Don't Vote Labour Again (Part 5)
Dawn Butler
One of Labour's nuttiest backbenchers, a throwback to the Corbyn era who has somehow survived the purges of Starmer, is Dawn Butler. She has been spared, more than likely, because of her supposed appeal to the black demographic, which Labour is desperate to court. It is for the same reason that Starmer and Rayner knelt for BLM, and likely why David Lammy has such an elevated position. Labour *assume* these things appeal, which is frankly a bigotry of low expectations.
Butler has been MP for Brent South (2005-10), Brent Central (2015-2024) and Brent East (since July 2024). She held several junior ministerial roles from 2005, under Blair, Brown and Corbyn, and also stood for Labour Deputy Leader. To call Butler a clown is an understatement. An ultra Europhile, she refused to vote for Article 50 and even begin the negotiation process. She resigned from Corbyn's front bench to do this. She then said at an event “if you don’t hate Brexit, even if you voted for it, there is something wrong with you”, causing Emily Thornberry to laugh like an imbecile. Butler and Thornberry are friends, and according to Thornberry the pair have drunkenly pratted around at the Notting Hill Carnival.
In July 2008, Butler's office wrote an endorsement for her, supposedly 'by' Barack Obama:
Having met Dawn Butler MP I can see why she is one of only two black women in parliament. She is bright intelligent and determined. I say to the people of Brent you should have the audacity of hope and when someone asks you can she do it, you respond, yes we can.
Her office then (supposedly) took two versions of the poorly composed text to Obama when he visited the UK, and the future President signed them. However, when the endorsement was published in January 2009, Butler initially claimed her office had *NOT* written it. This appeared very self-aggrandising and rather dishonest. In 2019, in an attempt to tackle the scourge of homophobia, she claimed that 90% of giraffes are gay. She also told Richard Madeley and the entire audience of Good Morning Britain that "a child is born without sex". Biology is clearly not her strong point.
During the BLM furore of 2020, she posted a video of police officers pulling over the car she was in, the implication being made that they were racially profiling her. "You cannot," she later claimed, "drive around and enjoy a Sunday afternoon whilst black". She gave the polite young men a pompous ear-bashing and they retreated. The footage appeared to have been flipped to suggest she was driving the car, when she wasn't. In fairness this may have been a quirk of her phone. The police stop was apparently a mistake, after the car's registration number was entered incorrectly during a routine check.
In the General Election, Butler posted a lip-synched rap video that was weapons grade cringe. But she surpassed all of these examples on October 1st, with a toe-curling and actually quite troubling poem about her black identity. It was posted on social media as an offering for Black History Month, that holy date in our calendar alongside Pride Month and [insert non-Christian religious festival]. I assumed it was a woke piece written by someone else, but it seems she may have penned it herself (just like the Obama endorsement). Its poor quality and lack of originality may well attest to that.
In it Butler appears to respond to racist trolls (which undoubtedly she attracts), but doesn't make this clear enough. As a Spectator article observed, it could give the impression it is addressing any white person. She proclaims how she will not bow to such comments because she is such a strong person. Assuming tackling racism (or any abuse) is best done by engaging with it - rather than ignoring it and not dignifying it with an answer - this would be fair enough. However, what is not 'fair enough' is veering into trite and divisive black supremacist talking points.
Butler is not subtle with these. She repeats four times the mantra "I am the Chosen One/Because I am one of the First Ones". This is saying black people are 'chosen', on the basis that human civilisation is thought to have originated in Africa. Why is Butler special? Because she is black, and descends from a continent that by sheer chance may have propagated the early humans. This means she is automatically a winner.
It takes everything about her as an individual, and distils it down to this simple premise. In this respect it is insulting to black people, and making racial characteristics front and centre, rather than dismissing them as irrelevant, which Dr King wanted to do (as indeed did Thomas Sowell and more recently Morgan Freeman). That is the woke mindset all over - making an issue out of inherent characteristics our society has already got over. It has made identitarian grievance an industry.
Her 'chosen' status is contrasted with the lower status of her imagined white detractor (or again, is it in fact all white people?): "You are the wrong one, the violent one, the weird one". There is a childish schoolyard quality to this. She also invokes the idea of systemic racism - or 'whiteness':
You created a structure/ That made you seem great/ But it is all fake/ Because I am The Chosen One
Ironically, she is decrying ideas of white supremacy by insisting black people have supremacy instead. That is the definition of reductive. And then comes her devastating 'gotcha' moment:
You see this skin I’m in/ This beautiful mahogany brown/ This skin you don’t like, I believe/ So why you try so hard to achieve/ By burning yourself with the sun?
Oh, zing. The fact some white people like getting a suntan proves 1. that they want the appearance of a black person and 2. that black people are superior because they are born pre-tanned. It's laughable, and yet we know Butler thinks she has made some profound philosophical point.
Topping off this literary delight is her use of images in the video. There are the usual 'black pharoahs' from Ancient Egypt, Dr King and a shot of Kamala Harris. These blend with generic footage of the MP 'meeting the voters' in 'the community'. She also shows a collage of famous black figures to illustrate the rather self-aggrandising line: "I know I’m black and beautiful/An African freedom fighter".
Eagle-eyed viewers noticed that on the panning collage were several communist Black Panther types, some of whom were notorious criminals. This included two convicted murderers of police officers, a self-confessed serial rapist and a Nation of Islam figure who referred to Jews as 'bloodsuckers'.
It is the brief inclusion of the racist rapist, Eldridge Cleaver, that is most disturbing. It should be said he renounced his sexual crimes and even his extremist politics, later becoming a Republican. However, in his autobiography ('Soul on Ice') he admits he targeted white women because he considered it an 'insurrectionary act':
It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women - and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman... I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.
Butler inadvertently hailing this man as a hero is ironic, because she has been among other things the shadow minister for Women and Equalities. When the dubious characters in the collage were pointed out, Butler deleted the video, then reposted a version with the collage removed. She also circulated a statement saying she "strongly opposed" the views and actions of those individuals. Too late though, the damage was done.
Needless to say, if a white MP were to perform such a poem with the words 'black' replaced by 'white', adorned with images of violent racists, it would be called a hate crime and see their career destroyed. That is the acid test of all this woke nonsense. The likes of Butler would never go easy on a conservative politician making a similar error, and we needn't go easy on her. This is the type of person Labour thinks is suitable to represent it, and indeed to represent us - incompetent at best, malevolent at worst. It's an insult to everyone, no matter what their skin colour.
Butler's 'freedom fighters'
Mumia Abu Jamal: Black Panther (BP) member, murdered a policeman in 1981
Huey Newton: BP founder, convicted of assault, accused of two murders, assault and rape
Fred Hampton: BP figure, convicted of assault
Bobby Seale: BP cofounder, accused of torture and murder
Eldridge Cleaver: convicted serial rapist who said that raping white women was an 'insurrectionary act'
Marcus Garvey: black ethno-nationalist who associated with the KKK for tactical reasons, was convicted of fraud and blamed the Jews for it
Assata Shakur: murdered a policeman in 1979, still a wanted fugitive living in Cuba
Khalid Abdul Muhammad: Nation of Islam and BP figure who in 1993 called for white South Africans to be murdered if they wouldn't leave SA, labelled the Jews 'bloodsuckers' and referred to the Pope a 'no good cracker'
All rights reserved, Ed Pond, 2024