Isn’t it wonderful how all of the woke guidelines for find out how to discuss girls and folks of color go flying out the window in relation to Priti Patel? You may say something you want about Patel and the PC set gained’t bat an eyelid. The truth is they may cheer you on. Patel is presumably the one feminine, Asian-heritage public determine within the UK who enjoys completely not one of the protections of political correctness. It’s at all times open season on Priti.
So for years we have now been advised that we shouldn’t name profitable girls ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. These are sexist insults in opposition to girls who’ve merely proven the form of resolve and dedication that males are celebrated for, feminists say. And so they have a degree. However this rule in opposition to calling highly effective girls bitches by no means applies to Patel. She is consistently depicted as ruthless and scheming.
Witness the newest claims about her ‘bullying’. Apparently she has been bullying the poor previous blokes within the civil service. In response to insider reviews on Patel’s numerous reigns of terror in authorities departments, her bullying has included strutting out of her workplace and bellowing: ‘Why is everybody so fucking ineffective?’ Which, to be sincere, is precisely what I’d say if I ever had an viewers with our more and more sclerotic civil service.
This isn’t bullying. It’s the particular person in cost demanding some solutions. There’s something faintly tragic about the best way during which high-pressure work conditions are more and more being redefined as ‘bullying’, to the extent that even seasoned civil servants are blubbing into their macchiatos over getting a bollocking from the boss.
The view of Patel as a sharp-elbowed schemer, a ruthless invader of a world she doesn’t actually belong in (hmm, attention-grabbing), can also be captured within the obsession with what’s known as Patel’s ‘smirk’. Who can neglect Andrew Marr reprimanding Patel stay on air for laughing throughout a dialogue of the apparently horrible penalties of a no-deal Brexit, when she clearly wasn’t laughing in any respect: her resting face is solely a smile. If Marr had so ungraciously upbraided another feminine politician for exhibiting disrespect, there would have been uproar. However not with Patel. Say what you want.
The unfairness that Patel is a nasty smirker, a form of smiling witch, lives on. This weekend, the Guardian’s Marina Hyde referred to her because the ‘perma-smirking’ house secretary. I’m not being humorous, however for Hyde to criticise others for smirking is reasonably like Elton John criticising individuals for being spendthrifts. Aren’t Hyde’s columns actually simply 1,000-word smirks?
Extra strikingly, Hyde refers to Patel as ‘madam’. Oof. This captures one of many key liberal-elite prejudices about Patel: that she actually thinks she’s one thing. That she has concepts, or at the very least mannerisms, above her station. I actually hope they don’t go any additional down this essential route particularly.
After which there’s the race factor. One good rule of political life is that you simply shouldn’t concentrate on a person’s race or heritage. As an alternative, you must decide them by what they imagine and what they do. But even this civilised, post-racial preferrred will get brushed apart the place Patel is worried.
Within the Guardian, Kehinde Andrews said Patel is solely considered one of Boris’s ‘ministers with brown pores and skin carrying Tory masks’. What a convoluted method to say Uncle Tom. A author for the Huffington Put up says Patel is being ‘used as a pawn in white supremacy’. This totally denudes Patel of her company, lowering her to an unwitting stooge in a grand scheme she doesn’t actually perceive.
Musa Okwonga describes Patel as a ‘racial gatekeeper’ who acts as the general public face of ‘a bunch of white individuals with racially regressive views’. Most shockingly of all, Cambridge tutorial Priyamvada Gopal suggests Patel is a product of ‘cultural eugenics’, in that she is ‘Indian in blood and color’ however English in each different respect.
Some individuals would possibly check with that as profitable integration. Not the Patel-bashers. To them it’s a species of eugenics, and Patel — being so eager to please her white masters — is its most profitable product. That is actually ugly stuff.
The double requirements within the woke foyer might be glimpsed if we take into consideration their response to a number of the horrible issues which have been mentioned about Diane Abbott. There are some idiots on the web who don’t solely criticise Abbott’s political beliefs — which is totally nice — however who view her as a stooge of white socialist males or who obsess over her pores and skin color and her ‘madam’-like tendencies (posh voice, and so on). And leftish commentators have rightly known as that stuff out.
And but now they do the exact same to Patel. They scale back her to her pores and skin color. They depict her as dumb. They trace that she is a bitch, or at the very least a bully. There’s an undeniably sexist and even racist part to the obsession with the depraved, smirking nasty lady within the Residence Workplace.
Some on the left appear to…