What is the UK Race Report and why is it making people so angry?

The Race Report has attracted headlines since its publication on the 31st of March. But what is the report, and why are so many people angry about it?

What is it:

The Race Report, or for its full name the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, was commissioned by the UK Government following Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests across the UK last summer. The protests were triggered by the murder of George Floyd in the United States and the commission set out to find whether or not racism is still present in the UK. The Prime Minister explained the aim of the commission was to examine “all aspects of inequality - in employment, in health outcomes, in academic and all other walks of line.”

A foreword to the report was written by chairman Tony Sewell, an education consultant. He said “we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, though “impediments and disparities do exist, they were varied and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism”.

The report’s predominant finding was that family structure and social class had a bigger impact than race on how people’s lives turned out. It also found that children from minority ethnic communities did as well or better than white pupils. It did find, however, that overt racism remained, particularly online.

The other main findings were:

• The success of minorities in education has “transformed British society over the last 50 years into one offering far greater opportunities for all”

• The pay gap between all ethnic minorities and the white majority population had shrunk to 2.3% overall and was barely significant for employees under 30.

• Diversity has increased in professions such as law and medicine

• Some communities continue to be “haunted” by historic racism, which creates “deep mistrust” and could be a barrier to a society free of racism.

The report also included 24 recommendations to promote anti-racism within the UK, these included extended schools day to allow disadvantaged students to catch up from lessons missed during the pandemic; that children from disadvantaged areas should receive higher quality career advice from University outreach programmes; and that the acronym BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) should no longer be used because differences between groups are as important as what they have in common.

The commissions concluded that the UK is not yet free from racism, or is a “post-racial country”, but that its success in removing race-based disadvantages in education and in the economy, “should be regarded as a model for other white-majority countries”.

Why has it made people so angry?

Many people believe the Government’s report is not an accurate depiction of race in the UK today, and that it instead creates an idealistic and untrue image of racism in 2021.

Shadow secretary, David Lammy, described the report’s findings as “deeply worrying and frankly immature that Britain is still having a conversation about whether racism exists”, and said that it was time for legislative action and not another review.

Lammy’s ideas that racism is still very present in Britain can be seen through a review by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2010, which found that black people were up to six times more like to be stopped by police than white people. Stop-and-search rates between 2018 and 2019 show that these figures are only rising, with black people now nearly 10 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people. These stop and searches contribute to much higher arrest rates for black people than white people.

Baroness Lawrence, a Labour peer since 2013, said that when she first read the report “my first thought was that it pushed the fight against racism back by 20 years or more”. Speaking at a public event organised by De Montfort University Leicester’s Stephen Lawrence Research Centre last week, she said “You know, all these things we’ve been working for and showing that structural racism exists – we talk about the pandemic when you look at how many of our people have died, all the nurses, the doctors, the frontline staff, of Covid, and to have this report denying that those people have suffered… they are denying that the likes of my son were murdered through racism and the fact that it took 18 years to get justice for him.”

Baroness Lawrence was made Labour peer in 2013 after campaigning for justice for her son, Stephen Lawrence, who died in 1993 following a racist attack in South London.

Statistics collected by the government showed that in 2020 not a single force in England or Wales registered an arrest rate of less than 20 for every 1,000 black people. In direct contrast, no police forces in England or Wales registered an arrest rate of more than 20 for every 1,000 white people.

Labour Leader Kier Starmer expressed disappointment with the report’s findings and said that there were still many “structural” racism issues that are yet to be solved in the UK. On a visit to Leeds, he told reporters that while the report did make “an acknowledgement of the problems, the issues, the challenges that face many black and minority ethnic communities” there was also “a reluctance to accept that that’s structural”.