UN chief: British policies are racist
BRITAIN’S policies on austerity, immigration and tackling terrorism are racist, a UN watchdog has claimed.
Ministers hit back after Tendayi Achiume, the UN’S special rapporteur on racism, called for the anti-terrorism Prevent strategy to be shut down and anti-immigration laws to be repealed.
A Home Office source said the criticism was not based on “reality” while Iain Duncan-smith, the former Conservative leader said her claims were “complete rubbish”. Jacob Rees-mogg, the Tory MP and leader of the influential European Research Group, said: “The UN ought to have better things to do than issue tendentious reports abut the UK.”
Prof Achiume – who has just finished a 12-day visit to the UK – accused the Government of using austerity measures to subordinate people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
Unveiling her preliminary findings in London yesterday, Prof Achiume said: “Austerity measures today appear inadvertently to function as a prime instrument of racial subordination.” Prof Achiume said that all “proposed fiscal policy” should be tested “to reveal the projected racially disparate impact of effects of such policies on ethnic and racial communities”. She said these assessments would be carried out in public and policies vetted so that they cannot “inadvertently exacerbate racial disparities”.
Prof Achiume – an associate professor of law at the University of California – also said that policies on immigration had been targeted at black and minority ethnic groups.
Prevent, the Government’s anti-terrorism strategy, “mandates civil servants, social workers, care-givers, educators and others, to make life-altering judgments on the basis of vague criteria in a climate of national anxieties that scapegoat entire religious, racial and ethnic groups as the presumptive enemy”, she said.
Prof Achiume took aim at immigration laws passed in 2006, 2014 and 2016 which had helped to create a more hostile environment in the UK for migrants.
Landlords had been forced to check their tenants’ immigration status which meant that they were less likely, to rent homes to tenants “with foreign accents or names”. She called for laws to be repealed that rely “on private citizens and civil servants” doing “frontline immigration enforcement, effectively transforming places like hospitals, banks and private residences into border checkpoints”.
On Brexit, Prof Achiume said she was alarmed at an increase in hate crimes and racially motivated incidents across the UK since the EU referendum. A government spokesman said: “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.”