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.

"Is Covid Racist?" is the title of a recent documentary on Channel 4. Presented by Dr. Ronx Ikharia it is a full investigation into why the coronavirus has disproportionately affected BAME frontline workers in the UK, and pays tributes to those who have lost their lives. The programme states that: "over 60% of NHS frontline health workers who have died of COVID-19 are also people of colour, despite making up only 20% of the NHS workforce"  and looks into the socioeconomic inequalities that may have caused this to happen.

Experts featured include Dr Chaand Nagpul, chair of the British Medical Association Council and Halima Begum, of race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust. All reach the same conclusion: black and brown healthcare workers were at far greater risk than their white colleagues. Five themes are investigated: genetics, pre-existing medical conditions, wealth, health, and institutional racism. Though recent government research dismisses structural racism as a contributing factor, Dr. Ronx allows the "hard facts" to speak for themselves. 

Read more here and a review here. Watch the programme here until December 23.

The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery is a new book by Michael Taylor. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, 800,000 enslaved people continued to work in the British colonies producing sugar and other commodities for the home market. Slavery remained central to Britain’s economic and strategic interests, and resistance to further reform meant a 26 year delay to the abolition of slavery in the colonies. This was led by “The West India Interest”, a pro-slavery elite involving wealthy planters, hundreds of MPs, civil servants, financiers, landowners, clergymen, judges and military chiefs, including publisher John Murray, The Spectator magazine, William Gladstone, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and George Canning. Taylor explains that racism went hand-in-hand with the business, because people needed a way to rationalise slavery to themselves. They were helped by clergy who associated white and lighter skins with Christian concepts of “goodness” and purity and black skin with darkness and evil.

This review says: "Taylor’s magnificent book opens a window onto a most shameful commerce." Another reviewer comments: "In an era when black history is at last being given its rightful due, Taylor’s potent book shows why slavery took root as an essential part of British national life and why to remember it otherwise is 'misleading and self-serving'”.

Read more here.