The obnoxious hypocrisy of Starmer’s fury with JD Vance

Why is it okay for Brits to be righteously angry over the death of George Floyd but not for Americans to be righteously angry over the death of Henry Nowak? Our cousins across the pond have every right to ask this question following David Lammy’s staggeringly imperious comments on Sky News on Sunday morning. With aristocratic swagger, our deputy PM lamented JD Vance’s meddling in our national life with his tweet about the ‘righteous anger’ we should feel in response to Nowak’s death. It’s inappropriate, Lammy sniffed. Yep, this is the same David Lammy who cheered the ‘righteous anger’ that greeted the killing of Floyd.

One is forced to ask: was it arrogance or stupidity that led Lammy to rebuke an American for doing exactly as he once did? Did he forget that he also used the phrase ‘righteous anger’ after Floyd’s death, and that he barked at America to turn this rage into ‘meaningful reform’? Or is he now so high on his own supply of moral vanity that he thinks different rules apply to him? I suspect it’s the latter, because even when the Sky News host – Trevor Phillips – played clips of Lammy and his Labour colleagues righteously raging over Floyd’s death, Lammy didn’t flinch. We are allowed to wag a finger at Trumpist America, but those rough Yanks must never do likewise with us – that was the patrician essence of the rictus smirk he wore even as his rank hypocrisy was played back to him.

Even by the low standards of our smug elites, the Victorian gasping over Vance’s comments has been wild. It feels positively pre-1776, with America’s old rulers telling Vance and the rest of the DC riff-raff to do as we say, not as we do. No sooner had Vance mourned the murder of Nowak by Vickrum Digwa – calling it ‘tragic’ and ‘enraging’ – than Downing St was noisily gnashing its teeth. ‘People [are] trying to interfere in our democracy’, said Keir Starmer’s spokesman. Yes, it’s the same Keir Starmer who, as leader of the opposition in May 2020, took to his despatch box in the Commons to express ‘shock and anger’ over Floyd’s death. And to vent his ‘abhorrence’ over Trump’s response to that death.

It takes cant to dizzying new heights for a PM who lectured America about Floyd’s death to get all uppity because Vance has ventured an opinion on Nowak’s death. Labour is stuffed with such moral pretenders. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, wrote a wordy public letter in 2020 to voice her ‘unspeakable outrage’ over Floyd’s death. Now she yaps about the ‘dangerous undercurrent’ of rage in response to Nowak’s death. London mayor Sadiq Khan welcomed the ‘fury and anguish’ that swept the globe after Floyd’s death. Now he says we should stop playing ‘knockabout politics’ with Henry’s death. Why is it righteous fury when people like him mourn the death of a man 4,000 miles from Britain, but ‘knockabout politics’ when others do likewise following the cruel slaying of a boy in Britain?

Britain’s entire political class, not to mention the well-fed activists of the Oxbridge left, stand so morally exposed right now. Both the House of Commons and House of Lords held a minute’s silence for George Floyd. Not only have they done no such thing for Nowak, but MPs jeered and finger-jabbed at Nigel Farage when he dared to say we should ‘rage’ over that teen’s cruel, lonely death. Meanwhile, plummy leftists who took the knee, tore down statues and bored us rigid with their performative fury after Floyd’s death now warn us oiks not to ‘weaponise’ Nowak’s death. Only they are allowed to exploit human tragedy for moral kicks, okay?

It isn’t hard to see why Vance’s tweet rattled our ruling class. For he did something they are too craven and culpable to do – he tied young Henry’s death to the West’s violent drift from the virtues of its own civilisation. Yes, he was wrong to link the killing with Britain’s burning of its own sovereign integrity and the corresponding spike in undesirable forms of immigration – Vickrum Digwa was born here. But he was right to lament the ‘politics of self-hatred’ that led us to a situation where cops will prioritise a false accusation of racism over a dying boy’s begging for help. That atrocity in Southampton, where Henry said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times as cops dragged him, cuffed him and basically called him a liar, was a microcosm of our institutionalised identity politics and its elevation of the cult of grievance over the enlightened virtues of reason and fairness.

The current Vance Derangement Syndrome is so telling. That Brits who wailed over the death of Floyd can reprimand Vance for mourning the death of Nowak reveals so much about the elites’ culture wars. To them, America is less a real place than a kind of moral playpen – a distant, unreal zone in which Europeans bereft of ideas for their own societies might puff out their chests and wang on about racism, slavery, whiteness, etc. In 2020’s Covid-addled, Floyd-enraged digital highways of voguish self-loathing, America became a stage for the pious of the world to act out the thin morality of their anti-Westernism. The possibility that actual Americans – like a then 35-year-old JD Vance – might have taken umbrage at this colonial-vibing venom for the American republic seems never to have crossed their minds. And now they froth like loons upon receiving a taste of their own medicine.

But there’s something else at play, too. It isn’t really Vance and his social-media missives they fear – it’s us. They are consumed by fever dreams that Vance’s tweet will ignite the bovine rage of the British masses. The Westminster elites’ frantic policing of our post-Nowak emotions – especially our ‘righteous anger’ – is driven by a deep dread of working-class feeling. Just as they seek to temper our fury following Islamist attacks or further revelations about the rape gangs, so they want to crush our dismay over Henry’s death and our dissent over the neo-racialism of identity politics that exacerbated that horror. They might be pissed with Vance, but it’s us they hate.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.