Let’s take a step back for a moment – and ask a simple question that nobody seems to bother asking: if a society is institutionally racist, what does that look like?
Think of it this way: if a society is institutionally racist, then the statistics will all point in the same direction. If you toss the same coin twenty times and the coin comes up Heads every single time, you start to ask questions about the coin. Yes, there might be a 1 in 1,048,576 chance of that happening at random – but you’d take a moment to check whether you were actually tossing a double-headed coin. If that happens, without cherry-picking the data, then we suspect racism.
All societies contain (pseudo-)random variation. You’ll never find every statistic being identical between any two different groups, let alone when there are diverse cultures within all communities, but in a non-racist society the statistics will point both ways: the coin lands Heads sometimes; Tails others.
In a racist society, black people would (like in the USA) be more likely to be stopped and searched. They would (as in the USA) be more likely, if searched, for the search to be negative – in other words, for the search to be unfair. They would be more likely (as in the USA) to be arrested, to be killed by law enforcement or die in custody (as in the USA). They would be more likely (as in the USA) to be found guilty in court, receive a longer sentence if convicted (as in the USA) and – in a society with the death penalty – more likely to be executed (as in the USA). If those differences stand up to scrutiny, and can’t be explained by lurking variables, then we could conclude that the country is institutionally racist.
But, I hear you ask, what about the UK? Well here, the story is…different. Black people here are also more likely to be stopped and searched. However, the proportion of ‘unfair’ stops and searches (i.e. the search proves fruitless) is higher amongst white people. British police are highly professional: in 2019 British police killed three suspects, compared with over a thousand in the USA. Black people are marginally less likely to die in custody. White people are more likely to be found guilty in court; black people receive longer average sentences. Some Heads, some Tails, and sometimes the coin seems to have stuck in the carpet and landed on its edge.
The picture in the United Kingdom just doesn’t look like the USA. The evidence doesn’t point to an overall pattern of racism - at worst, the UK is a generally equal society containing a significant number of racists. Sadly, with recent protests, the conditions have been created for future racism to thrive.
A class divide is measurable: 37% of all people [YouGov, 16/7/20] support footballers ‘taking the knee’, but this drops to 27% amongst C2DE (loosely, ‘working class’) socio-economic groups. Whilst 13% of all people support protestors tearing down statues, it’s just 8% of the working class. 21% of all people thought the Black Lives Matter protests were right to go ahead during Covid, it was just 17% amongst the working-class (i.e. the communities most at risk from Covid). Yet media coverage is often one-sided and flying in the face of majority public opinion. Control for ethnicity, which isn’t possible from the publicly-available data tables, and the divide would likely become even more stark.
What’s riling people in white working-class communities can’t be explained in just a few words: riots during a Covid lockdown, injuring dozens of police – yet seeing the BBC report it as ‘largely peaceful’; a perception that ‘taking the knee’ (which comes from protesting the national anthem in American Football NOT Game of Thrones, Dominic Raab) is incendiary; a feeling that people and institutions are being falsely accused of racism, and a sense that anti-white rhetoric is condoned. The latter causes a reaction. That reaction must inevitably lead to a spike in white supremacism.
We’re shutting down comment: just 23% of working-class people feel freely able to express their views on politics and current affairs on their social media. They feel (by 46% to 20%) that people are now less free to say what they think. Debate and discussion are being stifled: the consequence is that today, for the first time in my life, I fear racism is truly on the rise in the United Kingdom. I’ve watched in horror as I see people I’ve known for years develop a frustration – and seen them lash out: language that would have been unthinkable six months ago is now commonplace. “Race relations”, one put it bluntly, “have been set back twenty years by recent scenes”. I hope they’re wrong, but I fear they’re right.
Published in the Northern Journal 30/7/20. Written by former MEP, Jonathan Arnott - this Blog's featured writer.
Scrapping the Lords wouldn't make British democracy work any better