PM’s race audit will only spread bile and division
NOTHING appeals to the vanity of the political establishment more than the chance to pose as the champion of racial equality. The obsession with the fashionable creed of anti-discrimination is the perfect vehicle for selfrighteous civic leaders and power-hungry officials.
It enables them to proclaim their moral virtue while they bully the public, spew out their guilt-tripping propaganda and indulge in relentless social engineering.
This week the state machine embarked on another frenzied round of sanctimonious hectoring dressed up as the fight against prejudice. On Tuesday the Government released its much-hyped Race Disparity Audit, an extensive study about the experiences of life for different ethnic groups, covering 130 areas including education and employment. All too predictably this report was used by the political elite and race campaigners as a further opportunity to portray Britain as a fundamentally unfair society, scarred by bigotry against ethnic minorities.
“Deep-seated racial inequality has been laid bare,” proclaimed one Left-wing newspaper. Theresa May, who commissioned the audit when she became Prime Minister last year with a pledge to fight “burning injustice”, warned that discriminators would now have “nowhere to hide”.
But all this condemnation of supposed prejudice was based on a fallacy. The self-lacerating interpretation of the race audit was actually a vast, manipulative exercise in deceit.
YES, the report highlighted disparate outcomes for various ethnicities but these did not always fit the conventional narrative of triumphant white privilege and oppression. Indeed in several fields white Brits actually have it tougher than ethnic minorities.
This certainly applies to schooling, where white working-class pupils have the lowest levels of attainment of any group. Indian youngsters living here are twice as likely to go to university as white British school-leavers.
Just as tellingly, one third of Indian households in Britain have a weekly income of more than £1,000 compared with one quarter of white British ones. Those figures make a mockery of the wails about institutional racism.
It is absurd to blame any disparity on raw prejudice, as the social justice warriors like to do. The audit points out that young black men are three times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts. But such crime rates can be influenced by many social factors such as absent fathers and gang culture.
Despite what the race lobby argues, there is no hard evidence of racism in the criminal justice system. Jury conviction rates are much the same right across the ethnic spectrum.
In one crucial respect it blows apart one of the progressives’ favourite causes: that of mass immigration. For decades we have been told that we need a massive annual influx of foreigners to boost our economy because only hard-working migrants will do the work that the feckless British will not.
It is an attitude summed up by Left-wing columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who once wrote of “taxpaying immigrants past and present who keep indolent British scroungers on their couches, drinking beer and watching TV”.
Yet the Government’s audit shows that overall black and ethnic minority people are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Britons. With around 600,000 new arrivals every year, Britain is importing joblessness and welfare dependency on a massive scale at a huge cost to our civic infrastructure.
But the British state and its ideological allies do not care about such facts. They adore the relentless demographic upheaval brought about by mass immigration because it means there is always scope to demand more intervention, more awareness-raising and more regulations.
That explains why, in the name of promoting diversity, we have ended up in the grotesque situation of public employers practising open discrimination against white people, as reflected in training schemes geared solely to favoured groups.
Only yesterday it was revealed that the British Transport Police have held a series of recruitment events that are open only “to women and black or ethnic minority candidates”.
BY focusing so intensely on ethnic differences it fuels division, hinders integration and spreads resentment. In a culture where failings or setbacks can be blamed on racism there is a direct incentive to whip up grievances and wallow in victimhood.
As former deputy mayor of London Munira Mirza, herself the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, put it yesterday, the Government’s audit “is a bogus moral crusade that pollutes the public space with false accusations based on selective evidence”.
Just as disturbing is the selfloathing, where love of our national heritage is regarded as immoral and patriotism a sin. It is the outlook that sees the term “English” as racist, wants to banish Christianity and topple Nelson’s column.
But this emphasis on race does a terrible disservice to Britain. We are one of the most tolerant and just societies on Earth, which is precisely why so many immigrants want to settle here. Yet we will lose those qualities if the divisive politicians and bureaucrats have their way.
‘It fuels resentment, hinders integration’