When everything is ‘racist’, nothing is

Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get back the whirlpool bath she charged us on her parliamentary expenses. But the officers skipped the boot and went straight to the passenger side, where they found the member for Brent Central recording them with her phone and looking pleased as punch to audition as the new Rosa Parks.

As it happens, the footage she released showed the police being deeply polite, and they subsequently explained that the pull-over had been due to a registration-plate mix-up. But Butler claimed it was a case of the dreaded ‘stop-and-search’ and within hours she was on Channel 4 News, being grilled by one of their crack interviewers.

Fatima Manji asked Butler how such a thing could happen to someone who a day earlier had been ‘declared one of the 25 most inspirational women in Britain’ by Vogue magazine. The questions on Channel 4 News seem to have got easier since I last went on. A smiling Butler explained that this was all par for the course for an ‘African-Caribbean woman’. She then claimed that the Met Police is ‘institutionally racist’ and that Cressida Dick ‘should spend all of her waking moments trying to eradicate institutionally [sic] racism from the Met Police’.

A day earlier, a black teenager had been macheted to death in broad daylight in front of shoppers on London’s Oxford Street. Three men aged 18 were arrested after arriving at hospital with stab wounds of their own. What normally happens at this stage is that politicians and pundits debate the utility of stop-and-search. Some people say that stop-and-search saves young black lives. Others — like Dawn Butler — declare that stop-and-search is racist because it disproportionately targets people of the racial background who disproportionately do the stabbing.