One of the things that I most abhor about the political Left is their opposition to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. It’s their way or the highway when it comes to the Left. When it comes to the Left a person is not allowed to think for themselves or have an opinion that the Left do not approve of. This is a general characteristic of the political Left that afflicts all those who come into conflict with Leftists or Leftist ideas. But when members of ethnic or sexual minorities challenge the nostrums of the Left, many Leftists behave in ways that decent people would call out as disgusting and indeed racist.

There’s a brilliant piece on the Unherd site by the well known educator Katherine Birbalsingh, the founder of the Michaela Community School in London and an advocate for the sort of intellectually vigorous education that is often opposed by the Left. In this piece Ms Birbalsingh speaks of the negative reaction that she got when she spoke at the 2010 Conservative Party conference on the subject of education and education standards. She is retelling this story in the context of how the Left is treating high profile ethnic minority conservatives. As many will by now know, the Left is up in arms about the appointment of Asian conservative and critic of multiculturalism Munira Mirza to the government’s racism commission and the continual attacks on the Home Secretary Pritti Patel by the Left. In the case of Pritti Patel the Guardian newspaper went so far as to publish a cartoon showing Patel as a ‘fat cow’ that some are seeing as anti-Hindu in nature because of the exalted religious position of cows in Hinduism.

The piece by Ms Birbalsingh entitled ‘Minority Women Can Think For Themselves’, draws a comparison between how Ms Patel and Ms Mirza are being treated by the Left and how Ms Birbalsingh has been treated by the Left. The author of this piece is bang on with her assessment of a Left that is obsessed with appearing to be non-racist whilst often failing to be actually non-racist. She condemns, quite correctly in my view, the ‘hierarchy of oppression’ that the Left use to categorise people and bears more than a passing resemblance to the sort of racial categorisation that used to occur in the slave states of the Americas and was used to classify mixed race individuals such as Quadroon for a quarter Black person and Octoroon for an eighth Black person and so on.

This ‘hierarchy of oppression’ my view is the very antithesis of being against racism as classifying people according to their inherent racial or other immutable characteristics, is in itself racist. I’ve put a short excerpt of Ms Birbalsingh’s article up below but I would strongly advise people to read it in full over at Unherd because it exposes the racism that is now a major part of the modern political Left

Ms Birbalsingh said:

The backlash against Priti Patel and Munira Mirza has been something to behold. Mirza, recently appointed to run the Government’s new Racial Inequality Review, has been described as a ‘racial gatekeeper’, among other things; Patel has been accused of ‘gaslighting’ by Labour MPs after talking about her own experiences of racism.

I feel it especially because I have something in common with Patel and Mirza: we are all ethnic minority women who do not accept the standard leftist view of racism.

In 2010, I spoke out about the state of our education system at the Conservative Party Conference, criticising the ‘culture of excuses’. For some, this was the worst thing I could do. No matter that I am not nor have ever been a member of the Conservative Party, nor that I feel passionately that we should all be floating voters, especially minority groups.

I would never be forgiven by some people, who just couldn’t understand why an ethnic minority person would have sympathy for Conservative policies. At best we’ve been hoodwinked; at worst we must just be plain evil. It often feels like we are not allowed to think for ourselves, outside of the orthodoxies set down by Left-wing political groupthink.

My experience ten years ago is why today I have the greatest sympathy for Conservative MPs like Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch. I know how I have been treated for simply being supportive of Conservative policies — heaven knows what actual Tory MPs from ethnic minorities must have to endure. Mirza has been working with the Conservative Party for many years and her simple appointment to this role has enraged her detractors. For them, a ‘good’ ethnic minority is one who always toes the leftist line.

I find very little to disagree with in Ms Birbalsingh’s piece. As someone who follows and reads the work of conservative thinkers who come from minorities whether they be racial or sexual minorities, I have seen how badly they are treated by the Left. The Left don’t really want those who they see as ‘their Blacks’, ‘their Asians’ or ‘their gays’ to leave the Leftist plantation even if it becomes plain to those from these minorities that being kept on this political plantation is the very worst thing that could happen for either them as individuals or their family or wider community.

If we aspire to a truly free society where people are judged by the Martin Luther King standard of the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, then the racialism of the Left must be rejected by everyone, no matter who we are. I’m a minority, I’m Jewish, and I’ve rejected the Leftist plantation owners that want me to walk in lockstep with them and I feel better for being free and thinking freely. If I can break the chains that the Left want me to stay in then others can and should do the same.