WHAT AN INSULT
No 10 fury as UN envoy from Zambia claims Tory policies and Brexit have made UK more racist
TORy policies and the Brexit vote have made Britain more racist, a United Nations envoy claimed last night.
Tendayi Achiume also said UK immigration policy was so discriminatory it might even violate international human rights laws.
But Downing Street hit back furiously last night, insisting the special rapporteur had commended UK legislation and policy ‘to tackle direct and indirect racial discrimination’.
Miss Achiume had cited Theresa May’s creation of a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants and the anti-terrorism Prevent programme.
The Zambia-born academic said the adoption of ‘sweeping austerity measures’ since 2010 had disproportionately affected ethnic minorities.
She has been in the UK for 12 days to investigate racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
In advance of her trip, she said her mission would also look at whether ‘discrimination and exclusion’ may have been exacerbated by the vote to leave the EU. Conservative MPs also responded with fury to her intervention, accusing the special rapporteur of having an axe to grind.
‘It is complete rubbish,’ said former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith. ‘Every single one of these UN rapporteur reports are not worth the paper they are written on – they are a total waste of time. The people who come here have always got an axe to grind.’
In a press conference in central London yesterday, Miss Achiume, who is based in the UK, said Brexit threatened racial equality.
She added: ‘Another Brexit-related trend that threatens racial equality in the UK has been the growth in the acceptability of explicit racial, ethnic and religious intolerance.’
There had been ‘high levels of anxiety among immigrants regarding their status following the UK’s departure from the EU’, she said.
Asked whether she thought the Brexit vote had made Britain a more racist country, she said: ‘The environment leading up to the referendum, during the referendum and after the referendum has made racial ethnicities more vulnerable to racial discrimination and intolerance.’
Of the Government’s economic policies, she said: ‘Austerity measures have been disproportionately detrimental to racial and ethnic minority communities.’
Appearing to play down the impact of terrorist attacks, Miss Achiume said: ‘In recent years, a series of terrorist attacks by individuals purporting to act in the name of Islam have served as triggers for national panic regarding Britain’s security.
‘This panic has been exacerbated by, and provided rich fodder for, outrageous and deeply offensive portrayals in the media, and even by leading politicians that cast Muslims as inherently dangerous, inherently opposed to Britain’s prosperity and inherently foreign.
‘This presumption of foreignness is widely peddled in public and political discourse that belies the deep, historical ties many British Muslims have to this country.’ She called for the Prevent scheme to be suspended and for an audit to be conducted on its impact on racial equality, especially within Muslim communities.
Miss Achiume said that farRight groups had gained ground and she urged politicians to condemn racism toward Jewish and Muslim people.
‘Stakeholders raised serious concerns about the failure of political leaders on the Left and the Right to consistently and unequivocally condemn anti- Semitism and Islamophobia perpetrated in the media, in public spaces and even by members of the UK parliament,’ she said. She also appeared to link the recent rise in anti-Semitism to the EU referendum – rather than to the far Left. She produced no evidence to back this up.
In a statement, Downing Street said: ‘ Miss Achiume welcomed our race disparity audit as “a remarkable step towards transforming formal commitments to racial equality into reality”.
‘We have made great progress, but the Prime Minister is clear that if there is no rational explanation for ethnic disparities, then we – as a society – must take action to change them. That is precisely what we will do.’
Tory MP Peter Bone said Miss Achiume was ‘plain wrong’. ‘The person who made this claim that we are somehow more racist now is totally ill informed,’ he added.
‘They always have an axe to grind’