The Report on Racism

The "Report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities" has just been published.  The Commissioners were nearly all from BAME backgrounds and have produced a robust and fair Report.

The Report identified a class divide in which the cycle of advantage maintains a section of the population in wealth and leaves the large bulk of the population in relative poverty.   The wealthy class is largely white British but the poorer class consists of large numbers of white British and other ethnic groups.  This class divide causes a bias in the crude statistics on disadvantage so that majority, poor white British are labelled as "white supremacists" etc. when it is the small wealthy class that actually creates the disparity that causes this analysis.

The most striking finding is that different ethnic groups had very different experiences and outcomes.  Educational outcomes demonstrate this at a glance:

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Most ethnic groups had better outcomes than most white British children.  The rich white British group have excellent outcomes because they send their children to private schools.  Within the lower classes the white British do extremely badly.  The Report found that there was "..an attainment gap approximately 8 times smaller than that found in the US" between black and white students.

Data on entry rates to higher education showed that in 2020 White students were the least likely to go to university at 32.6%, followed by students from the Mixed (39.0%), Black (47.5%), Asian (53.1%) and Chinese (71.7%) ethnic groups.

The Report asked that education be widened to encompass the role of ethnic minorities in British history.  I disagree strongly with this idea because it distorts British history into the study of Empire.  This is a dreadful mistake because the Empire is not the main thread of British history.  The main thread of British history runs through the foundation of Parliament, Lollardy,  the Civil War, the limitation of the monarchy and the birth of democracy and the resulting Enlightenment.  It is our domestic history that makes Britain great and different.  A focus on Empire in education would be a direct attack on the culture of ordinary British people and remove the pivotal role of British civilisation in the rise of the democratic West.

The median pay gap between ethnic groups is very small when cultural factors such as the proportion of women working is taken into account (the "adjusted" figures below).

White British - Ethnic Group pay. Positive figures = lower earnings.

The use of "median" figures adjusts for the much higher pay of the white British upper middle classes.  However, this still has a small effect so if the rich white British were removed there would probably be even less difference between UK born ethnic groups.

Ethnic groups are heavily represented in the NHS.  The term "BAME" is wholly inappropriate when considering health workers because nearly half of all doctors come from non-white groups and probably more than 50% of NHS doctors are non-white-British. The non-white doctors are not a minority in the NHS.

The anomalously high death rate from COVID amongst non-white doctors needs investigating, especially when these are high income individuals. 95% of the doctors who died were non-white, some of whom were running the medical units where they worked.

Non-white British ethnic groups were more likely to experience hate crime than the white British:

An important contribution of this report was to recognise that ending racism imposes a huge burden on a majority population: "Imagine  a  world  with  just  2  groups  in  which  both  are  equally prejudiced, but the minority forms just 10% of the population. When it comes to hiring, the  potential  prejudice  faced  by  a  minority  applicant  will  be  much  greater  than  the  potential  prejudice  against  an  applicant  from  the  majority." 

However, because the white group massively outnumbers all of the other groups a large number of white British people are experiencing hate crimes. As an example there are about 20 times as many white people as black so if 0.2% experience hate crimes there are 3-4 times as many white people being subject to hate crimes as black people.  White people were about 8 times more likely to be the perpetrators of hate crimes as black people but when the fact that there are 20 times as many white people as black people is taken into account each white person was only half as likely or less to commit a hate crime as a black person.

The Report has an in-depth analysis of "stop and search" figures by ethnicity.  It considered the fact that stop and search was used to prevent homicides of black people in London (72% of all London homicides). Black people were 4 times more likely to be a victim of violence than white people, and 8 times more likely to be a perpetrator in London. However, the Report concluded that this area of policing needed attention, especially given the effect of stop and search on trust in the police.

The Report made a very important point about the under representation of ethnic minorities in the police force:

The Report identified a lack of applicants as a particular problem. This would be expected from a largely lower class population because the lower class are always anti-police and scorn class members who sympathise with the law.

The section on COVID was interesting, the data suggests that some ethnic groups had corrected the factors that caused increased death rates by the time the second wave hit:

The source of the graph above suggested that it may have been the intensive dissemination of information on COVID by various agencies that caused the fall in mortality.  It seems that people were dying of distrust.

Overall this was one of the fairest and most complete reports on racism in the UK that has been published.

Many of the problems that are assigned to racism are actually about class. The majority of white British people are discriminated against by the "system" as much as black people.  It is a tragedy that white middle class "socialists" have been unaware that it is their classism, their rejection of the class war in favour of exploiting racial tensions, that is now the cause of much of the racism that remains in the UK.  

Many young white middle class British people have adopted anti-racism as their religion. This is possibly the most dubious religion in history because it is founded on hatred: the hatred of racists who are popularly imagined to be poor white working class men.  Militant British anti-racism is permitting classism to masquerade as holiness.  British anti-racism is too often a weapon to justify the total lack of empathy among the British rich and educated for the British poor.

31/3/2021