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Roma and traveller communities - "your struggle is our struggle"

An adult conversation about drugs policy through the prism of public health

“The Black Lives Matter movement has given us the platform to have the greatest discussion ever about who we are as a nation. What were those young people essentially saying last summer? That the institutions built during the time when we enslaved Africans and colonised more than half the world are still here. It’s no surprise that the infrastructure built to that end still produces negative outcomes for those people from cradle to grave.

The evidence from numerous studies showed that social determinants, many of which have a racial element, were factors. For example, low-paid and zero-hours workers, such as cleaners, security guards and care workers, were hit hard. Many of them had no choice but to put their lives – and hence their loved ones’ lives – in danger as they had to go to work to pay the rent and feed their families.

“It’s not about building back better because back wasn’t great. It’s about unleashing a new Great Britain in which all of us have the opportunity to excel. I believe we can do better"

This report has almost no answers to the plethora of inequalities that Covid has uncovered, in education, health, housing and employment. To have published it any time in the last 20 years would have been seen as a whitewash; to do so after the months of heartache and the awareness-raising of the past year is almost criminally negligent.

It’s a huge missed opportunity, when the nation feels ready for change and open to the idea of real, long-lasting work to undo the scourge of racism.

make the reporting of ethnic pay gaps compulsory for all companies;

recruit more Black teachers;

police with consent for all communities;

make boardrooms do far more to bring in racially diverse talent;

have an honest conversation about Britain’s history, the bad as well as the good, and show how the past still very much influences the present.

Yes, of course, the government should look at the underperformance and potentially low aspirations of some poorer white working-class areas of both the north and south. But that is not a reason to ignore racism and its impact on ethnic minorities. The things that hold white working-class people back are very different to the discriminatory practices, both direct and subtle, that see Black pupils being excluded at a much higher rate at school.

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This should have been our 1945 moment: a time when, as a nation, we could be big and bold enough not only to acknowledge historic and continuing embedded racism, but come up with a plan to deal with it.

As bad as this review sounds, and it absolutely shocking, it offers the Met Police, and indeed many other police forces thr opportunity for the greatest reform since the police began, as we know it .

The greatest obstacle the Met Police face and indeed this present government will be denial: Denial that it’s this bad, denial that ‘Stop and Search’ defaults to racial profiling; denial thzt mysogony is commonplace. My deep worry is the Met had the same opportunity with the Macpherson report over 20 years ago. That was squandered.

Woolley has been dismayed by the rise of prominent Black and Asian politicians who “seek to deny the levels of systemic racism that exist today”

In the Guardian, he called the Sewell report into racial and ethnic disparities a “historic denial of the scale of race inequality in Britain” earlier this year.

Guardian

“Racism is too crude a word,” he says. “It’s loaded, a blunt instrument to describe a myriad of occurrences. There are misunderstandings, cultural baggage, and in the worst instances, extreme racism. Most institutions will have some institutional baggage that is going to take some unpicking.

“These institutions that I now belong to, I see very little of the teeming diversity that is outside. Do I think that people are consciously doing that? No. Do I think that it must change? Yes, I do. My modus operandi has been to lay bare uncomfortable truths. It’s not always Mr Nice Guy. But in the main, if you take people along with you, you’ve got a better chance of making a difference.

Crossbencher Woolley is no Conservative (his first thought on being ennobled by Theresa May was “Oh gosh, they’ll think I’m a Tory!”)

Accepts his debt to Margaret Thatcher, who introduced the access courses.

“Margaret Thatcher and that government was the real nasty party,” he says. “But my life changed dramatically because she had a vision for mature students. Life isn’t always black and white.”

“We had a vivid illustration when we did our Colour of Power survey and looked at 50 trade unions. You think of trade unions, you think of equality, yeah? But not one of them had a black general secretary. So the idea that the Left owns equality, and particularly race equality, is fanciful.

It is Woolley’s take-them-as-you-find-them attitude that sets him apart from many activists. He refuses to be party political and will work with anyone who is prepared to effect change.

In his book he is critical of Munira Mirza, the Prime Minister’s former head of policy, who recruited the panel that produced the 2021 Sewell Report into race and ethnic disparities in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. It concluded that institutional racism does not exist in Britain, which Woolley describes as “State endorsed gaslighting”.

He says: “It was the greatest lost opportunity for a nation to deal with its uncomfortable past and its unequal present, and I feel much of the nation was ready for that conversation.”

Telegraph

Shameless Braverman shames the struggle that got many black and brown faces in the highest places.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman will no doubt be oblivious to the decades of effort many took, including myself and Baroness Warsi, to get women and men who look like her into positions of power. 5 years ago the Tories always put black and Asian candidates in unwinable seats. We proudly changed that.

How heartbreaking, then, it is to see a woman of colour demonise refugees, shockingly stereotype Pakistanis with lies and half truths. And for what ? To turn communities against the most vulnerable in order to win a few grubby votes.

My question is not to the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, no point, but rather to the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak: We know that Braverman has form, pandering to prejudice, but this is on you. How will you right this wrong ?

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There are two key areas that the government could enact without delay. First, it needs to implement the recommendations from the dozen or so race equality reviews over the past five years, including the Lammy Review, the McGregor Review, the Bame Covid-19 Review and the Windrush Review.

Secondly, as a matter of grave urgency, the government should put together a Covid-19 race equality policy document that begins immediately to protect lives, mitigate wholesale redundancies and ensure students don’t fall off the educational cliff.

In the medium and long term, if the commission abandons its fixation around the “narrative”, it could offer solutions that help us to dramatically reform our institutions in a way that could deliver greater race equality for generations to come. The whole of society gains by delivering such equality. Let’s not forget that.

Woolley refuses to name names but says having “black and brown faces in high places” is not always the answer when it comes to improving equality.

Although minority communities are not a “homogenous group”, it is still disappointing “to see some black politicians weaponised, crossing over motorways to have a fight saying racism doesn’t exist”.

“To me it is perhaps one of the biggest disappointments… not all of those black and brown faces will serve you well. In fact some will serve you really not well at all.”