As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a friend of mine, I'll try not to be too offended by her claim (subscriber-link only) that any non-white person who is not left-wing is an "Uncle Tom":
The election ushers in the first "black" Tory MP, Adam Afriye (half Ghanaian and half English) and Shailash Vara, the Ugandan Asian who has done time as deputy chairman for a party which has always repudiated equality and diversity policies and produced a string of racist politicians, including Winston Churchill....
Not to mention the first female prime minister, but I'll let that pass. "Uncle Tom" is the laziest insult in the book. How does Yasmin know that black and Asian conservatives "assimilate into the political establishment without a backward glance at their origins"? Isn't it just possible that their ideas are based on hard experience rather than an eagerness to get a seat at the top table? Has she ever considered the possibility that it's much easier to follow the right-on crowd rather than take the path of somebody like Shelby Steele, a writer who has been subjected to no end of personal attacks simply for questioning America's post-Civil Rights orthodoxies?
If Uncle Tom were around today, in fact, he'd probably be a leading light of the Democratic Party.
