Why Labour’s plan for a new Race Equality Act would only entrench racial division in Britain
Voters still know worryingly little about what exactly Keir starmer might do should he win power at the next election.
Many of the promises he espoused before he secured the leadership in 2020 have long been abandoned.
Gone are bold plans to abolish tuition fees and ‘ end the national scandal of spiralling student debt’. Dropped, too, are Corbynite proclamations such as: ‘Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders.’
to accuse him of flip-flopping would be an understatement.
But one thing we can be sure of is that, under starmer, Labour would introduce a new ‘ race equality Act’ to ‘ tackle structural racism at source’. the party’s ‘women’s and equalities spokesperson’ Anneliese Dodds promises this ‘ landmark’ will be a ‘core part’ of a future Labour government, which could be just months away.
You might remember Dodds as a supremely uninspiring shadow Chancellor — in post for just over a year between 20202021 — who was swiftly demoted by starmer after failing to make an impression on the electorate and following a raft of sub-par media interviews.
But what exactly is the race equality Act — and why should anyone be worried about it? For a start, many doubt that ‘structural racism’ even exists in this country — as it did, for example, in apartheid south Africa or Nazi Germany. the race relations Act 1965 banned discrimination on the grounds of ‘colour, race or ethnic or national origins’, while the 2010 equality Act enshrined race as a ‘ protected characteristic’ in law.
What more could we need in this area? A lot, if you believe that legislating in this field is more likely to make ethnicminority Britons vote for you.
Keir starmer first committed to the proposed law in 2020, after commissioning a ‘ race equality taskforce’ during the early weeks of the pandemic to study the impact of Covid on Britain’s ethnic minorities.
The taskforce was chaired by Baroness Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager stephen, and included the activist immigration lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie. this week, McKenzie opined that ‘ racism haunts the Post office scandal’, and in 2021, she helped to ensure that a Jamaicaborn man, who had served eight years in British prison for kidnapping, successfully avoided deportation thanks partly to his ‘ high blood pressure’. he even won damages from the home office.
to no one’s surprise, then, the report, when it was published in october 2020, claimed Covid had ‘thrived on . . . decades of structural injustice, inequality and discrimination’. In response, starmer announced Labour would introduce a new Act to fight ‘structural racial inequality’, boasting that this would be a ‘defining cause’ for his government.
the precise details remain sketchy. But a glance at several policies floated so far suggest Labour is planning a familiar programme of wrong- headed diversity schemes, openborders initiatives — and, worst of all, the systematic fostering of racial grievances.
tackling racism is a noble aim. But Labour, blindly pursuing the increasingly discredited ideology of the Black Lives Matter movement, seemingly plans to use the Act to blame any difference in outcomes between ethnic groups on ‘structural racism’ rather than complex social factors.
For example, the Act would apparently force companies with more than 250 employees to report their ‘ethnicity pay gap’.
If a company finds a ‘gap’ between what its white employees are earning versus its black ones, it could face hefty fines for not addressing this.
‘ We think the evidence is extremely clear that this is necessary,’ insists Dodds.
of course, it may be that the boardrooms of Britain are swollen with racists who systematically pay their black and Asian staff less than their white employees.
More likely, perhaps, is that ‘paygap’ data regularly fails to take account of hours worked, relative experience, qualifications or the nature of individual roles.
take hartlepool in County Durham: more than 95 per cent white, with an older-than-average population. If a company there finds most of its ethnic-minority employees happen to be younger, to have qualified more recently and thus work in more junior roles than their white colleagues, would it be fair to brand that company racist when its ‘ethnicity pay gap’ figures produce a result Anneliese Dodds doesn’t like?
equally, would it be fair for those more junior staff to insist on higher pay, purely because their more senior colleagues were white?
Also promised in the Act is a plan to ‘tackle health disparities’ between various ethnicities. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this in principle. But not all ‘health disparities’ come down to racism. It is true that, during Covid, minority- ethnic Britons suffered a higher mortality rate than white ones.
During the public inquiry into Covid last year, Leslie thomas, a lawyer representing the Federation of ethnic Minority healthcare organisations, claimed that ‘institutional racism’ within the Nhs was to blame for the ‘disproportionate impact’ of Covid on these racial groups.
some 42 per cent of doctors, dentists and consultants in the Nhs are ‘ black and minority ethnic’ according to the health service’s Workforce race equality standard. Can an organisation that represents ethnic minorities in greater proportions than the wider population truly be ‘institutionally racist’?
During Covid, people from ethnic minorities were more likely to live in intergenerational houses and densely populated areas, as well as to suffer from comorbidities such as diabetes. All of these worsened the impact of the virus.
Moreover, on several health outcomes, white Britons fare worse than minorities. Cancer research UK points out that ethnic minorities enjoy better outcomes for most cancers than white Britons do, partly thanks to lower rates of smoking and alcohol consumption.
Meanwhile, the office for National statistics recently found that between 2011 and 2014, white and ‘ mixed’ ethnic groups had ‘lower life expectancy at birth than all other ethnic groups’ — while ‘the Black African group had statistically significant higher life expectancy than most groups’.
Black Britons live longer than white ones? Don’t expect Labour to discuss that when it bemoans Britain’s ‘ ethnic health disparities’. even more alarming, perhaps, is the third set of proposals for the race equality Act: preferential treatment for ethnic minorities in swathes of public life. to this end, Labour has suggested that black-led organisations could be favoured for securing billions of pounds worth of government contracts.
‘taskforce’ member Jacqueline McKenzie complained last year: ‘there are no black firms that currently benefit [from public contracts] at all,’ clarifying that she meant ‘African heritage firms’.
the risks of this approach are glaringly obvious. taxpayers’ money should be spent on the grounds of cost and quality — and not because the supplier’s bosses happen to be of ‘African heritage’.
starmer has even backed allBame (Black and minority ethnic) shortlists for parliamentary candidacies — an approach currently banned under the 2010 equality Act — insisting that such a policy would make Labour ‘truly representative’. In fact, it would be the opposite of ‘ diversity and inclusion’.
When rishi sunak unveiled his Cabinet in october 2022, it included five Ministers from minority ethnic backgrounds — including the Prime Minister himself. race is no barrier to success in British public life.
BUT perhaps the most shocking of all the policies Labour is touting in its putative Act is to enshrine an openborder scheme for illegal migrants who travelled to Britain as children.
In 2023, McKenzie revealed there was strong consensus within the taskforce: ‘ We’re not going to deport anybody who was here as a child, thousands of them [arrive] each year.’
Just last week, it emerged that 45 per cent of the 8,766 ‘child’ asylum seekers who arrived in Britain from 2020 to september 2023 were actually adults, including dozens who were over the age of 30, according to a report from Migration Watch UK.
And in November, a 31-year-old from Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, who arrived in Britain as a teenager, admitted killing three Britons who were stabbed in Nottingham, as well as the attempted murder of three others. In what sane world should he not be deported?
Far from escaping the radical identity politics of the Corbyn era, Labour has doubled down on them.
this Act would institutionalise racial division and cause immense damage to the fabric of British society.
starmer and Dodds should scrap it — or we’ll all pay the price.