Britain’s finance minister is only “superficially” black because he went to a good private school and “you wouldn’t know” his ethnic identity from hearing him on the radio are among the racist claims that have seen a prominent left-wing MP suspended from her party today.
Labour MP Rupa Huq was suspended by her party after demands for such gained traction on Tuesday after leaked audio emerged of her attacking the UK’s Chancellor for the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, over his race.
Huq is reported as making the comments at a Labour Party conference event about race which was held on Monday, which have since been lambasted as exemplifying “racist tropes”.
In the recording released by Westminster gossip blog Guido Fawkes, Huq can be seemingly heard arguing that Kwarteng does not sound like a black man when interviewed.
“He’s superficially a black man,” the Labour party politician said. “But… he went to Eton [College], he went to a very expensive prep school, all the way through, the top schools in the country.”
“If you hear him on the Today [radio] programme, you wouldn’t know he’s black,” she went on to say.
The site then reports that the event’s chair, Sunder Katwala, then intervened, emphasizing that Kwarteng being a conservative does not make him “not black”, before arguing that the Labour Party needed to be “careful” with such statements.
Evidently the hardline Corbynite MP was insufficiently careful on this occasion, however, as according to The Guardian Huq has now been suspended by her party.
Those expressing concern over Huq’s implication that race is linked to politics and that racial identity can be stripped away for having the wrong politics or life experiences includes Anglican priest and political pundit Calvin Robinson, who told Breitbart London that Huq’s statements exemplified “racist tropes which are increasingly popular amongst the hard-Left” that “a person’s skin colour should determine their thought process, their politics and their opinions”.
“If the Labour Party truly wants to shed its image of being a racist party — after the now infamous EHCR ruling — they should remove the whip from Huq and suspend her from the party with immediate effect,” Robinson said, arguing that there “should be no place for racism in British politics”.
However, before suspending the politician, the Labour Party’s response to such criticism had been otherwise rather muted, with senior leftist David Lammy only going so far as to describe the statement as “unfortunate“, before saying that he hopes “she is able to stand those comments down”.
While Huq’s statement appears to have caused a lot of outrage in Britain, as mentioned by Robinson, the basic concept of the slur is far from original, with those on the left having frequently in the past questioned someone’s minority status based on their personal politics.
Perhaps the most famous instance of this phenomenon occurred back in 2020, with then-Presidential Candidate Joe Biden claiming that any African American man who could not decide whether or not to vote for him over Trump simply was not actually black.
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” the now-President claimed during an interview with American rapper Charlamagne the God.
More recently, a senior member of New York’s Black Lives Matter movement branded the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, a “coon” over his alleged use of right-of-centre talking points.
“So, let’s get back to Eric Adams,” BLM’s Hawk Newsome said. “This mayor who’s a Democrat, but he spews conservative and Republican talking points.”
“At the end of the day, we have a name for someone like this,” he continued. “And this is someone we’d call a coon, right?”
Statements in the past from black Conservatives indicate that such occurrences are unfortunately not all that rare, with Republic Senator Tim Scott saying that he has frequently been slapped with racial slurs over his views.
“I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word — by progressives, by liberals,” the GOP politician said last year.
“A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the colour of their skin was their most important characteristic — and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior,” he continued. “Today, kids again are being taught that the colour of their skin defines them — and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”
“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country,” Scott went on to say. “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination.”
Such racial slurs are not unknown in the UK either. Black Conservative Shaun Bailey has been the subject of these attacks, with Breitbart London reporting back in 2018 that left-Twitter had said he was a “coconut”, “Uncle Tom”, and a “token ethnic”. In 2021, a left-wing academic at the UK’s Leeds Beckett University was sacked after calling Anglican Priest Calvin Robinson a “coconut”.
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