You might have seen Derek Laud, the former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, in the news recently accusing the Conservative Party of racism.
As a former member of the ultra-Right wing Monday Club he should know. He apparently resigned from the group in 2011 over a disagreement about Apartheid South Africa saying “I hadn’t appreciated just how absurdly nasty this fringe group of lunatics really were.” A five-minute Google search might have alerted him. They were in favour of the repatriation of non-white immigrants, opposed independence Kenya and of course supported Apartheid. A decade before Laud left, the Party had cut ties with this group, which was founded in opposition to Harold MacMillan’s 1961 “wind of change” speech heralding independence for Britain’s colonies.
As the son of immigrants from a former colony, Jamaica, it took Laud a long time to twig what the Monday Club were about. Quite how he stuck it out in the 1980′s as a speech-writer to Thatcher in the era of Norman Tebbitt – presumably not detecting any racism then – only to be suddenly struck by it today as the present-day Tories wheel out their ‘Go Home’ billboard van and conduct stop-checks at inner London stations is a mystery. After all it was Thatcher who spoke about Britain being “swamped” by immigrants and was branded “unabashedly racist” by the former Australian foreign minister. This was the same Prime Minister who continually ignored the suffering of black Britons in the 80′s, refusing to acknowledge that police Sus Laws were oppressing black people and blaming the community in the aftermath of uprisings.
Laud said this week: “I believe the Conservative Party has shown it is racist. It will do anything, right to wrong, to bolster its poll ratings.” The current dog-whistle stirring of the immigration pot by the Tories is extremely unpleasant, divisive, inflammatory and shows reckless disregard for the negative impact on race relations. However I wonder about the sudden awakening of Laud whose ex-boss called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” when many Britons were campaigning against Apartheid.
In 2009 Laud wrote in The Independent that he was comfortable with the nickname ‘Golly’ and that he once told Thatcher that he had been “working like a black.” So even though he has a point over the immigration ‘crackdown’ he is perhaps not the best-placed person to be criticising the Tories for racism when there are questions about his own attitudes.
As the first black Master of Foxhounds the plum-voiced Laud has styled himself as an upper class gentleman and played up to this image on Celebrity Big Brother. I hear he has recently joined the Liberal Democrats (I asked him about this on Twitter but have yet to receive a reply) which may or may not explain why he has slammed his former friends at this time.
Laud is entitled to express his views about present-day Conservatives but his record of working for them at a time when this Party were widely seen as disliking the black community, and his own remarks, needs clarification before he can advance in politics.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
