The Bristol screening of After The Flood on July 22nd took place in John Wesley's New Room – the world's first Methodist Church. A most appropriate location given Wesley's strong stance against slavery. 92 people attended an enjoyable and stimulating evening enhanced with a generous supply of tasty Caribbean food and drinks. Special thanks to our organiser and host, Carmen Carrol of Keyboard Trust Ministry who worked very hard preparing for this special evening.

On the Q&A panel, MJR was represented by Professor Dr. Robert Beckford and our Chair Revd. Alton Bell. It also included a strong contingent from the Church of England with the Dean of Bristol Cathedral Canon Dr. Mandy Ford, Revd. Dr. Catherine Okoronkwo who is the Advisor on Racial Justice to the Bishop of Bristol (the Rt. Revd Vivienne Faull), Rev Mary Hotchkiss Curate in the Bristol Diocese and Revd. Chris Dobson who is the Ecumenical Advisor and Partnership Officer to the Diocese of Bristol.
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A lively Q&A session followed the film with chair Alton Bell deftly handling questions covering a wide range of topics from the cost of reparations, the need to take action now and what happens next. Comments included:

• "Highly recommended to my Bristol church family, will be uncomfortable but important viewing." Rev Philip Nott.
• "A most stimulating and worthwhile film, very good." Pastor Eric Aidoo Chair CTE Bristol.
• "We have learnt from the recent past and we are listening." Canon Dr. Mandy Ford.
  
• "Thank you for a challenging film and discussion last night" Twitter.  

The evening concluded with a vote of thanks by MJR Trustee Keith Cottrell who observed that this film is sowing seeds for change across our country.

We are pleased to announce Ven. Karen Lund, the Archdeacon of Manchester as the fifth member of our Q&A panel for the Manchester screening of ‘After the Flood: the church, slavery and reconciliation' on July 12 (a.k.a. the 'Northern Premiere'). Tickets are available here.  The timing of this and the other July screenings coincides neatly with the release yesterday of the first of six reports from the Church of England’s Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice (“ACRJ”). The report can be read here.

A Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress since it came out in 2021 concludes that the origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population. The 52-page paper, which has been leaked to The Guardian states that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”. 

​The report, named 'The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal', was commissioned by the Home Office as part of a commitment to educating civil servants about the causes of the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of people wrongly classified as illegal immigrants by the department. Stating that “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function” the report asserts that in the 1950s, British officials shared a “basic assumption that ‘coloured immigrants’, as they were referred to, were not good for British society.”

While circulated internally, a year on the report remains unpublished and a Freedom of Information request by The Guardian was turned down by the Home Office; a refusal described as "shameful" by Simon Woolley, the former CEO of Operation Black Vote and chair of the No 10 race disparity unit. “The government is hellbent in its denial of the systemic nature of racial inequality and in this climate historical facts have become uncomfortable truths that need to be hidden.” Read the full Guardian article here.

​Image by Steve Eason.

New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that unemployment rates among Black, Asian and minority ethnic workers are now more than double those of their white counterparts: 7.7% versus 3.5% The gap has widened considerably since the start of the pandemic. These disparities show that the post-pandemic employment rate for ethnic minority workers is recovering at a slower rate than that of white workers.

It has also been revealed by The Independent that Black households face being disproportionately impacted by the cost of living crisis with the majority having less than £1,500 in savings and being more likely to go hungry. And it has recently emerged that Black, Asian and minority ethnic women are twice as likely to be on zero-hours contracts as white men.

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), said: "The pandemic held up a mirror to discrimination in our labour market". and is calling on the government to “challenge” structural racism that is resulting in job inequality. “BME workers bore the brunt of the economic impact of the pandemic – in every industry where jobs were lost to the impact of Covid, BME workers were more likely to have been made unemployed.”

Read more here. Download the ONS report here.

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.