Campaigners criticise 'deeply cynical' race report

A government-commissioned report which found that the UK "no longer" had a system rigged against people from ethnic minorities, has been described as "deeply cynical".

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities said family structure and social class had a bigger impact than race on how people's lives turned out.

But unions have said it ignores black and ethnic minority people's concerns.

While Labour has accused the government of downplaying institutional racism.

The commission was set up after Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racism protests across the country last summer - triggered by the killing of George Floyd in the US.

But the report has been criticised by campaigners and unions, with the GMB's national officer Rehana Azam saying it "feels like a deeply cynical report".

She said it was "completely irresponsible and immoral" and ignored black and ethnic minority workers' concerns.

Boris Johnson said the government would consider the implications of the report's recommendations for future policy and remained "fully committed to building a fairer Britain".

The commission's 264-page report concluded that the UK is not yet a "post-racial country" - but its success in removing race-based disparity in education and, to a lesser extent, the economy, "should be regarded as a model for other white-majority countries".

In his foreword to the report chairman Tony Sewell, an education consultant and ex-charity boss, said while the "impediments and disparities do exist", it continued, they were "varied and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism".

Black Lives Matter UK tweeted that it was "disappointed" that the report overlooked disproportionality in the criminal justice system.

Black people in England and Wales are nine times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers, it said.

The report thanked the "mainly young people" behind the BLM movement for putting the focus on race but said progress could not be achieved by "cleaving to a fatalistic account that insists nothing has changed".

Among the main findings of the report were:

Labour's shadow women and equalities secretary Marsha de Cordova labelled the report a "divisive polemic" that downplayed institutional racism.

Her colleague David Lammy, who led a review on racial bias in the justice system, tweeted that Britain's black community was being "gaslighted" and said he was "tired of the endless debate about whether structural racism exists with little desire to actually address it".

The commission said unemployment differences between ethnic groups had declined and the pay gap between ethnic minority workers and white workers was also falling and at its lowest level for almost a decade.

But TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said "institutional and structural racism exists in the UK, in both the labour market and wider society", and said black and minority ethnic workers were far more likely "to be in low-paid, insecure jobs" compared to white workers.

Prof Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University told BBC news the report was "not a genuine attempt to understand racism in Britain" or "make a substantive change".

He said the fact there was a discussion over whether institutional racism existed was the problem, "because it does exist, it clearly exists and the question should be 'how do we address this'".

Liberal Democrat equalities spokeswoman Wera Hobhouse said the report must not be used as an excuse to continue "shameful inaction" on issues of racial injustice.

She called for an end to "hostile environment" immigration policies and the "disproportionate" use of police stop and search tactics.

The commission found not enough information was given to the public about why police used stop and search, saying the focus was on drugs rather than knife offences.

In its recommendations, the commission also called for the term BAME, which stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, to be dropped, calling it "unhelpful" and "imprecise and often misleading".

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a member of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, said the report was not denying institutional racism existed but said the commission had not discovered evidence of it in the areas it had looked.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said progress had been made to tackle racism. "That's not to say there aren't instances of racism that of course exist in this country," he told ITV.

"But if I think about the things that happened to me when I was a kid, I can't imagine those things happening to me now."

The report's 24 recommendations included: