go nearly far enough. In an extraordinary statement following the election of Gething, he tweeted the following: https://x.com/nazirafzal/status/1768951785534767521?s=20

His message appeared a little cryptic to me, so I enquired as to what he meant exactly – was he celebrating the overrepresentation of non-whites, the non-representation of whites, or simply claiming that whites had no right to representation in the first place? Understandably perhaps, he didn’t deign to reply – possibly my ‘white gaze’ was too strong. Nonetheless, the language matters:

There are now no white men leading the countries of the United Kingdom. Representation matters, actions matter more.

While I am perfectly willing (and hoping) to be corrected in my assumption, I believe Afzal is claiming that 100% representation is not enough, because the actions of institutions and society as a whole are still unequal. He may well be right about that, and indeed that the war on whiteness (specifically, white masculinity) is not yet over – but one has to ask, precisely how much more does he / they want?

Whites are performing poorly; if they are indeed ‘privileged’, they are performing lamentably. White, working-class boys (that’s the mythical ‘patriarchy’ by the way) are the worst performing educational demographic in Britain. White Brits are out-earned to the tune of £10,000 per annum by their Chinese and Indian counterparts – how’s that for a genuine pay gap? And white Brits actively seeking employment anywhere from the BBC to the police or the Armed Forces, may find their skin colour and their gender offset any aptitude they might have shown at interview.

Whites are the only group it is acceptable (if not mandatory) to discriminate against in Britain. Our children are denied access to education; young, white men are the ‘most derided group’ in society according to YouGov, and any whites complaining about such ‘hate speech’ are routinely ignored by the police. There is one body still willing to take us on thankfully – the Sentencing Council for England and Wales, who are more than happy to jail us seeing as they’ve given up jailing anyone else.

Whites are also the only group society is actively engaged in erasing: historically, culturally, and even in terms of present visibility. Not only is anything white ‘too white’, but ‘Whiteness’ itself is now routinely spoken about in terms of a disease. Less interested in ecclesiastical matters of late, the Church of England is leading the charge on this one, with Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, recently declaring: “Let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy.” Yes, let’s do that – it sounds just like what Jesus would have wanted!

‘Anti-racism’ meanwhile appears to be little more than code for ‘anti-white’, and the veneer of disguise is eroding by the day. Consider the attitude of the media with these commonplace headlines:

‘I chose not to have children, because they’d be white’ 

‘We tend to empathize with our online avatars. So let’s get rid of white emojis’

‘Can my children be friends with white people?’

The practise has even spread to white people themselves, who seem to feel the only way to ‘play’ diversity, is to self-flagellate in public. Consider Eminem’s famous musing in his track ‘Untouchable’, “And I admit, there have been times where it’s been embarrassing to be a white boy”; Matthew Parris’s slightly more direct stance: “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be a whitey”; and Rosanna Arquette’s blunt confession to feeling “so much shame over being white”.

The non-white makeup of the leaders of the United Kingdom is naturally a newsworthy story. If those who spent the past few decades bewailing a paucity of representation wish to inform us however, that such a story does not require a correction of the narrative, then I humbly suggest we are in the territory of ‘non-white privilege’.

As for the notion of ‘white privilege’ itself, I can’t help thinking back to the PPI scandal and all those missold policies. If you or anyone you know may have been missold your white privilege, perhaps you should put in for compensation? How about the Church of England raids its £1billion slavery reparations pot, and puts the money to better use?

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West, and writes a Substack here.

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