BRENDAN O’NEILL: Kemi Badenoch isn’t the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy.’

We need to talk about what Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago.

Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader of the Conservative Party, Labour’s Butler took potshots. She retweeted some tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’ written by Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian journalist. He branded Badenoch ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’. She’s the chief representative of ‘white supremacy in black face’, he sniped. And Butler pressed retweet, hand-delivering to her 240,000 followers this repugnant reduction of a black politician to a witless stooge of whiteness.

Talk about putting the “international” back into international socialism — why is UK’s Labour Party stealing their racist insults from the L.A. Times? “[Larry] Elder, who would have become the state’s first black governor had he won, was smeared continually by California media at the behest of the left in the most absurd and often quite offensive ways. The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion column in August headlined ‘Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.’ Another Los Angeles Times columnist linked Elder to the politics of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.”