You know how it is. You\u2019re a middle class, straight white man in his 60s in A&E. Possibly the most disadvantaged person in the entire country. You complain of chest pains. In the adjoining triage queue there is a black woman with what looks like a broken toe. You know what happens next. The black woman is seen within minutes. You have a cardiac arrest on the waiting room floor.<\/p>\n
Said no one ever. There may be times when there simply aren\u2019t enough staff in the A&E department. There may also be times when a doctor under pressure fails to make the right diagnosis. But no one for a minute believes they are being deliberately kept waiting any longer than necessary. The founding principle of the NHS is predicated on patients being treated according to the severity of their condition.<\/p>\n
Just not in Kemi world. The Tory leader sees danger in every decision. Not that NHS staff will deliberately try to kill off elderly, white males. Just that they\u2019ve been through so many unconscious bias training sessions that they have transferred their unconscious bias to a different group of people. It\u2019s the quantity theory of bias. There\u2019s a certain amount to go round and if you shift it from one person it merely reattaches itself to another. The only way to eliminate unconscious bias is to decide it no longer exists. Replace it with \u201ccommon sense\u201d. Job done.<\/p>\n
When politicians start talking about \u201ccommon sense\u201d solutions, it\u2019s usually time to start worrying. When Kemi Badenoch<\/a> starts doing it, you need to be doubly vigilant. She has form for this kind of thing. One moment sounding almost reasonable, the next contradicting herself while going off on one.<\/p>\n Generally speaking, making policy on the basis of a few cases where mistakes were undeniably made is a recipe for disaster. Yet for Kemi it seems to be the only way of making policy. And her party loves her for it. Though her polls remain dismal, more and more Tory MPs worship at her feet. It remains one of life\u2019s more eternal mysteries.<\/p>\n Kemi was in a small room at the Institute for Government in Westminster for her latest keynote speech. The latest in an ongoing series. This one was to meet equalities legislation head on. Top line? There was way too much of it. She didn\u2019t want to sound complacent \u2026 but she couldn\u2019t help sounding complacent.<\/p>\n You couldn\u2019t argue with her assertion that everyone should be treated equally. But you could raise a few eyebrows that we had already done far too much to make life more tolerable for minorities and we had now reached a point where to be a white person was to be a potential victim. Police<\/a> forces had spent too long thinking of institutional racism that they were now in danger of becoming racist against white people.<\/p>\n As a society, we may have been racist once, but we\u2019ve all moved on. \u201cBritain is the least racist country in the world,\u201d Kemi said. Really? If so, then the bar is quite low. She appears not to have noticed the growing support for Restore and Reform\u2019s increasingly far-right brand of populism. Maybe she\u2019s been too busy making sure her party tracks right with them. Like boiling frogs.<\/p>\n Weirdly, though, Kemi wanted to have things both way. To say that we weren\u2019t racist while implying the police who had attended the scene of Henry Nowak\u2019s murder were guilty of unconscious racist bias against him. Despite the judge having specifically ruled this out in his sentencing notes. There again, Kemi has never come across a situation where she doesn\u2019t know best. And far be it from her to use a young man\u2019s murder for her own political ends \u2013 she would never do that because Henry\u2019s father had asked politicians not to do so \u2013 but please excuse her for making political capital out of his death.<\/p>\n Once again we were disappearing down the rabbit holes of what passes for Kemi\u2019s brain. Because in her mind, it is quite clear what happened. The police came to the scene of the crime, saw that Henry was dying and then deliberately chose to attend first to the Digwa brothers. Because they had been trained to prioritise racism over a fatal stabbing. It was all quite mad. No consideration that it was a dark December night and the police might have made a terrible mistake.<\/p>\n