Sanity From Across the Pond on Race Relations
“What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact.”
That brilliant quote comes from one Kemi Badenoch, a conservative member of UK Parliment, who was recently highlighted on anti-CRT activist and Manhattan Institute Fellow Chris Rufo’s twitter feed.
“I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations that has come far too close to home in my life, and that’s the promotion of critical race theory, that sees my blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression… .”
Perhaps more importantly, in this clip, Badenoch speaks about the “statutory duty” of schools in the UK to remain politically neutral but then choosing to support the overtly political, international, “anti-capitalist” Black Lives Matter group.
“Black lives matter, of course they do. But we know that the Black Lives Matter, capital BLM, is political,” Badenoch says.
Apparently the UK, like the U.S., has seen a share of white liberal BLM activists calling black citizens who do not share their support for the Marxist-aligned group the always objectionable n-word.
Badenoch, who has recently seen a rise in popularity within the Tory Party, has a chance to replace Boris Johnson using the culture war as part of her platform. But, reading her leadership plans, American conservatives may see much more of what they support as well. Badenoch sounds postively Thatcherish, albeit updated for a digital age.
Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has put herself forward as a candidate to become the new prime minister, promising “limited government” and “a focus on the essentials”.
The MP for Saffron Walden said she supported lower taxes “to boost growth and productivity, and accompanied by tight spending discipline”.
Writing in The Times, she also hit out at “identity politics” and said Boris Johnson was “a symptom of the problems we face, not the cause of them”.
“People are exhausted by platitudes and empty rhetoric. Loving our country, our people or our party is not enough,” she said.
“What’s missing is an intellectual grasp of what is required to run the country in an era of increased polarisation, protectionism and populism amplified by social media.”
She said governing Britain today requires “a nimble centre-right vision” that “can achieve things despite entrenched opposition from a cultural establishment that will not accept that the world has moved on from Blairism”.
Badenoch’s nod toward the problem of schools’ embrace of divisive ideologies such as BLM and CRT should also attract American conservative admiration as that support, as well as a prolonged insistence on COVID lockdown measure for schoolchildren, is largely blamed for what looks to be a tanking of support for the publc school system in the U.S.
Americans’ confidence in the US public school system has fallen nearly to the all-time low of 26% recorded in 2014, according to a poll released Thursday that also found the gap between the faith Democrats and Republicans have in the system has expanded.
Overall, 28% of Americans say they have a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the country’s school systems, barely beating the record low from 2014, a Gallup poll shows.
Trust has been on a downward slide since it hit a high of 62% in 1975 but rebounded slightly to 41% in 2020 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.
The rate then plummeted to 32% in 2021 and 28% in 2022.
The survey also indicated the stark political divide between parties — with 43% of Democrats saying they have confidence in the system compared to only 14% of Republicans.
…
The poll suggests the recent controversy over the teaching of critical race theory in public schools — which played a crucial role in Virginia’s gubernatorial election in 2021 — as fueling the divisions.
The poll also indicated that Republicans’ displeasure with the education system has widened dramatically since 2020.
In any event, with the Democrat president’s polling in the toilet, American conservatives hope to make gains in Congress during the 2022 midterm elections and debate has already begun concerning the best candidate to defeat progressives in the 2024 general. Should they succeed, there’s no doubt that having strong conservatives like Badenoch in leadership positions in the UK would be a happy circumstance, indeed.
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