1. The government's 258-page report on race and racism wasn't worth the keystrokes. This is gaslighting on an extraordinary scale, and goes out of its way to deny the life experiences of minority ethnicities and purposely ignore the multiple indices that have recorded and continue to record the consequences of racial discrimination and inequality. The
British Medical Journal are
especially scathing, damning it for "cherry-picked data" and its attempt "to undo several decades of irrefutable peer-reviewed research evidence on ethnic disparities, previous governments’ reports, and independent reviews all reaching similar conclusions." All of which point to the inescapable fact that "ethnic minorities have the worst health outcomes on almost all health parameters." If this wasn't a government-endorsed report, its correct repository would be the bin and its contents laughed out of contention.
2. The authors of this "
independent report" were government appointed, and it selected a tranche of lackeys and useful idiots who were always going to turn something out congenial to the Tories' interests. Again, the
BMJ criticising the author selection observes it "included a space scientist, a retired diplomat, a politics graduate, a TV presenter and an English literature graduate, but no one with an academic background in health inequalities." Even worse, it transpires a number of experts the report claims to have consulted
were not. Befitting a government of organised cynicism, the report's authors were selected from minority ethnicities to give this shoddy document a cover it would never have acquired if the Tories had relied on the Toby Youngs and Sarah Vines of this world.
3. The document might be a load of rubbish, but it is reflective of a layer of opinion within minority ethnicities, particularly those who are upwardly mobile and find themselves occupying comfortable professional or business occupations. Not dissimilar from the brief flap of so-called
conservative feminism from eight or so years ago, this is an individuated and individualising mindset of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, working hard, and overcoming racism and discrimination to make a good go of things and becoming successful. Having made their way in the world, this layer looks around itself and puts its success down to their personal qualities, such as talent, intelligence, and graft. From their point of view, because they have a nice house and a nice salary, institutionalised racism is so much poppycock. Racist attitudes are the mindset of ignoramuses and bigots, a matter of
individual fault, and therefore responsibility. To even talk about structural racism is, for these people, to provide excuses for those who did not rise with them. Their situation at the bottom of the occupational ladder is thanks to not enough application, a lack of effort, a revelling in victimhood, or in a racialised twist of the cultures-of-worklessness claims beloved of Tories and centrists, not being socialised into the right values. Therefore white privilege does not exist. What we see instead is racialised underperformance. Or, to put it another way, minority ethnicities are to blame for their predicament for being insufficiently British.
4. This is pure propaganda with a firm objective in mind. It is, obviously, another effort in the Tory culture wars. With Brexit done, Boris Johnson has to cast around for new glue to keep the Tory voter coalition together. He has the advantage of
having kept his word at his back, but no Tory government can manage without finding scapegoats and outgroups to pin their failings on. The report, coming with the official stamp of approval, serves these purposes in two ways. With the Tory coalition disproportionately dependent on the legacy print media for news and opinion formation, headlines trumpeting the "findings" that Britain is a beacon for race relations and inclusion tells its mainly white, mainly old, mainly propertied support that all is fine and dandy. Where this voter coalition has racist views, it's telling them they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. And when the government is on the hook for the likes of the Windrush deportations, profile policing, and
immigration bashing, these aren't racist either. Where there is fault it's an honest mistake or somesuch - so goes the frame. The second consequence is to attack and delegitimise complaints about racism, and moving to a position where protests and marches against racism are stripped of political recognition and positioned as social order problems
to be managed. By rejecting claims about institutional racism in the shoddiest manner possible, the aim is to show those who complain or take to the streets have nothing to get angry about. It's entirely perfomative, and therefore entirely illegitimate.
5. It's a good job Labour have come out strongly against this. Oh, wait a minute. It wasn't until lunch time on Good Friday that the party
pushed out a statement from Marsha de Cordova deploring how the report sets the clock back. But nothing from the top, which is what is exactly warranted in response to such a blunt force attack. A Labour leader worth their salt would be all over this and challenging the naked Tory attempt at reframing race, ethnicity, and nationality in a way that suits Johnson's political positioning. But, as we have seen, not only are the Labour right
not serious about winning office, Keir Starmer is practically allergic to contesting the Tory definition of political issues. He has not dissented from their
management of the pandemic, so he's not about to wade into what the Labour right would regard as identity politics. And so the party concedes more ground to the Tories and fails to stick up for key constituents of its own coalition, making the job of cobbling together a coalition broad enough to turf them out of office even more difficult.
www.theguardian.com
