We should be proud of Britain’s progress in fighting racism
FOR ALL their screeching about social justice, the woke warriors thrive on creating a climate of discord and despair. In pursuit of their revolutionary agenda, they paint Britain as a land of profound bigotry, where ethnic minorities are permanently oppressed by a racist white society.
But now a heroic trumpet blast has been sounded against this bleak, simplistic narrative, which has increasingly prevailed across our civic life.
In a comprehensive report published yesterday, the independent Commission on Race and Disparities argued the UK, far from being a haven of intolerance, should “be regarded as a model for other white-majority counties”.
Through 264 pages of wellresearched analysis, it repeatedly challenged the fashionable dogma of minority victimhood, pointing out that equality is advancing in almost every field, as reflected by growing diversity in the professions and the reduction in the pay gap.
Education is “an emphatic success story, with children from ethnic minorities outperforming their white peers”.
Set up by the Government last summer in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the commission is headed by Dr Tony Sewell, founder of Generating Genius, a charity that aims to promote academic excellence for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
IHAVE been lucky enough to work with Dr Sewell in the past, and always found him a man of originality, insight and principle. Those qualities certainly shone through his commission’s willingness to dispute the conventional orthodoxy about race.
Its report did not deny that overt prejudice still exists in Britain and there is still some way to go before we build “a post-racial” society.
Nevertheless, it rejected the idea that the fabric of our country is gripped by “institutional racism”.As Dr Sewell said: “We no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.”
Indeed, the commission says a blinkered refusal to recognise progress made over the past 50 years could seriously damage race relations. In its own words, an obsession with “white privilege and institutional racism” will achieve nothing “beyond alienating the decent centre ground – a centre which is occupied by people of all races”.
All around us we see barriers coming down. Race is no obstacle to advancement.
In politics, great offices of state like the Treasury and the Home Office are held by the offspring of migrants. At Cambridge, Homerton College has announced its new principal is Lord Simon Woolley, who was fostered as a child, brought up on a council estate, left school without A-levels, but gained a degree and became a dynamic campaigner for black engagement in electoral politics.
THROUGHOUT law, medicine, the arts, sports, the media, enterprise and academia there are similar success stories.
If Britain were a racist hell, why would so many migrants want to settle here?
As Dr Rakib Ehsan, of the Henry Jackson Society, says, the 2020 Migrant Integration Policy Index shows “the UK comfortably outperforms diverse white-majority European countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands when it comes to anti-discrimination protections.”
But the professional agitators and virtue-signalling activists
do not want to hear any of this. They have a vested interest in fomenting divisions. For them, toxic identity politics creates lucrative work in the racial grievance industry, props up their ideology and brings in votes.
That is why they have reacted with such hysterical fury.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is “disappointed”, Halima Begum of the Runnymede Trust wails that she feels “deeply, massively let down”, while Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, describes it as a “complete nonsense”. He is the academic who recently stated that the British Empire “did far more damage” than the Nazis.
Fortunately, Dr Sewell’s commission was drawn from the real world, including an economist, scientist, surgeon, and entrepreneur. That is why it has a far better grasp of reality than the zealots of wokedom, who find racism everywhere.
Backed by a wealth of data, its evidence was powerful and its recommendations practical, such as an expansion of apprenticeships and an end to the Orwellian practice of “unconscious bias training”.
Altogether, it provides an uplifting vision of Britain’s future, one rejected only by those who despise our country.
‘Virtue-signalling activists have a vested interest in fomenting division’