The Government's announcement that it has appointed Tony Sewell as chair of the government committee looking into race disparity in the UK has left many black people, angry, disappointed and exasperated.
The decision to appoint a man who doesn't believe in the existence of institutionalised racism, into an enquiry into the disproportionate deaths of members of the BAMEcommunitie, on the very same, would be funny if were not so profoundly offensive.
However, this appointment should surprise no one, for sitting at the heart of this Johnsonian Government is a cabal of African, Caribbean, and Asian apologists for British racism. United only by opportunity and white patronage some have become the useful idiots of a government that is ideologically blind to the realities of systemic, and institutionalised racism.
This Government presides over criminal justice and policing system that actively criminalises African, Caribbean, Muslim and Traveller communities, where citizenship and the quality of justice and policing, are determined by the colour of your skin, the God you pray too, or the "outsider" culture you belong to.
Please take a look online on any given day and see the viral racism inflicted on our communities by a majority white police force. Go to any court in the land and watch how justice is far too often determined, not by the law of the land, but by the shade of the hand that dispenses it.
In the context of this appointment, it's now hard to reconcile the fact that Prime Minister announced race inequality commission, was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrations and a disproportionate number of BAME people affected by Covid-19 virus. Much like the Windrush Lessons Learned review, the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry, or the Undercover Police Inquiry the Conservative Party, under both Theresa May and the current Prime Minister, has perfected the art of political Aikido.
This is the strategy of regularly admitting guilt and offering an apology, followed by setting up of public inquiries that are designed to absorb the energy, take the heat out of any emerging crisis, sucking people into a Byzantine maze of legalese and compound injustice that changes absolutely nothing. It is no surprise therefore that after ten years of Conservative rule we've had more public Inquiries than all of the previous post-war governments combined.
The commissions' objectives are to look at all aspects of racial inequality in areas such as education, health, employment and criminal justice.
Now to be fair, Tony Sewell is a Doctor of Philosophy, and he did chair the London Mayor's Education Enquiry during Boris Johnson tenure as Mayor in 2012.
So has done some great work with young people over the last 15 years. His charity Generating Genius has claimed remarkable success in working with black boys, in particular in developing their academic potential and achievement.
However, it's not all peaches and cream, both he and Trevor go back a long way. They worked together on the profoundly controversial Channel 4 documentary Saving Ryan broadcast in 2003 an unethical exploitation of a young black boy where they attempted to play God with the life of 14-year-old troubled black boy Ryan Bell. What followed was a sensationalist Pygmalion type TV documentary.
Tony and Trevor devised the whole experiment. The Phillips TV production company, Pepper Productions convinced Bells family to take part by offering them a chance of a 'lifetime'. Channel 4 funded the documentary that took a young black boy from a challenging neighbourhood and placed him in Downsides, the oldest Catholic boarding school in the country and one of the top private sector schools in the UK.
After initially thriving, Ryan was eventually unfairly expelled from the school. Trevor and Tony having made both headlines and cash abandoned Ryan who once the cameras are gone was left unsupported in this alien environment. All too predictably Ryan became a victim of the very academic racism both Trevor and Tony said didn't exist. It was tantamount to child abuse, and the effects were devastating for Ryan and his family.
So Sewell's track record is deeply tainted, writing again for another right-wing magazine, Prospect in an article entitled "Masterclass in victimhood" Tony argues that the black attainment education gap has nothing to do with institutionalised racism, he takes aim at Diane Abbott MP who has dedicated her entire political life to tackling these issues, in addition to respected academic researchers such as Professors David Gillborn and Heide Mirza (no relation) all were summarily dismissed by Sewell.
"My challenge to these claims is that times have changed. What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour. They are not subjects of institutional racism. They have failed their GCSEs because they did not do the homework, did not pay attention and were disrespectful to their teachers. "
So Tony's appointment is seen as profoundly controversial by the vast majority of BAME communities and beyond. He suffers an inglorious track record of both denying and disputing the reality of institutionalised racism and its effects. And, as any quick online search will confirm, he seems to have made up his mind on the Covid-19 crisis and black communities already.
Writing in the Telegraph on the 7th May under the headline "Structural Racism doesn't explain why black people are more likely to die from COVID." Sewell pulls no punches in explaining why he refuses to accept an analysis that includes institutionalised racism and structural inequality as an explanation for the disproportionate impact on black communities.
Boris's Special adviser Munira Mirza who has overall responsibility for the commission and is Head of the Policy Unit at number 10 Downing Street appointed Tony. Known in black communities as Misery Mirza, and another former member of Boris's London mayoral team, she has consistently dismissed the reality of institutionalised, systemic racism.
Following the David Lammy MP Review into the treatment of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups within the justice system published during Theresa May's premiership, Mirza wrote a piece in the controversial climate denial, libertarian, right-wing, online magazine Spiked, criticising the review in an article titled "Lammy review: the myth of institutional racism".
She wrote, "Certainly there is a historic legacy here from previous decades, but it is equally possible that the current accusations of institutional racism by lobbyists and activists – a perception more than reality – is behind the further corrosion of public trust."
And writing on her blog on the Windrush scandal in a piece entitled "Weaponising Victimhood" she argues that the scandal had nothing to do with racism, she writes,
"The government's attempt to impose a hostile environment on illegal immigrants inadvertently caught a small group of older people of Caribbean heritage…" Adding "the real lesson is not one of racism, as in the deliberate targeting of ethnic minority groups, rather it is that the process of immigration enforcement needs to be improved".
Again in the Telegraph on the 7th May in a desperate attempt to support Trevor Phillips's comments questioning whether structural inequality can be credibly offered as part of the explanation for ethnic disproportionality are, Tony repeats Trevor's assertion that Tower Hamlets low rate of Covid19 infection proves that disproportionately BAME deaths have nothing to do with racism.
"He (Trevor Phillips) has raised questions about whether we can assume that poverty is the key determinant. He has also talked about looking not so much at who is infected but who is not. For example, The London borough of Tower Hamlets is more than a third Muslim — the highest density of any in England — and is sandwiched between two Covid-19 hotspots, Newham and Southwark, both home to substantial non-Muslim minority communities. It is also among the most deprived neighbourhoods in London. Yet Tower Hamlets lies in the bottom third of the capital's infection list."
The problem for both Tony and Trevor is that the facts brutally undermine their position as we know them today. Tower Hamlets has a Covid-19 infection rate of 2.8 which places it not in the bottom third of London boroughs, but in the top 15 London boroughs, all of London's major Muslim communities are included. And the latest figures tell us that Tower Hamlets is one of the 12 London boroughs where Covid-19 infection rates are rising fast.
Their position is further undermined by the report published by Public Health England on 16th June "Beyond the data; understanding the impact of COVID-19 on BAME Groups" the report cites issues such as housing, occupational risks, financial vulnerabilities and experience of racism as critical social and structural causes of BAME vulnerability to the virus.
Both Tony and Trevor are listed as senior fellows of the Policy Exchange a centre-right policy think tank credited as being one of the most influential think tanks on the right.
This small cabal of black conservatives and centre-right thinkers are running a determined ideological campaign to dismantle the concept of institutionalised racism and Sewell is running a dangerous line as part of this campaign.
Writing again in the Telegraph in an article entitled, "Genetics is the 'bad boy' of science, but it may give us part of the answer" Tony argues that the health inequalities suffered by BAME communities are genetic. So not only are we a culturally pathological dysfunctional community, we are genetically inferior too.
Of course, such an analysis is only half the story. Scientific research on the intergenerational transmission of stress demonstrates that our "genetic" disposition to specific health conditions can be attributed to the long-term socio-economic exclusion and the subsequent poverty of communities that causes ill health and results in the epigenetic transmission of stress and ill-health across generations.
There can be no doubt that this all forms part of a conflict covert Tory campaign to attack, discredit, undermine and dismantle the concept of institutional and systemic racism.
