The risk of feigning outrage over social justice causes such as racial equality is that progress gained can suddenly become progress lost.
From Little Britain and Fawlty Towers to Coco Pops and Uncle Ben’s rice, nothing is immune from the howling cries of the far left, who these days are ostensibly either consumed by 'white guilt' or found competing for victimhood.
Their latest pursuit involves calling-out well-known brands whilst simultaneously labelling them ‘racist’. They have taken it upon themselves to police products as self-appointed arbiters of correct consumerism. Rest assured, their claims of lifelong anti-racism and expertise in social justice now extends to what we should buy and what we should boycott.
Keir Starmer has been harnessing his inner social justice warrior since his Labour leadership win in April. He is learning not only how to cry wolf himself but also how to kneel, on command, to the calls and cries of others. "Did you get what you want?" he can be heard to pleadingly ask the photographer. But it's not only his knees that have lost all sensation - the British public are becoming numb to the far left exploiting anything and everything that has a pulse and a vulnerability.
Politicians aren't the only ones who should bear the brunt of responsibility for such nocuous virtue-signalling. Consumer brands such as Skittles are vying for public approval - either you Taste the Rainbow or you're considered a homophobe. Yorkshire Tea and PG Tips are prime examples. Champagne socialist and Labour Party political weathervane Owen Jones declared on Twitter that he was leaving PG Tips for Yorkshire Tea. The reason? Yorkshire Tea had publicly announced their support for the political organisation Black Lives Matter (and in no way an attempt to exploit a social movement). PG Tips were having none of it, however. Immediately, they began bidding for his approval whilst positioning themselves as the comrade's preferred teabag, leaving Jones spoilt for choice. I suspect he's never felt so flattered. Tea bags aren't as racist as it might once have appeared.
Whilst the Labour membership had anti-racist teabags covered, Labour MPs had embarked on a far more deadly endeavour: exposing the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. If there's one thing the Labour Party detests, it's those who refuse to submit themselves to the socialist cause as identity politics lab rats. You cannot possess what they consider to be a vulnerability whilst also failing to wag your finger about in a rage. Or worse still, be a member of a political party other than the Labour Party. Priti Patel has fallen fowl of this Labour Party commandment - thou shalt not be of ethnic minority heritage whilst unaffiliated with the Labour Party. In the House of Commons earlier this month, Priti Patel fought back. "Well, on that basis, it must have been a very different Home Secretary who as a child was frequently called a P*** in the playground, a very different Home Secretary who was racially abused in the streets or even advised to drop her surname and use her husband's in order to advance her career" she retorted. The Labour Party BAME cabal were furious. It was written all over their faces: how could it be the case that a person of minority ethnic heritage did not wish to take authority from the Labour Party on their own ethnic heritage? How dare the Home Secretary make such comments as a strong and independent woman unshackled from identity politics in the presence of 'authentic' minority ethnicity? This - the House of Commons - was the Labour Party's designated social justice 'safe space'.
In a fit of rage the incensed Labour MPs penned a ‘scathing‘ letter to the Home Secretary. Comrade-in-Chief, Diane Abbott, along with her identity politics protégées Naz Shah, Florence Eshalomi and Rosena Allin-Khan, judged that Patel as a person of colour does not automatically make her 'an authority on all forms of racism'. The letter concluded by summoning the Home Secretary to the Labour Party naughty step, where she would stay until confronting her own 'failings' for having strived for and achieved success as a strong and self-sufficient woman of minority ethnicity.
Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has also been on an expedition to the land of political expediency and exploitation. Kahn, who has a City Hall budget of £17bn, has ramped up his publicity campaigns since having to seek a financial injection for TfL to the tune of £1.6bn from central government. Instead of taking responsibility for his chronic mismanagement of London, he bemoans the fare rises and increases in charges that ordinary Londoners are now saddled with whilst detaching himself from his disastrous mayoralty as if he were a mere bystander having played no role at all. His go-to excuse used to be Brexit - specifically a no-deal Brexit. In the face of growing crime in London, and under scrutiny from the GLA, he had declared that "criminals want there to be a no-deal Brexit". More recently, he has been itching at every opportunity to insist everyone is informed that London is Open. The propaganda machine hasn't stopped. The slogan appears everywhere; from buses, bus-stops and underground stations to street banners and sickly-slick social media posts. And, just like the entirety of the Labour Party membership, he has clearly received the memo on race exploitation. If there's one thing that can be said of Sadiq, he certainly knows how to flog a horse - dead or alive. It now appears he is on a mission to expose anyone who doesn't share his socialism via anarchism approach to running a major capital city, as racist. The statue of Edward Colston had barely skimmed the surface of the water in Bristol Harbour before Kahn was commissioning the tearing down of monuments and statues. Before we knew it, in a fit of wokism, Khan had hoisted the statue of Robert Milligan off its plinth and vowed to review everything from street names to names of public buildings.
There is one problem with going to such lengths. Those who have long committed to racial equality, and those who I believe to be the vast majority of the British public, feel that British culture and heritage is being dismantled before their very eyes. They have had enough of the snowflakes and enough of virtue-signalling politicians. They will only suffer so much before they demand public institutions take back control from the guilt-ridden, white, liberal establishment. Take Back Control, Cumming's Vote Leave slogan and mantra seems lost to a Tory government obsessed with appeasing the wokest among both them and the rest of the political class. But whilst Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings plot and scheme to retain former Labour voters and usurp the last gasp of a party afflicted by an internal identity crisis, the public grow tired of them all. Every single one.