Minorities and Politics (and Trevor Phillips)
Am I the only who just can’t stand the ever-so-smug Trevor Phillips? He just constantly annoys me, popping up and declaring [or clearing ] any institution he chooses as effectively racist, seemingly just because he can.
His latest victim? The House of Commons, which he declares “an outstanding example of racial, gender and disability exclusion”.
Whilst the Commons may be “white, straight and male,” that is hardly a problem in and of itself. Parliament does not need to be a mirror image of society in order to represent it properly. What it needs to do is listen to what the people are saying.
Straight white men can perfectly well represent black gay women, and vice versa. That the Commons happens to be full of white men is more due to the fact that white men tend to be more invovled in politics in Britain. Even if that wasn’t the case, so long as each seat was open for selection and voting on an entirely equal basis, does it matter? It shouldn’t in a free society.
The thing is, Britain doesn’t need more minority MPs just because. It only needs them if they are the best people for the job. If a minority, whoever they may be, gets more representation in Parliament just to make the numbers up then no-one will be better off and everyone will be worse. Because these people, whoever they are and whatever minority they are there to ‘represent’, won’t be seen by anyone as being equal – they becoem tokens. We don’t need so-called “positive discrimination” in politics as that won’t help, not in the long term.
In the shoirt term, the sorrt of things that Trevor Phillips would like to see may well push up the numbers of gay/black/female MPs – but none of them would be there on the same grounds as the others. They would have got special, favourable, treatment. They would be reduced to stats “an increase of x number of *insert minority of choice*! Wow, we’re so good.” All parliamentary fights – within parties as well as between them – should be equal, with no bias attached to them for any reason. Otherwise, is it really democracy?
I think that Unity sums up what I’m trying to say in a brilliant post at Liberal Conspiracy:
Sorry guys, but any time you start spitting out demographics and complaining about under-representation in this arena or that, then you’ve already lost the mainstream cultural argument because that sounds, to many people, like you’re trying to game the system for your own group’s political and economic advantage rather than seeking redress for a wrong that needs to be righted.
Equality means equality. No institutional benefits either way.
Barack Obama is a great thing for America and for the world, but we don’t need a British Barack Obama. We just need the right people from all minority groups to get involved in politics and correct the imbalance in the time-honored British way – by each and every one of them earning their way into a seat in Parliament and making the changes that need to be made as they go.
