The news that the embattled Race and Ethnic Disparities Commissioners have today distanced themselves from the Government and making the extraordinary serious accusation that the Prime Minister Office re-wrote huge tracts of the final report. This is an explosive new development that will further damage both the Government and Commissions credibility.
We are now told that the 258-page document was not made available to the Commissioners to read in advance. Some now say, speaking anonymously to the Observer newspaper, they did not 'sign off the final report' before publication.
These explosive revelations raise serious questions for both the Government and the Commissioners.
First, there is the distinctly unsavoury prospect of the Prim Ministers Office conducted a political hatchet job on the report and is basically lying about its conclusions. Given the anger and concern from Black, Asian ethnic minority communities, this leaves a bitter taste in everyone's mouths. The consequences will be a catastrophic loss of confidence of what is remaining of this Government's shattered reputation in relation to Britain's black communities.
These revelations confirm that this was a covert exercise to develop a political asset for a relentless propaganda campaign whose objective was to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement, undermine the concept of institutionalised racism, and politically attack all those who opposed the report. It was an attempt to create a new defining line in relation to the politics of race.
The report's overwhelming narrative was relatively straightforward. Institutional racism doesn't exist. Some minorities are pathologically and culturally dysfunctional and only have themselves to blame for their misfortune, whilst other minorities are good and prosper precisely because they don't have a 'victim mentality. This report sought to mess with people heads in a very sinister way. The Government was a party to a determined attempt to legitimise the routine denial of peoples lived realities. These revelations illustrate the Cabinet Office conducted a pyscho-opps propaganda war to destabilise black people's mental health.
The plethora of right-wing articles following publication that defend the report, slamming its critics, provides ample evidence of a coordinated and quite deliberate campaign to split Black, Asian and ethnic minority communities. The report was a tactic to publicly identify the opponents of Government and flush them out in an attempt to send a clear message as to who is the enemy of and allowing the right-wing media to go after them.
Comparisons to the Ministry of Truth's Orwellian concept in his classic dystopian novel 1984 come to mind. At the centre of this unholy mess sits the PM key adviser, Munira 'Misery' Mirza.
One of the immediate consequences of these revelations should be that she should be subject to an immediate investigation into what role she played in all of this.
Concerning the Commissioners, I know for sure there were those among them who worked on the government press release in advance of its release. These Commissioners are not unintelligent people, and the question that has to be asked is why you would go on national television advocating for and defending this report if you hadn't, in fact, read the document in advance?
The reality for me, whilst I can believe some of these Commissioners were duped by this Government, it is hard to believe that others, given their extensive professional experience and public profiles, would not have been forensically and intimately aware of what was going on.
Those that genuinely were duped should be reprimanded for their naivety. Those that were eager and willingly entered into this conspiracy should find no quarter of forgiveness. All, without exception, must explain how they were seduced into this political honeytrap by this discredited and unethical Government.
The Government's cackhanded attempt to rewrite the narrative concerning institutionalised racism has blown up in their face. There will be many serious questions that will need to be asked and answered. The consequences for this Government and the country at large will be profound.
There is no coming back for a Government that orchestrated a conspiracy to fool the public into believing institutional racism does not exist.
