Why do those who abuse Priti Patel get a free pass?

Remember when Labour MP Clive Lewis got into trouble for saying, ‘On your knees, bitch’? It was at a fringe event hosted by Momentum during the Labour conference in Brighton in 2017. Lewis uttered the line as a joke to the actress Sam Swann. People went nuts. Labour bigwigs accused Lewis of misogyny. He eventually ‘apologised unreservedly’ for his ‘offensive’ language.

That phrase — ‘On your knees, bitch’ — sprung back into my mind this week as I read an exchange between Alastair Campbell and Priti Patel. No, Campbell did not use the B-word. He is far too civilised for that. But he did tell Patel to get on her knees. 

In response to Patel’s Twitter condemnation of the racist abuse being sent to some of England’s black football players, Campbell issued a three-word instruction: ‘Take the knee.’

There is something a little chilling, or at least discomfiting, in this. A white man telling a woman of colour to bend her knee? It is striking that in an era in which we are constantly invited to obsess over and condemn the allegedly arrogant behaviour of white men, so few people criticised Campbell for telling an Indian-heritage woman to do something she doesn’t want to do — to subjugate herself, essentially.