According to a new report by racial equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust, racism is still "systemic" in England and legislation, institutional practices and customs are harming ethnic minority groups as they still face inequalities across health, the criminal justice system, education, employment, immigration and politics. The authors write that they believe the government’s new approach to equalities will fail to improve these outcomes “and may in fact worsen them”.

The report provides the independent civil society perspective to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) by examining the situation of race and racism in England. Describing the Government's recent Sewell Report as: "divisive and dishonest", the report says government practice  "stands in clear breach" of the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). UN's human rights experts had previously criticised the Sewell Report, stating: "In 2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent."

Read more here and here. Download the Runnymede Trust report here,

A proposal for the Church if England to appoint racial justice officers in each of its 42 dioceses has been turned down by the Archbishop's Council due to cost. It was a key recommendation from the 'From Lament to Action' report published in April after years of inaction over institutional racism. Co-chairs of the anti-racism taskforce that produced the report, the Rev Arun Arora and the Rev Sonia Barron, said they were “deeply shocked and disappointed” and that it “boils down to a matter of priorities” and would “inevitably lead to conclusions as to how much or how little this matters to decision-makers in the church”.

Elizabeth Henry, who resigned as the C of E’s race adviser last year, said: “To say it’s too costly is a gross insult. It’s to say racial justice is too expensive when it is a foundation of our faith. This decision is a disgrace. We have to stop waiting for the church to allow us racial justice. I pray black and brown people will vote with our feet.”

Other recommendations in the report included that shortlists for senior clergy should include at least one appointable candidate of a minority ethnic background by September, with an expectation this occurs for all other jobs in the Church.

Read more here and here..

​'From Lament to Action' is the report by the Anglican Church's Archbishop's Anti-Racism Taskforce. Released in the same week as a shocking Panorama programme 'Is the Church Racist?', issues a warning to the Archbishops that a failure to act could be a “last straw” for many people of UK Minority Ethnic (UKME) or Global Majority Heritage (GMH) backgrounds with “devastating effects” on the future of the Church. The report is clear that addressing the underlying issues of systemic racism is a “missional imperative” for the Church, and warns: “Disregarding a significant part of the population, and thus denying the gifts they bring for the service of the Church, must not continue.”

​Read the News Release here. Download the report here. Read a summary of key recommendations here.

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report continues to gather controversy. New research this week from the Resolution Foundation, and new work from the London School of Economics contradict the report's optimistic picture of a closing gap in employment and pay between the various ethnic groups in the UK, leading the Independent's Ben Chu to ask: "Is the jobs market racist?" 

Unemployment rates have been consistently more than double for black/African/Caribbean people in the last 20 years. The most recent figures which reflect the Covid pandemic show a spike to 14% for black people versus 4.5% for white people. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data also suggests that the unemployment rate of black people aged 16-24 has almost doubled from 24% in 2019 to 42% at the end of last year. For white people aged 16-24 the rate has increased from 10% to only 12.5%. Chu comments: "There’s really no room for doubt that black people suffered from higher unemployment rates than white people in the years before the crisis and that they were also hit much harder during the pandemic, especially the young."

Similar disparities over pay are shown in the LSE research, which states: “It is clear there is no evidence for pay gaps being smaller for ethnic minorities now than they were 25 years ago, contrary to the impression given by the Sewell Report”. Chu concludes: "...when it comes to its analysis of the UK labour market, the unsubstantiated claims and apparent data cherry-picking of the CRED report have fatally undermined the credibility of its conclusions".

​Read Chu's full article here. Download the Resolution Foundation report "Uneven Steps". Download the LSE report.

The Report released by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities on March 31 has generated a huge response, a lot of it critical, and some of it, regrettably, personal. We in MJR note the wide breadth of sources of this criticism and the justifiable grounds from which they speak. However, we share the calls in this statement from the National Church Leaders Forum – A Black Christian Voice (NCLF) for "real engagement with elements of the report that could be impactful", and for "all participants in public discourse to adopt a respectful and constructive approach in the exchange of views".

The statement also says: "While significant progress has been made in our multicultural society, much more needs to be done before the U.K. can justly regard ourselves as a beacon of racial justice in the world." It goes on to welcome several of the report's recommendations, encourage further work in areas that align with those of previous reports, and strongly urge that "this and future reports undergo a process of peer review (to avoid further division)".

Read the full NCLF statement here. Read the Commission's full Report here.

'Facts Don't Lie: One Working Class: Race, Class and Inequalities', a new report from the Runnymede Trust, claims government failure to fully enact the 2010 Equality Act has exacerbated inequalities in England in the pandemic. Section 1 of the Act requires authorities to carry out their functions having “due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”. This puts a legal obligation on education authorities in England to ensure working class children on free school meals were fed properly while schools were shut and had access to laptops for remote learning.

Instead, according to the report, the government is "choosing to pursue a politics steeped in division" (quoting the Prime Minister’s Special Adviser on Minorities, Samuel Kasumu,). "From the heart of Whitehall, Kasumu’s words leave no doubt that a government facing unprecedented challenges in unifying a nation has instead chosen a moment of national crisis to divide us, not least by seeking to drive a wedge between constituent groups within the working class, framed around the notion of white marginalisation." 

Report co-author Dr Halima Begum, accuses the government minister for women and inequalities Liz Truss of making a "false equivalence" in claiming white working class children were being neglected because of a focus on protected characteristics such as race. This simply because a substantial number of the working class are BME people. Speaking of a "calculated government strategy", Dr Begum claims "such rhetoric only pits one vulnerable community against another, while doing little to assist anyone to escape the shackles of their privation and poverty.”

Read more here. Read the 'Facts Don't Lie' report here. Read about "The Weaponisation of the Working Class" by report co-author Nick Treolar here.

Beyond the Hostile Environment is a new report by think-tank IPPR. It is the full report after the interim, Access denied. Over the past decade, the government has rolled out a series of measures with the specific aim of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for people who are currently residing in the UK without immigration status. These measures prevent people without the correct status from accessing employment, housing, public funds, free healthcare, and financial services, and are designed to encourage them to leave the UK of their own accord. In this final report, IPPR assesses six different policy options for addressing the adverse impacts of the hostile environment on individuals and communities and for reforming the current system of immigration enforcement.

Read more and download the report here.

A 157-page audit by Historic England, the public body responsible for preserving buildings and monuments, has identified hundreds of sites around Britain with links to the slave trade, including schools, farms, pubs and gravestones. The list includes halls, churches and entire villages have been linked to the “transatlantic slavery economy”. 

The research “identified the tangible presence of England’s slavery past in buildings, houses, streets, industrial heritage, urban fabrics and rural landscapes”. The report states: "The transatlantic slavery economy was invested in the built environment of the local area in housing, civic society organisations, churches, village halls, farms, shooting lodges, hotels." As an example, Nunnington in North Yorkshire has been included because a slaver built a school and houses there.

Completed last summer, just after the toppling of statue of Edward Colston, the report is more comprehensive than the National Trust review limited to stately homes, but still does not address all "tombs, monuments and memorials of individuals and families made wealthy from associations with the Atlantic slave economy"

Historic England said the audit would “identify significant gaps in knowledge that can be targeted ... to produce a more complete picture of the impact of Atlantic slavery on the built environment in England”

Conservative MP Nigel Mills has accused the report of being a "Waste of time", claiming: “What happened hundreds of years ago was wrong. But we don’t need to constantly berate ourselves for it.”

Read more here and here.  Download the report here.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) equalities watchdog has found in its "Assessment of hostile environment policies" that these policies that caused the Windrush scandal broke the law and are “a shameful stain on British history”. ​The damning report concludes that the Home Office failed in its “legal duties” towards black Britons, and that the harsh effects of the crackdown were “repeatedly ignored, dismissed, or their severity disregarded”. Ministers failed to listen properly to protests from members of the Windrush generation, “even as the severe effects of hostile environment policies began to emerge”. The EHRC said its findings endorsed the conclusion of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review that the experiences of victims of the scandal were “foreseeable and avoidable”. 

The Windrush compensation scheme has paid just £1.6m to 196 people in 18 months when a bill of between £200m and £570m was expected. At least nine people have died before receiving the compensation they applied for. A black official helping to run the scheme resigned last week over “racism” and the government’s failure to help victims.

The EHRC concluded that the Home Office did not comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which requires all public authorities to consider how their decisions affect people protected under the Equality Act. Impact assessments were “often considered too late to form a meaningful part of many decision-making processes”. Exceptions to the PSED for immigration were “in many cases interpreted incorrectly or inconsistently, and there was a general lack of commitment within the Home Office to the importance of equality”.

​Read more here and here. Download the report here.

Two more reports have been added to the growing pile of research showing that minority ethnic communities have been hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, this time revealing that little effort has been made to address the issue.

A joint report from IPPR and Runnymede trust states: "there has been little effort to stop Covid-19 hitting minority ethnic communities hardest as we enter the second wave". It estimates that over 2,500 deaths could have been avoided during the first wave in England and Wales if the black and Asian populations did not experience an extra risk of death from Covid-19 compared to the white population (after adjusting for differences in age and sex). Put differently, over 58,000 and 35,000 additional deaths from Covid-19 would have occurred if the white population had experienced the same risk of death from Covid-19 as the black and Asian and populations respectively. The inequalities are not explained by underlying diseases (such as heart disease, diabetes) or genetics (as there is no genetic basis for race or ethnicity). The report says: "this inequality is likely to be driven by structural and institutional racism that results in differences in social conditions (such as occupation and housing) and differential access to healthcare". Read more here.

​The second report is a follow up by The Independent to the Government-commissioned review from Public Health England in June into inequalities in Covid deaths. It states that: "four months on, as the country heads towards another peak of cases, the government has been unable to provide The Independent with details of any action taken to address the issue". It quotes Marsha de Cordova, Labour’s shadow equalities minister: “Ministers’ failure to prevent the disproportionate impact of Covid is negligent, discriminatory and unlawful.” Read more here.

The cartoon, from The Independent in June, sums it up well.