Starmer: "Whatever your race or belief, your dreams can come true."
The problem with Starmer isn't just that he's away with the fairies on social mobility.
It's that he buys-in wholesale to the Tory ideology around race and social mobility. THREAD 🧵
The problem with Starmer isn't just that he's away with the fairies on social mobility.
It's that he buys-in wholesale to the Tory ideology around race and social mobility. THREAD 🧵
The rightwing answer to hard evidence on racism is that 'dreams can come true' by playing the game - and those that don't succeed only have themselves to blame. This is highly insulting to the lived experience of the vast majority of black and Asian people. 2/
Starmer's dreams are as counter-factual as the #SewellReport which sought to deny institutional racism, let alone structural/systemic racism. Yet there's no shortage of credible reports telling us social mobility isn't a thing and additional layers of racism suffered by PoC. 3/
Starmer also spouted this nonsense the at #PMQs, so either he doesn't have right advisers or, more likely, he's made the political choice to deny the realities of racism by playing the 'equal opps for everyone if you stop playing the race card' card. 4/
https://twitter.com/brolezholloway/status/1585329418884431872?s=20&t=KhLeAOmt5Zrjcr8Xug0vag
I fear Labour's lack of race policy development is deliberate. Labour say they want a "Race Equality Act" yet there's no policies to address systemic racism; just low-hanging fruit of ethnicity pay monitoring which the CBI and Theresa May support. 5/
https://twitter.com/TheVoiceNews/status/1585587561505984512
If Starmer believes "dreams can come true", why address systemic racism, or even acknowledge it exists? We've had Kemi Badenoch’s gaslighting, we don't need Starmer to tell us 'be more like these few successful black & Asian public figures and everything will be alright.' 6/
Obviously some PoC succeed despite the barriers. One or two - like Sunak - have fewer barriers due to privileged upbringing. But the real narrative is a version of the ‘strivers & skivers’ or ‘good/bad immigrant’ - it’s a way of silencing those talking about reality. 7/
And explaining away outcomes like black people being twice as likely to be unemployed & in poverty. It ignores growing wealth inequality & lack of social mobility. We expect better from Labour; we’ve seen better in recent times. Starmer needs to upgrade his ‘I have a dream’. 8/8
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