U.K. premier’s Black aide resigns

Decision follows report that Britain isn’t ‘institutionally racist’

LONDON — The most senior Black adviser to U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned, the government said Thursday, the day after a report on racial disparities concluded that Britain does not have a systemic problem with racism.

The government denied any link between the departure of Samuel Kasumu and the much-criticized report, which activists and academics have accused of ignoring the experiences of ethnic-minority Britons.

The prime minister’s office said Kasumu would leave his job as a special adviser for civil society and communities in May, as had “been his plan for several months.”

It denied that the resignation was related to Wednesday’s publication of the report by the government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which concluded that Britain is not an institutionally racist country.

But Simon Woolley, a former government equalities adviser and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, said Kasumu’s exit was connected to the “grubby” and “divisive” report.

There is a “crisis at No. 10 when it comes to acknowledging and dealing with persistent race inequality,” Woolley said, referring to the prime minister’s official residence.

Kasumu had considered quitting in February. He wrote a resignation letter, obtained by the BBC, that accused Johnson’s Conservative Party of pursuing “a politics steeped in division.” He was persuaded to remain temporarily to work on a campaign encouraging people from ethnic minority groups to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The Conservative government launched the inquiry into racial disparities in the wake of anti-racism protests last year. The panel of experts concluded that while “outright racism” exists in Britain, the country is not “institutionally racist” or “rigged” against ethnic minorities.

Citing strides to close gaps between ethnic groups in educational and economic achievement, the report said race was becoming “less important” as a factor in creating disparities that also are fueled by class and family backgrounds.

Many anti-racism activists were skeptical of the findings, saying the commission ignored real barriers to equality.

“Institutionally, we are still racist, and for a government-appointed commission … to deny its existence is deeply, deeply worrying,” said Halima Begum, chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, a racial equality think tank.

Doreen Lawrence, who became a leading anti-racism campaigner after her 18-year-old son Stephen was killed in a racially-charged 1993 attack in London, said the report’s authors were “not in touch with reality.”

“Those people who marched for Black Lives Matter? It’s denying all of that. The George Floyd stuff? It’s denied all of that,” she said.

The report was also widely disparaged by academics and scientists, who said it ignored the interplay of factors such as poverty, class and race in creating inequality.

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted racial fault lines, with Britons from Black African and Black Caribbean backgrounds dying from covid-19 at more than twice the rate as their white compatriots. Jobs, underlying health conditions and deprivation are all factors in the divide.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, public health experts Mohammad Razai, Azeem Majeed and Aneez Esmail said “structural racism is an important factor in ethnic disparities in health” and accused the report of using “cherry-picked data” to support a political agenda.

“Its attempts to undermine the well-established and evidence-based role of ethnicity on health outcomes will lead to a worsening of systemic inequalities, putting more ethnic minority lives at risk,” the authors said.

Black people in Britain are also three times as likely as white people to be arrested and twice as likely to die in police custody.

Like other countries, Britain has faced an uncomfortable reckoning with race since the death of Floyd, a Black American who died during a police arrest in Minneapolis in May 2020. His death sparked anti-racism protests around the world.

Large crowds at Black Lives Matter protests across the U.K. last summer called on the government and institutions to face up to the legacy of the British Empire and the country’s extensive profits from the slave trade.