Cast your mind back to the furore when the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, was revealed to have said that he “didn’t see another white face” in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It was reported as if it would be of real consequence to his political future – but enough time has passed, I figure, to confirm that it was not. Why did some seriously consider this a turning point? Because Jenrick had said something genuinely explicit and unambiguous – no dog whistle, no gesture, no disguise, no metaphor. Though he claimed “it’s not about skin colour”, it was a naked reference to race and an evident rebuke to British communities where there was a predominance of people of colour.

The lack of consequence, however, was unsurprising, because within the public sphere the question of racism has been rigged for quite some time and the rules around who gets to say what about race in Britain have been rewritten. What Jenrick did, then, was to truly test the boundaries by outraging them – and signal what those in public life can now get away with saying after a concerted effort to erode the dignity of public racial discourse. His colleagues have wasted no time in answering this call. Katie Lam, a so-called rising star of the Conservative party, last week called for legally settled families to be deported to make the UK “culturally coherent”. How quickly the goalposts move.

Public discourse on race has never been free from defensiveness, denial and attempts to undermine it. But still, over the years, as the prevailing ideology of the mainstream right has been reconfigured, so too has its approach to race. The old one-nation Tories still bought into a liberal consensus – that there was such a thing as systemic disadvantage against racial minorities, and this was reflected across key areas of policy, from health to justice to education.

David Cameron had no issues publicly discussing racism. If anything, it was a key feature of his modernisation of the right. It even put him at odds with Oxford University when, in stating that the low number of Black students matriculated there was “disgraceful”, he misled on the real figures. He went on to bluntly say that Britain “still has a problem with racism” and work cross-party with David Lammy to tackle racial bias in the justice system. Theresa May didn’t mince her words on race and racism, either: during her time as home secretary, she criticised the police force for being “too white”. May was, to my mind, the only home secretary and prime minister to take seriously the fact that police powers, particularly on stop and search, needed reform because of their misapplication to Black men. Years after her premiership, May would say that she was “woke and proud”.

This is not written in praise of Cameron or May. Austerity........

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