Labour’s Dawn Butler MP has thanked God “for BLM”, saying the Marxist race movement has emboldened her to “use the term white supremacy” without fear.
Butler, who was briefly a government minister under then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and served as Shadow Minister for Diversity and then Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities under hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, made the comments in an interview with Make It Plain, an arm of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity which styles itself as the “home of radical Black thought”.
“I always think ‘Thank God for BLM’,” Butler said in an interview published by the organisation, alongside articles on “Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas” and the “Psychosis of whiteness”.
The politician claimed that “I never even used to use the term white supremacy because I was almost scared of using it” before Black Lives Matter took to the streets of Britain, largely unimpeded despite an otherwise stringently enforced anti-coronavirus lockdown, in 2020.
Much of Butler’s interview was focused on Olukemi ‘Kemi’ Badenoch, the Conservative MP and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Equalities who is, like Butler, a black woman, but not, unlike Butler, a proponent of racial identity politics.
The pair have previously clashed in the House of Commons, with Butler suggesting that people like Badenoch amount to “racial gatekeepers” by disputing the leftist conventional wisdom on concepts like “white privilege” and “systemic” of “institutional” racism.
“It’s sadly nothing new. Every generation will have a Kemi…. even back in the day during colonialism …there was a Kemi there… it’s all about how we tackle it,” Butler told Make It Plain.
Despite her claim to have been energised in her race activism by the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020, Butler does in fact have a fairly long record of pushing identity politics, for example by declaring that banks and businesses “must” pay reparations for slavery at a party conference in 2019.
She also the subject of some mockery in 2018 when she took aim at TV chef Jamie Oliver for releasing a line of “punchy jerk rice”, branding the white celebrity’s product “not ok” and “[cultural] appropriation from Jamaica”. Butler was born in the London Borough of Newham.
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