In happy societies, ethnicity or religious identity is not one’s destiny, yet a recent critic called out Conservatives - the ‘racist party of leftish nightmare’ for Indian voters. Interestingly, Labour MP Navendu Mishra had expressed last year in his tweet that “..Racism is alive & well within Labour. A hierarchy of racism exists inside the party & some groups are seen as fair game for attacks based on religion/race/heritage.”
“The British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function, which in turn produced legislation aimed at keeping racial and ethnic groups apart … From the beginning, concern about Commonwealth immigration was about skin colour,” an unnamed Home Office historian recently went on record to tell The Guardian. This controversial statement coincides with the release of the Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honours list 2022 which has close to 95 names of Asian origin. History has it, that many people have returned the Queen’s Honours titles as a mark of their protest against being a subject of the crown. One of them is The Good Immigrant Editor Nikesh Shukla.
A little ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, it is important to remember that 25 May marked two years of the brutal murder of George Floyd, the 46-year old African American man who was arrested and killed after police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. His death triggered a new wave of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which was widely supported and promoted by people of colour across the globe.
Manchester GP Manjula Arora has been suspended by the GMC after claiming she was promised a laptop and plans to appeal - in a case that has sparked deep concern among doctors over medical regulation. In a letter to the GMC, BAPIO wrote: 'Differential treatment of non-white doctors have been a significant issue and this case would be another one in point.'
At the same time, Neil Basu’s bid for the crime agency's top job has ended after the alleged No 10 intervention. The government has now effectively blocked or deterred Basu, who is of Asian heritage, from the two top jobs in law enforcement. He would have been the first Briton from an ethnic minority to hold either. He did not apply for the Met commissionership after Cressida Dick’s resignation in February as government opposition was so clear. In an OpEd in The Guardian, Neil Basu wrote, “I write this as Anil Kanti Basu – the mixed-race son of a white Welsh woman and a Bengali Hindu immigrant, invited to the UK on a medical scholarship in 1961 to help build our glorious NHS, their subsequent treatment would have been entirely recognised by a post-Windrush community that still doesn’t trust the police. I write this with 54 years of lived experience of racism. I understand how they feel.”
Ironically, last year, Tony Sewell’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report on race said there was no evidence to suggest that Britain was an institutionally racist place. Prime Minister Johnson said, “For centuries, our United Kingdom has had a proud history of welcoming people from overseas.”
After two years, did Britain learn and internalise any lessons that emerged from the death of Floyd? Was any progress made in race relations, cultural acceptance and fair treatment of the ethnic minorities? The answer doesn’t seem promising.
Journalist Habiba Katsha spoke to white people in the UK about their learnings from BLM, and some of her findings exposed that most white people haven’t read about people of colour, and if they have, they do not necessarily learn from these books. For some, it was the first time they learned about the roots of racism.
The Manjula Arora case
Manchester GP Manjula Arora has been suspended by the GMC after claiming she was promised a laptop and plans to appeal - in a case that has sparked deep concern among doctors over medical regulation.
The General Medical Council has said that it is reviewing the Manjula Arora case to see if there are “lessons to be learnt for future cases” after doctors and medical leaders expressed outrage over the decision to suspend the GP.
The hearing concluded that Arora had not set out to be dishonest or to mislead but that her use of the specific word “promised” when speaking to the IT department had amounted to dishonesty.
The case centred around incidents that took place in late 2019 and 2020 while Arora was working for Mastercall, which provided a clinical assessment service for the North West Ambulance Service.
The RCGP has welcomed the GMC decision to review the case - but warned that the tribunal outcome had left it 'deeply concerned'.
A college spokesperson told FP Online, “We are deeply concerned about Dr Arora’s case and while we welcome the decision by the GMC to review the ruling, we will be asking for answers as to why the case was allowed to get through their screening processes and end in a fitness to practise hearing and receiving a sanction.
“GPs are working in an increasingly punitive and litigious environment and any referral to the GMC causes enormous stress and distress for the doctor being investigated, their colleagues and families. As well as being devastating for Dr Arora, cases such as this only make it harder to retain existing GPs and persuade new ones to go into general practice, and particularly to work in out-of-hours.”
An RCGP statement said: “The college has raised concerns with the Care Quality Commission about the disproportionate impact of its inspection regime on doctors from minority ethnic backgrounds, and we will continue our work to ensure all regulators actively avoid perceptions of discrimination.”
Dr Partha Kar OBE, Diabetes co-lead, NHSE; Director- Equality, Medics, NHSE; Consultant, Portsmouth told Asian Voice, “Since the BLM movement, there has been a greater focus on inequalities based on race- with multiple data sets and appointments being made to tackle this. There certainly is more discussion and wider acceptance of this issue- which has taken the debate forward. However, there still remains much to be done. The recent case of Manjula Arora shows how much there is to travel- yet with signs of progress as it has ignited passions, created much debate and forced the GMC to review and rethink. The BLM movement has resulted in many starting to speak up and in a wider leadership context? Certainly, made progress compared to where things were a few years ago. Results however on a national basis need to shift at a quicker pace too.”
The historical roots of the Windrush scandal
The Guardian recently reported that according to a leaked government report by this unnamed historian titled ‘The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal’, the origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population.
This radical assumption surfaced after the Home Office commissioned a paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress over the past year. The report was commissioned by the Home Office as part of a commitment to educating civil servants about the causes of the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of people wrongly classified as illegal immigrants by the department.
In the 1950s, British officials shared a “basic assumption that ‘coloured immigrants’, as they were referred to, were not good for British society,” the report states.
A 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian, exclusively shown to Guardian, described how “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function”, and sets out how this affected the laws passed in the post war period.
It concluded that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
It found that the scandal was caused by a failure to recognise that changes to British immigration law over the past 70 years had a more negative impact on black people than on other racial and ethnic groups.
The report further stated, “Major immigration legislation in 1962, 1968 and 1971 was designed to reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.”
Living in illusion
Critics say that we remain far too influenced by the impression that Britain willingly and amicably handed overpower (as Harold Macmillan put it) to Asian and African representatives of “agreeable, educated, Liberal, North Oxford society”. Britain is still criticised for its imperial past which allegedly monstrosities inflicted untold suffering.
Author compels the Queen to say ‘sorry’
Independent award-winning journalist & author, Dr Mustafa Fetouri wrote a compelling piece in the Middle East Monitor, “Your Majesty: Say sorry to mark your Platinum Jubilee and help end that poisonous history.”
“At 96 years of age this year, 2022, this may well be her last chance to make history by saying "sorry" to millions of people in India, Palestine, Jamaica, Kenya and many more around the world who her ancestors once ruled,” he added.
Are academics nurturing racism?
According to an article published in The Daily Telegraph, the University of Cambridge is offering a class on the history of classical music—with a twist. Called Decolonising the Ear, the course teaches how to listen to music in a “postcolonial” way. The class’s premise is that classical music could be “complicit … in projects of empire and neoliberal systems of power.” In other words, classical music is racist and classist. Course material includes teaching how “genres like opera seem particularly susceptible to racialized representations.”
Ryan Malone, composer and program director of the Armstrong International Cultural Foundation told The Trumpet, “As I teach my students, we are not judging this music; it is judging us. It has been around much longer than we have, and it is reckless arrogance to think we can dismiss its impact on human civilization with our extremely short-lived blip on the human timeline.”
Anti-racism initiatives continue
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy recently tweeted, “The pandemic's unequal impact has been a reminder that racism is still a matter of life and death. I've coordinated this cross-party letter on behalf of the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations, urging the Chair of the Government's Covid Inquiry to put racial health inequalities front & centre.”
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) published its third update on the implementation of cricket’s action plan to tackle racism and promote inclusion and diversity at all levels of the game.
Following the publication of the action plan in November 2021, the county cricket network has achieved significant progress to increase Board diversity in line with the targets of 30% female representation and locally representative ethnicity by the end of April 2022.
In the last six months, more than 30 organisations have appointed at least one new Non-Executive Director (NED) to their Board, with many of these involving major recruitment processes appointing multiple NEDs.
At an aggregate level, the county network has now surpassed the Board diversity targets, with an overall figure of 31% female representation on Boards and 16% ethnic diversity, up from 20% and 10% respectively since November 2021. This builds on the action taken across the network since the introduction of mandatory standards via the County Governance Framework (CGF) in early 2020. The proportion of Directors at county organisations who are from a minority ethnic background has tripled from 5% since 2019, while the proportion of Board roles held by women has also grown significantly from a 2019 baseline of 11%.
Today, four of the Board’s 12 members are women and three are from ethnically diverse backgrounds, ensuring that Kent Cricket – a single organisation that is responsible for all cricket in the County from schools and community cricket to the professional game - will benefit from a wide range of skills and perspectives as well as meeting its diversity targets.
In a further demonstration of commitment to strong and diverse governance arrangements, Worcestershire Cricket Foundation (the charitable successor to Worcestershire Cricket Board) has established the most diverse Board of any entity across the game. Following the appointment of seven new Trustees, women represent a majority of the Board (seven of 12 Trustees) and one-quarter of Trustees are ethnically diverse, significantly ahead of local demographics.At an individual level, the ECB understands that 80% of county organisations (40 of 50 entities) have now met their Board diversity targets.
Meanwhile, University of Oxford Lecturer Sam Fowles rightly argued, “Attacking historians and denying the racist legacy of colonialism chills free expression and alienates swathes of the population. Unless we ditch the nostalgia, wise up, and address real problems in the real world, the UK’s best days will remain in an imagined past.”
