The very public row between Katharine Birbalsingh, a right-wing, black secondary school headteacher, and Labour MP Jess Phillips, will be entertaining sexists who are always on the lookout for a good cat fight. The rest of us need to be more grown up and understand how this “spat” has exposed the hypocrisies and bad faith of those who incant free speech slogans while ceaselessly attacking “wokery”, feminism, anti-racism, and campaigns for justice and equality.
But first, here are some useful facts that may already be lost in the storm that broke out this weekend and is still gusting. Ms Birbalsingh runs the high-performing Michaela Community School in Wembley, north-west London, and became known as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”.
In May, Ms Birbalsingh, apparently inadvertently, tweeted a picture of Tina Turner with her abusive ex-husband Ike Turner with the caption “good times”. Ms Phillips, shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, responded on Twitter: “Hold the line! Stay with me! Domestic violence is never OK, and we will defeat those who prop up the status quo.” It was an overwrought reaction.
Now, in an open letter to Sir Keir Starmer, Ms Birbalsingh accuses Ms Phillips of “racist and bullying behaviour”; of “seeking to whip up a social media mob” against her; and of “a deliberative attempt” to challenge her competency as a headteacher. She claimed Phillips had tweeted “You are no Asian”, though now admits she misread the word, which was in fact “Aslan” – as in the lion from CS Lewis’s Narnia books.
The MP never referred to her race, but Ms Birbalsingh believes “Ms Phillips’s extreme and unprompted hostility towards me is motivated by my race… Her behaviour is a clear example of ‘unconscious bias’. I mean that she hates me, despite not knowing me, because she subscribes to the idea that Black and Asian individuals in public life owe a duty to voice opinions that match with a left-wing view of the world, or they are worthy of her contempt.”
She said she would report Ms Phillips to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
Now let me share some previous statements by the wounded complainant given to Spiked in 2020: “What we do not want to do is to encourage our children to be victims… yes, there are obstacles, yes, there is racism, but the way to succeed is to find a way to jump over those obstacles, not to sit and complain that life is hard… I want kids to take control of their lives, and victimhood does not help anybody.”
A month later on Twitter, she proclaimed that unconscious bias training was “nonsense”. Appointed social mobility tsar, she quit, explaining: “I come with too much baggage.”
That baggage includes a whole toolkit to bait lefties and egalitarians. Last September, she invited the Canadian professor Jordan Peterson to her school. The professor promotes highly contentious ideas about masculinity and feminism. Is this free speech? Or indoctrination and provocation? Would she invite Jeremy Corbyn to her school?
Ms Birbalsingh herself is of no interest to me. She matters because, as I write above, she epitomises to me the hypocrisies of anti-left culture warriors. Piers Morgan is, arguably, the most brazen of them. The man proclaims free speech as fervently as a religious fundamentalist yet is unforgiving of those who question his often pathetic and foolish obsessions.
When she was culture secretary, Nadine Dorries used to whinge that social media had been “hijacked” by left-wingers and that people like her were “afraid” of expressing their views. Yeah right. Ofcom has just launched investigations into right-wing TV channels GB News and TalkTV over impartiality rules. It is, at long last, attempting to regulate television channels that employ serving politicians as presenters. It should go further. These hives of right-wing propaganda promulgated by ideologues go unchecked, while the BBC and Channel 4 are relentlessly pursued for alleged biases.
Then there are our deeply conservative newspapers that produce sensationalist, daily doses of anti-progressive vitriol. Britons are thereby so thoroughly brainwashed that they think “woke” is a swearword, and that immigration and human rights conventions are communist plots to eradicate the West (the latter turned into a heated argument between me and some pub bores in Barnes).
Last December, American columnist Kali Holloway wrote excoriatingly in the Daily Beast about so-called “freethinkers who see themselves as valiant truth-tellers in a time of overwhelming leftist wokeism… They claim that left-wing overreach has quashed new ideas and open debate, and many of them profess to be one-time liberals who did not defect from the left, but were instead left behind by a movement gone off the rails and now careening toward a cliff built on meaningless politically correct terminology and safe space obsessions.
“They have proclaimed themselves victims – no, wait, martyrs – of an all-powerful censorious and illiberal left that controls the universities, the media, the social media platforms, and Hollywood, demanding unthinking, lockstep ideological agreement. Worse, they say, this cabal punishes those who disagree by banishing them to the fringes of society, turning them into friendless and untouchable political lepers… It’s all such bulls**t.”
Brilliant and exact. Ms Birbalsingh and her anti-woke brethren will carry on dividing Britons. Sadly, millions have blind faith and nothing will make them turn away from the false prophets and seek the light. But the rational and canny among us have a duty to speak up and call them out.
