Sunday Express

I cannot think of a country where colour matters less

- By Dinesh Dhamija ENTREPRENE­UR AND AUTHOR Dinesh Dhamija, a serial entreprene­ur, was the founder of ebookers. He is the author of Book It!, just published by Austin Macauley

AT A DINNER hosted by Durham University last month, a speaker said there was no evidence of discrimina­tion being a factor in under achievemen­t by British students of colour, provoking a walkout by a small number of student attendees.

He also referred – perhaps unwisely – to the sex-worker training sessions recently announced by the university, but that was not his key offence.

His offence was to challenge a “victim narrative” on the part of British ethnic minorities and people who perhaps wish them well.

There is in my view nowhere where the rights and talents of our minority groups are better protected.that message seems to have reached the desperate Afghan and Syrian refugees as they risk their lives to get here even from France.

As a first generation immigrant myself, never have I been more conscious of how misguided are the views of woke and lobbying groups like Black Lives Matter.

In my half century of learning, working and building businesses here, I cannot think of a country in the world where your colour matters less, and your freedom to live your chosen life is greater.

And I certainly include the US in that comparison, where I have seen the legacy of slavery and its ugly sister segregatio­n as recently as the 1970s cast a terrible pall over that country’s race relations.

In my new book – Book It! – I tell the story of my arrival and life journey in the UK within a decade or so of the Windrush Generation, whose experience has rightly been looked at so carefully.

When I got here, the Sixties had begun to swing and the “winds of change”, in Macmillan’s words, were seeing the sun set on the British Empire.

I arrived here in 1968, aged 16, – a tall and gawky brown person, with mixed Hindu and Muslim forebears who had lived in India and straddled the border of the new Pakistan, after partition in 1947. My parents had fled the resulting violence, in which a million of their fellow citizens and neighbours were killed by their

own people, and moved us to the Middle East, to what is now Dubai.

My parents had some savings and I had the mixed blessing of starting in a sixth form at a boarding school.

This was the only time in my life where I did experience some racism, although I worked out that the real discrimina­tion was against people who couldn’t play sport.

Fortunatel­y my father and uncle had taught me tennis and golf to a high standard. And I picked up cricket quickly there, too, and that was it – no more snide remarks or jokes about my accent, which rapidly became local, at least for middle-class southern England.

Cambridge, though, was the revelation. There was a huge variety of undergradu­ate and postgradua­te students from all over the world.

I went to one of the newer colleges which was focused on meritocrat­ic entry from all levels of society. These were the glory days of the grammar school system and my cohort would number Ken Clarke, Michael Howard, and John Selwyn Gummer, all from such background­s who went on to lead in politics.

Today, the university to which I have just made a £1million donation to support British underprivi­leged and ethnic entrystude­nts, rightly agonises about “open access”. But nowhere could be more meritocrat­ic, certainly not the Ivy League universiti­es in the US, where upwards of a quarter

of all places are subject to the “economic influence” of parents.

My career afterwards was perhaps not typical. Early on I chose entreprene­urship, starting with a ticket “bucket shop” at Earls Court station basement with my wife.

My internatio­nal background became a huge asset for me in building a billion pound listed company in the UK, employing 2,500 people at our peak.

IN ALL WE employed more than 5,000 Londoners over 25 years. And at every turn I found the UK was a credible and honest base for my clients – often internatio­nal airlines – and the UK system was colourblin­d, with high incentives to a business owner/manager.

So my message to the students at Durham, and our young everywhere from all background­s, is: learn to hear statements which do not blame economic underperfo­rmance on colonial legacy.

These statements are at least worth debating, as is why white working-class students are now outpaced at school by all other demographi­cs.

Freedom of speech is the sentinel of our free way of life and all the opportunit­ies for fulfilment and service which come with that.

“As a first generation immigrant myself, I have never been more conscious of how misguided are the views of the woke

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 ?? Picture: STEVE WOOD/GETTY ?? DIVERSITY: Britain in the 70s as ‘the sun was setting on the Empire’
Picture: STEVE WOOD/GETTY DIVERSITY: Britain in the 70s as ‘the sun was setting on the Empire’

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