Imagine if the Mayor of London was a Tory and his website featured an image of a black family alongside the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners.’ Imagine if this right-leaning mayor had weird rules on ‘branding’, one of which was that images of young black families should not be used in mayor-related publicity because these people, with their dark skin, are not reflective of ‘our’ vision of London.

If someone can explain how judging a family on the basis of their whiteness is any better than judging a family on the basis of their blackness, I would be most grateful

There would be uproar, possibly protests, and rightly so. It would be utterly unacceptable, vile actually, to racialise Londoners in this way; to treat black families as so morally lesser than white ones that they should never be shown in official PR bumpf. Being a Londonder has nothing to do with race. If you live here and work here and bring up your children here, you’re a Londonder.

And yet, Sadiq Khan’s administration has done the equivalent of the above. Only it was an image of a white family – a mum, a dad and their two kids, walking by the Thames – that was deemed to be unreflective of real London. If someone can explain to me how judging a family on the basis of their whiteness is any better than judging a family on the basis of their blackness, I would be most grateful. In both cases, isn’t it just rank racism – judgement according to colour rather than character?

The image of the unspeakable white family appeared in an official document ironically titled ‘A City For All’. The document is full of tips for how to present the super-multicultural ‘brand’ of the mayor and the Greater London Authority. Perhaps if Sadiq had any good policies, he wouldn’t have to obsess over fluffing his ‘brand’ like some B-list celeb. He has now distanced himself from the official suggestion that a pic of a white family would run counter to his ‘brand’, saying that ‘the photo caption was added by a staff member in error, and doesn’t reflect the view of the Mayor or the Greater London Authority.’

He shouldn’t be allowed to wriggle out of this controversy so easily. For what we have here, alarmingly, is a hyper-racial document; guidelines drawn up by Khan’s own officials that, in giving examples of photographs which do or do not represent ‘real’ Londoners, divide the citizenry according to race. It is disturbing, disgraceful even, that in 2023, decades after the transatlantic struggles for racial equality, sections of officialdom still insist on reducing the masses to their skin colour.

We know this is the document’s intent because it contains another photo that is judged to be acceptable by the overlords of the GLA. This one shows Khan surrounded by people from ethnic-minority backgrounds. Of the 13 people smiling and laughing in the mayor’s presence, only one appears to be white. We should only use images that show ‘a recognisable, real and diverse London’, the guidance says, which presumably includes a photo like that one.

To my mind, this bizarre racialist PR is as insulting to people of colour as it is to whites. Sure, the white family is damned as unrepresentative, but black people and brown people are included only as stooges for the mayor’s political messaging, as a stage army for political correctness. They are reduced to symbols too, only of ‘good’ diversity rather than ‘bad’ whiteness. We all have a particular role to play in the racial dystopia of Sadiq-ruled London.

This story matters. It highlights how much the politics of identity shares in common with the grim racial imagination of old. Yes, things have been moved around. Where once our racial overseers judged black people to be morally deficient, now they’re more likely to wring their hands over the problem of ‘whiteness’: white fragility, white privilege, white arrogance. And where a white family would once be held up as the perfect social unit, now it’s images of smiling non-white people that get the nod of approval from the social engineers who rule over us.

But both then and now, a striking racial impulse is at play. People’s moral worth is linked in some way to their skin colour. This runs counter to every progressive, liberal ideal, surely? Citizenship should be an entirely post-racial matter. In the past, there were people out there who thought that my parents, who were white but also immigrants, were not real Londoners, what with their thick Irish accents. We called those people bigots. What should we call them today?