Grant Shapps, racism, slavery, 'remembering' and 'forgetting'. (Part 2.)

In case any reader is getting the wrong idea, I am not singling out Grant Shapps for particular criticism. As far as this issue is concerned, he is not the worst offender. (A far more egregious example is the prime minister, particularly in his repetition of a certain word in an article in 2003 concerning the Queen and Commonwealth which was also used by Enoch Powell in his poisonous speech in 1968. I will not repeat the word here, but I advise readers to look up both in the original).

I am referring to a certain case, which has been widely reported, of an employee (a BAME woman) at a certain railway terminus in London who, in late March, was spat on by a passenger who said that he had the coronavirus. The employee contracted the illness and subsequently died. It transpired that she and her fellow employees had begged their employer, Govia Thameslink, for personal protective equipment, but had been refused. It has to be emphasised that the authorities are still investigating this case, and no corporate culpability has been established. At the very least, though, her employer has serious questions to answer concerning its lack of care for its employees. At the time, Grant Shapps made it clear that he regarded it as purely a criminal case, and not one which involved corporate responsibility.

I refer to this case because it is an extreme example on the part of a government minister to admit that inequalities of power exist, and that these inequalities can have terrible consequences. Shapps (and others of the same cast of mind) struggle to conceptualise society as anything other than a collection of atomised individuals, who continually exercise 'free choice'. This is apparent not only in their attitude to coronavirus and race, but to public health and workplace relationships more generally.