Why Robert Jenrick wants to see more 'white faces'

0:02Robert Jenrick:This is a Global Player original podcast. Today at the Conservative Party conference, the keynote speech was delivered by the Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, except for the fact that some comments he made nearly six months ago are gaining far more attention than what he said in the hall in Manchester. You know, I went to Hansworth in Birmingham the other day to do a video on litter and it was absolutely appalling as close as I've come to a slum in this country but the other thing I noticed that was that it was one of the worst integrated places I've ever been to in fact in the hour and a half that I was filming with news there I didn't see another white face and that's not the kind of country I want to live in I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated it's not about the color of your skin or your faith.

0:54Robert Jenrick:Of course it isn't. But I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.

0:59Emily:That's not the right way we want to live as a country. I didn't see another white face. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, comments like that would have got you the sack from the front bench of any major political party. But this morning, Robert Jenrick and his leader, Kemi Badenok, have come out fighting. What does this tell us about the direction of the Conservative Party. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:29Robert Jenrick:The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And those comments by Robert Jenrick were obtained by The Guardian newspaper and chose this morning to put them up online. And Lewis, as you say, five years ago, I think the party would have been doing its best to say oh well look i mean he's been taken out of context which is sort of what kemi badenock started saying today that they were taken out of context but there's the context and they're doubling down there is no apology for any of that thing and though he says it's not about the color of anyone's skin the comment is entirely about the color of the skin of the people he saw in handsworth which is an area i don't know that well but lewis presumably you know very well having You've grown up in Birmingham.

2:19Robert Jenrick:Yeah, yeah, I do know it.

2:19Emily:And look, it's a very ethnically diverse area. And I think that there's lots of kind of things that Generic says, which I think are pretty loaded. I mean, even talking about slums, you know, I mean, again, we're in an area with a lot of racial minorities living, talking about slums and all this sort of stuff. You know, it sends an unpleasant signal. I think we can get into sort of the politics of it. I think this is obviously part of, I would say, is Robert Generic's ongoing radicalisation. Some people have speculated in the past that this isn't real, that he's just doing it for the politics. I actually don't think that's true.

2:52Emily:I think this is something that Jenrick has sort of moved from a sort of Cameroonite kind of liberal right to a poster boy of the online radical right. And I think this is part of that process. It's worth saying these comments were not made in public. They were made in a quasi-public space. They were given at the Aldridge Brown Hills Conservative Association, one of their annual dinners, I think, and it was recorded surreptitiously. I think it's interesting to consider whether Jenrick would have made these comments in public from the stand. And I was thinking about this, and I think the answer's no, but I'm not completely convinced about that, which I think, again, sort of tells us something about the direction of travel.

3:30Emily:Like I said at the top there, I think, you know, five, ten years ago, 15 years ago, certainly, these are sort of comments talking, explicitly linking the idea of white faces and integration would have been the preserve of the extremes of British politics, the British National Party. I think it may have even made UKIP blush or it would have been controversial if Nigel Farage had said it. Now it's being said by the Shadow Justice Secretary. And I think it is just worth saying, you know, it is absolutely true. He's right that there are integration problems in Britain. It's absolutely true that there are pockets of our cities which are dominated.

4:03Emily:And it was ever thus really by particular racial groups, particular groups of, in this case, immigrants, but people who are descended from recent immigration and so on. But he says in his justification, in Kemi Badenow's justification this morning, he said this isn't about skin colour. Look, I said it wasn't about skin colour. And indeed he does. He said in the comments there, this isn't about skin colour. But he is the one who invokes white faces. He is the one who chooses as his metric, as his metric in those comments, he says, I didn't see another white face for an hour and a half. I don't want to live in a country like that.

4:39Emily:Yes, in the next breath, he says it's about wider integration. But how can anyone who doesn't have a white face listen to that and not think that if the Shadow Justice Secretary comes to my area and sees my face, he is using my face as a metric for whether or not I am integrated into this society or into this area. And I can understand that you would find that pretty chilling.

4:58Robert Jenrick:Well, let's have a listen to Robert Jenrick on Sky News this morning. Well, I was very clear that it's not about the colour of your skin or the face. You didn't see any white faces and that made you feel like it wasn't integrated. I was making is we want all people to be living side by side. We can't have particular communities in this country where there's a heavy preponderance of one group or another. We want people to be living in mixed communities, don't we? I mean, I don't know about you, but that's that's what I want to see in this country. That's the kind of country I want my kids to be growing up in.

5:33Robert Jenrick:You know, there's huge strengths in that. What we mustn't have are growing communities where people are living essentially ghettoised lives. So if you look at patterns of migration, I mean, there's the famous, what was once a church in the east end of London that was used by the Huguenots when they were fleeing persecution, that then became a synagogue when the Jews moved into the east end of London, that then became a mosque when the Jews moved out integrated into society and the Muslims came in and there are patterns of migration in poor areas where you do get clusters of the population together and as they kind of economic well-being advances so they move out and they move into the suburbs and that is a pattern of migration that you have seen over kind of hundreds of years in this country so I'm not sure what is remarkable about it that you find clusters of people living in certain areas because they've come to a country they don't know anyone and so they go to where there may be relatives or whatever and there's a community center or there is a sense of where they can belong yeah i think

6:44Emily:that more than anything else if you actually start to really think about this and break it down it sounds like it's on the cutting edge of where radical right online thought has been going which is this idea that basically the problem with multiculturalism, the problem with a multi-ethnic society, or the problem with multiculturalism is that it divides people rather than unites us. Now, hitherto, what the Conservative Party have been keen to stress, including Camille Baden-Ock, is that this is not an ethnic issue. It's a cultural issue. The concern has been that there have been people living lives in sort of parallel cultures which are not compatible with the standards of British life and sort of British liberalism and all of these sorts of things.

7:24Emily:What Jenrick is doing here, though, or at least the accusation is, is something darker because he's basically saying that this, as much as anything, is potentially a problem of ethnicities living separately. And I think as soon as you start thinking about it, it really doesn't make any sense. OK, so Robert Jenrick is saying this isn't about your race. We don't, or rather, he wants it to be that people are living side by side. So where does that end? Does this mean, for example, Robert Jenrick is reconsidering his support for religious schooling? Because we have religious schools in this country, Muslim schools, Christian schools, Jewish schools.

7:58Emily:Are we saying that given that all of those kids go together and are quite literally living in communities rather than side by side with other communities, that those should be abolished? Should that be extended as well, for example, to wealth? If I walk down Marlebone High Street, is Robert Jenrick sitting there going, you know, the problem around here is, is that there's just far too many poorer people. It's far too. Should we abolish private schools on that basis? Again, communities living separately rather than side by side. In his own constituency of Newark, generally speaking, an extremely white area, when he walks around the streets of Newark, is he considering to himself, you know what, I wish white people around here would integrate themselves a little bit more.

8:32Emily:And this is the problem. It sort of sends out the message that somehow those minorities have done something wrong for failing to choose to integrate themselves with others, i.e. white people, rather than just living their lives. I mean, I would just sort of challenge Robert Jenrick and other shadow ministers to ask themselves, what have they done to integrate themselves recently with people of other ethnicities?

8:53Robert Jenrick:Yeah, but it's not just confined to this area of politics. I saw a column in the Mail by Leo McKinstry, who once was a Labour supporter and has kind of gone to the right, talking about why are there so many black people or people of colour in TV advertising? And they don't represent the country. They're far too overrepresented in a way. and kind of his concluding kind of the crunch line argument at the end of the piece was in the adverts for LucasAid, why are we seeing Jude Bellingham and not Matt Letizier? And I'm thinking, what? Why aren't we seeing Jeff Hurst? I mean, Matt Letizier, why aren't we seeing WG Grace?

9:29Robert Jenrick:He hasn't played football for 20 years. And two, advertising companies aren't there trying to be woke. They're trying to sell product and they're trying to sell as much product and as fast as they possibly can because that is why advertising exists.

9:42Emily:Letizier has also become something of himself a bit of conspiracy theorist in recent years on the you know completely you know absolutely

9:48Robert Jenrick:someone who's been radicalized but the idea that you should not use jude bellingham but you should use matt letizier i mean you know i used to go and watch matt letizier he's a great footballer but i mean i don't even know what the argument is it's so silly and yet it's all sayable now and i think

10:03Emily:well exactly i think i think this is what i mean about the sort of creeping radicalization of some of this stuff which is that you know the fact that generic and the fact that generic says this and is not resiling from it itself, nudges everything along a little bit further. Stuff that would have been considered unacceptable or offensive to say suddenly becomes, you know, we talk about the Overton window politics all the time on this show, suddenly becomes acceptable. And, you know, as again, I'm not interested genuinely. I mean, I think we're not. We talk about this all the time. I'm not interested in shutting down debate on anything.

10:31Emily:I'm not interested in saying, I'm not even saying necessarily, Jemric should, you know, can we barely not choose to keep him in his shadow cabinet or not? But he should not be surprised that the comments like these are controversial. And I would just invite him to consider how he might feel if, let's say, for example, let's say a left-wing MP or, I don't know, a left-wing influencer who had been associated with the Gaza protest. Imagine that they went down to Golders Green, for example, in a Jewish area of North London and said, or someone said, oh gosh, it seems that this area is full of Jewish shops.

11:02Emily:It's full of Jews living on their own. They're not living together with the community. That's an awful thing. Why is that? imagine the rightly I think the response that that would engender and the accusation of racism that that would come or anti-semitism would come from that from the right including Robert Jenrick himself and so that's the thing is that if you're genuinely going to reject a model which is basically a model of a deep liberalism and a pluralism where we say as a society look fundamentally people can live where they like and they can live in the communities that they like and yes we don't want to see people become, to use his term, ghettoised.

11:37Emily:But at the same time, ultimately, we're not going to go around, and indeed it would be completely impractical, to sort of seriously suggest ways in which the state is going to try and direct and incentivise social mixing of communities in a way that we might find preferable. Obviously this stuff happens organically anyway, but what is generic seriously suggesting? It would actually require acts of a sort of deep statism and dirigisme to basically, for the state, bussing people around, to You know, I mean, this was a debate that happened in the United States and has been very controversial, of course, in terms of racial segregation in schools and all these sorts of things.

12:09Emily:It would require a complete change of mindset from the Conservative Party. That is what I think is sort of unpleasant and disturbing about what Jenrick is doing, because in all seriousness, he doesn't really, really think through or he doesn't really believe in the practical consequences of what he's saying. So what it then becomes, or it sounds like, is that it's simply a bit of a dog whistle. And it just reflects that kind of slow shift to more extreme language on race and ethnicity and culture that we've been seeing galloping now for some time.

12:39Robert Jenrick:Look, where I agree with Robert Jenrick, I think integration is incredibly important. I think it's incredibly important that people have a shared sense of the values of this country, that it is a liberal, tolerant, free speech, open, outward looking country. And that, you know, groups that come to settle here, you're very welcome. But this is the country that you've chosen to live in and that you need to kind of accommodate yourselves to the values of this country. I think that is a really important thing. And I've, you know, kind of the work my parents used to be involved in a million years ago was entirely devoted to that.

13:12Robert Jenrick:And I think that that is incredibly important. But the way in which you are saying it and the way in which you are doing it is seems to me to have, you know, party political purpose at its heart to create a kind of wedge issue. and it's not going to be overly welcomed by the communities you're claiming to say you want to see living these blended lives alongside everyone else. You are making a distinction over a white face and a dark face.

13:43Emily:Well, the other thing is, is that I just think that it's a deeply reductive view of integration, which is to say, OK, of course, any of us could go to a particular area which is weighted towards one community or the other or to one race or the other. I'm sort of disturbing when talking these terms, but one race or the other. And you go around and you think, gosh, it's not very integrated around here, is it? You know, where are all the white faces? Whatever it happens to be, to use his metric. But again, as you say, John, I'm from Birmingham. I do know Hansworth reasonably well. I went to a sixth form college, which was sort of in the middle of middle-ish of Birmingham.

14:12Emily:And it was very, very racially mixed. It was probably like a third white, third black and then a third sort of Pakistani or Indian. Right. Broadly speaking, we were all from different parts of Birmingham. He's right. Birmingham, by comparison to London or even some of the other cities, is more quite racially segregated, kind of historically. That is true. But then all these kids were going from all these individual areas, which on the face of it look very homogenous, white or black or brown or whatever it happens to be, and then going to college all day long, learning together, socialising together, going out the weekends together.

14:41Emily:Is that not integration? So, you know, like, it's just a really kind of simplistic. People go to the shops, they go into the centre of the city, they interact, they talk. Again, it's not to underestimate or to sort of try and ignore the fact that there are problems and pockets of integration. We know we see some of the problems around sort of extreme ideology and certain kind of rise of Islamism in some areas, in some pockets and so on, and there are pockets of problems around integration. Yeah, it's not to undermine that, but to sort of just say and use as a metric, go to an area and go, gosh, there aren't many white faces around here and somehow consider that to be or posit it as some sort of, let's be honest, a very inevitably very white audience in Aldridge Brown Hills Conservative Association dinner and posit that as a piece of evidence to suggest that somehow the whole of the integration model of Britain has failed is just reductive, stupid nonsense.

15:29Emily:And I think deep down Jenrick knows that.

15:31Robert Jenrick:Well, let's talk about the speech itself, because this is all what we've dwelt upon so far is something that he said in March, which was caught on the recording. And as you say, Lewis, it wasn't meant for broadcast. It was an association dinner where you think you can get away with more than you'd probably, you know, it's not going to be a Conservative Party release speech with check against delivery at the top of it as a press release. I mean, he's been caught out, but he's doubled down. In the speech today, we had props. We had him producing a judge's wig to talk about all these judges that had become activist judges and were no longer interested in the law.

16:06Robert Jenrick:They were on the side of immigrants and, you know, almost implying there needed to be a purge of these people from the jurist bench. And you thought, oh, I've heard this before. Or I've heard it in America where, you know, sort of Trumpian supporters, when they get a judgment they don't like, think, well, it's the fault of the judge rather than the law. And, again, Jenrick putting himself on that populist right where you think, right, the solution to Britain's problems is we've got to have a purge of these judges. And that was a part of it. He also went after the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, for having once defended Gerry Adams.

16:46Robert Jenrick:He thought, hang on, sorry, that's what lawyers do. Lawyers defend people and they prosecute other people. And the legal system works by everyone has a right of defence and they have a right to defend themselves. And I kind of thought, where are we getting to in what his perception is of how the justice system works? You might be wondering, what have I got in this box? No, no one was. Well, don't worry. I'm not about to do a Michael Fabricant tribute act. This is actually serious. For those of you at the back of the room who can't see, I have here a judge's wig. It's something we should all respect and revere.

17:37Robert Jenrick:When a judge dons a wig, it signifies the transition from their everyday personality, their identity, to that of a legal arbiter. It's a visual representation of the judge's role as an unbiased mediator, focused solely, only, on upholding the law and delivering justice. an unbiased mediator that is what a judge should be and that is what the vast majority of judges in our legal system do they wear the wig they respect and revere it and that is why in turn our legal system is respected and revered all around the world but we've got a problem It's one that Labour choose to ignore. Today I've uncovered dozens of judges with links to open borders charities who take to social media to broadcast their open borders views, who spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country.

18:51Robert Jenrick:Some even continue to do so whilst astonishingly serving as judges. It's like finding out halfway through a football match that the ref is actually a season ticket holder for the other side.

19:04Emily:I mean, look, it's... God, I was going to say something really rude. Go on, go for it. I was going to say it was cringe as fuck, really. I mean, like, it's just like... Your mum's going to be upset with you. I know, I know. But, like, honestly, like, the wig, I mean, for goodness sake. You know what? Let me be more serious about this. I find Robert Jenner a really quite interesting political figure. I do. I agree. I think he's a really interesting... And look, he is the only conservative... And he's a great communicator. He's become a great communicator. He, we've talked about it on the show before, he understands the power of digital video, the content age.

19:36Emily:He is the only one in a conservative party which shows almost no signs of life, which is completely moribund almost. He is the only one who shows any sign of life at all. And he's been doing a lot of intellectual running on all sorts of different things. And he's thinking deeply about politics and the problems of the country. That said, it is deeply, deeply dispiriting to see in someone who is clearly intelligent and understands the power of his own words, someone inviting the continuing Trumpification of British politics on steroids in that way. He knows, he himself even acknowledged that British judges, he's just said that the vast majority of British judges are not politically motivated or whatever.

20:16Emily:And he hasn't really got any evidence, serious evidence to suggest that even a small minority are. But here he is for his own political purposes, advancing something that we have fortunately largely resisted in this country for a long time. although the Conservative Party has certainly been dabbling in it since the Brexit period, which is this corrosive and caustic toxicity and attack on all of the institutions that actually make our democracy possible. And Jenrick is clever enough to know that, but instead he's standing up there at the Conservative Party conference making, let's be honest, what we all know is a leader speech, a leader speech in waiting.

20:50Emily:It is all about his leadership ambitions. There's nothing illegitimate about that. But why on earth does he have to have... He is doing a thing. I mean, in a way, what you can see with with Jenrick and Badenoch is the kind of completely two different visions of where the Conservative Party is going. Badenoch is basically talking about basically dismissing Farage as incompetence and as useless. And the Conservative Party has competence and therefore can sort of, you know, be economically sound and all that sort of stuff. Jenrick, meanwhile, is doing Farageisme and Trumpism on steroids and is deciding to go firmly into the sort of Farageist kind of territory.