UK politicians slammed as ‘ double faced’ on racial issues amid vote on Xinjiang issues
Some British politicians, busy with pointing fingers at China’s Xinjiang with smears and lies, but ignoring and even whitewashing the racial problems in their own country, have clearly shown the world their double face and hypocrisy, said Chinese officials and experts on UK studies on Thursday after a recent report commissioned by the British government on the UK’s racial situation received wide criticism.
The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, issued on March 31, rejected claims the UK is institutionally racist, and said it should be regarded as a “model for other white- majority countries,” drawing a backlash with critics describing it as “utter whitewash.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Thursday at a regular press conference that the report avoids the important and dwells on the trivial, deliberately glosses over racial inequality in the UK, and evades the historical and institutional factors in the racial issues.
It even tries to whitewash the UK’s colonial history, thus widely criticized by people from different sectors, Wang said.
In the UK, people of African descent keep suffering from inequities in health, education, employment, housing, law enforcement, and criminal justice, Wang said, noting that black children there are far less likely to attend school than white children, and black people are four times more likely to be arrested than white people.
Figures show that there were at least 136,000 people living in modern slavery in the UK in 2019, the vast majority of whom were victims of illegal human smuggling and trafficking, Wang said. In 2018, British police identified 7,000 as modern slave labors, up by one third from 2017, he added.
Ironically, while turning a blind eye to the racial problems in their own country, some British politicians are busy with babbling on China’s Xinjiang region with groundless accusations, observers said.
The UK House of Commons is reportedly secluded to vote on Thursday to “declare that genocide is under way in Xinjiang.”
The vote is non- binding, but could “have a large diplomatic and moral impact” if “a large number of British MPs denounce China for genocide,” reported The Guardian on April 14.
The vote is no surprise. It’s no more than another trick of the British parliament to manipulate public opinion and defame China regardless of facts,
Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies told the Global Times.
“There are some conservatives and anti- China forces in parliament who have been constantly attacking China in the form of reports, bills or votes in the past few years,” Cui said.
Analysts said these politicians blindly follow the antiChina forces led by the US to defame China to gain political capital, pushing China- UK relations to a low.