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Dear Uncle Kwasi,
Trust all is well with you. What an incredible month and a week it has been for you — appointed Chancellor on 7 September 2022, unveiling your mini budget on 23 September 2022, seeing the financial markets crash immediately and then getting your P45 on 14 October 2022. You must feel humiliated in getting the sack less than 24 hours after going on air to say, “I’m not going anywhere.”
When you were appointed Britain’s first black Chancellor of the Exchequer, very few black people rejoiced at your milestone. Likewise, when you were sacked from your post 38 days later, very few black people wept at your misery. Undoubtedly, you were the smartest guy in the room; your razor-sharp intellect honed at Eton, Harvard and Cambridge contributed to your meteoric rise within the Conservative party. So why were many black people apathetic to your rise and fall?
Uncle Kwasi, it is because you spent most of your political career denying your blackness. When the Windrush scandal exposed your government’s hostile policy of wrongly detaining and deporting blacks who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean, you were dispatched to defend the government’s position by denying the claim of institutional racism. You once argued that there is a consistent expectation in the media that MPs from ethnic minorities should engage with ‘black’ issues. You said, “The heart of identity politics, …. has dominated the left for a couple of decades.” When you said, “To expect all Chinese people to have the same views on political economy, ethics, religion would rightly be thought of as racist,” you flung your race under the bus. To argue that you “Would only be able to represent privately educated, single, 40-something black men” is not only ridiculous but also ignorant.
It is undoubtedly a case of the chickens coming home to roost. In your dual role as the black face of the Conservative party and the Head Negro of the Liz Truss Plantation, you threw your people under the bus to gain political capital. Now your good friend, Prime Minister Liz Truss, has thrown you under the bus to save her political career. You will go on in history as the worst and the second shortest-lived Chancellor. Instead of being a modern Moses who could have helped deliver his people from the racial bondage of UKkk, you chose to be an Honorary White who used his…
