Labour’s David Lammy MP has shared song lyrics describing the “shame” of being a white male, and the “evil” of their “ancestry”.
“Deep lyrics just dropped by Sam Fender,” tweeted the former Minister of State for Culture, quoting the following excerpt from the BBC-endorsed singer-songwriter’s ‘White Privilege’ track:
“The patriarchy is real, the proof is here in my song. I’ll sit and mansplain every detail of the things it does wrong
‘Cause I’m a white male, full of shame
My ancestry is evil, and their evil is still not gone”
The Labour MP, who was born in London to Guyanese migrants, capped the excerpt with an emoji of a black fist punching to the right.
The song also appears to take aim at Brexit, with the lines “Don’t wanna hear about Brexit, them old c***s f***ked up our exit, My generation was duped, the youth were left out of the loop”.
Lammy was distraught by the vote to Leave the European Union, becoming one of the first parliamentarians to agitate for the “advisory, non-binding” referendum not to be re-run but simply cancelled outright by MPs, pleading: “Wake up. We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness through a vote in Parliament.”
Lammy’s seeming endorsement of the song’s sentiments was challenged by BBC interrogator-in-chief Andrew Neil — one of the few senior journalists at the publicly-funded broadcaster with a background in right-leaning journalism — asking: “So let me get this right, David: all white people have an evil ancestry and, as a consequence, are still evil?”
Lammy did not respond to Neil directly, but the lyrics received a defence of sorts from Jonathan Lis of British Influence, an anti-Brexit pressure group once spearheaded by Peter Mandelson and Ken Clarke, who suggested that “The lyric presumably refers to the evil of white supremacy which produced the slave trade and colonialism and is alive and well to this day.”
“So where do white people enslave others today? And in the past were white supremicists [sic] the only enslavers and colonisers?” Neil replied.
In fact, the British Empire played a key role in ending Atlantic slave trade, abolishing it not just domestically but arming a Royal Navy squadron to put a stop to it internationally, at signifcant cost in both money and lives.
Britain also played a key role in putting down the centuries-old North African slave trade in European Christians — including Britons who were captured both at sea and in raids on the British coast — and in curbing the extensive but little-remarked predations of Arab slavers in East Africa.
Lammy has long worn in his racial identity politics on his sleeve, telling the Observer — sister paper to the Guardian — in 2017: “I don’t care which branch of the Islington mafia is running the Labour Party… People used to ask, [Tony] Blair or [Gordon] Brown? I would say no, just black. That is who I am.”
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