We need to kick identity politics out of public life.
Racism has been weaponised across our public services and institutions.
In the cases of the Nottingham and Southport killers, the Manchester Arena bomb attack, and the murder of Sara Sharif, the people who were meant to protect us from harm failed because they were too scared of being accused of being racist.
This has not happened by accident.
In the years since the Black Lives Matter protests, race-grifting activists who argue we should defund the police, decolonise the curriculum and pay reparations have been given far too much access to our public sector.
Their advice has been as clear as it is wrong: that we should treat people differently based on the colour of their skin to make up for some fictional collective colonial guilt.
One of the root causes is a law called the Public Sector Equality Duty.
It requires every public body to obsess about equality and diversity in everything they do, with the constant threat of being sued if they fail.
It is the doorway through which marched Stonewall fanatics who said biological men should be in women’s prisons and the defund the police brigade who told the police you should treat people differently based on the colour of their skin.
It gave those who said talking about the grooming gangs was an example of ‘anti-Muslim racism’ the power to write up an Islamophobia definition that gives special protections to just one religion.
One politician above all others has had the courage and determination to reject this madness. When Black Lives Matter was preaching about white privilege, Kemi Badenoch was the only voice ripping apart their arguments and exposing why this ideology is so dangerous.
We have to rid ourselves of this dangerous thinking which will only breed more division and resentment.
That’s why I backed Kemi to lead my party, and why the Conservatives would scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty and bring back common sense to our public services.
That’s the only way to restore trust in policing and the wider state: by upholding the age-old principle that we are all equal under the law.