‘Black Lives Matter was irrational’

Five years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement crossed the pond, as protests flared up in London and around the UK. Activists claimed that Britain is a systemically racist country and that widespread racial discrimination is holding minority groups back. Tony Sewell, now Lord Sewell, was tasked by the British government with investigating these claims. Yet Sewell and his Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities could find little evidence to back them up. Instead they found that while disparities exist, the UK is largely tolerant, fair and anti-racist – results that identitarian activists were not prepared to hear.

He recently sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the 2020 protests and their fallout. What follows is an edited extract of their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Fraser Myers: Looking back on 2020, is it fair to say we lost our minds?

Tony Sewell: We lost everything, really. Like Covid, BLM was a kind of global infection. People were unable to distinguish between what had happened in a faraway town in America and what was happening in their own lives. I don’t know how many black people are in South Korea, but it had demonstrations. People weren’t really interested in the truth in 2020. They weren’t interested in facts. They were interested in emotion – so the reaction was always going to be irrational.

Myers: You were commissioned by the government at the time to investigate racial and ethnic disparities in the UK. Interestingly, you concluded that though disparities existed, racism was not necessarily the leading cause.

Sewell: That’s right. Take education, where the comparatively poor performance of African Caribbean communities was attributed to racism.

In truth, Indian Hindu pupils and Nigerian pupils were doing much better than African Caribbean pupils. And the Nigerian groups were in the same classrooms as the African Caribbean students. That pushed us towards looking at other things, such as family structures. It became apparent that what seemed on the surface to be attributable to ‘racism’ was caused by multiple factors.

Myers: Your report points to some of the successes for ethnic minorities in Britain. Why do we never talk about these?

Sewell: Certainly, for new African migrants and certain Asian groups, in areas such as education and employment, it was a positive story. The other positive was the trajectory of race relations – there has certainly been a marked improvement. But talking to people, you’d think we’re back in the 1950s or 1960s, or under some sort of apartheid, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Yes, there are issues with segregation and things like that. But, all in all, people are getting on with each other. In fact, outcomes for ethnic minorities couldn’t have been better in some areas, particularly in of education.

Myers: What do you make of the solutions which are often put forward to correct these disparities? Do we need to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ or increase the ‘representation’ of certain groups?

Sewell: In the 1990s, I worked in Hackney, east London. Back then, it was deemed one of the worst school districts in Europe. We tried all the solutions people talk about today – more black teachers, a greater focus on black authors in the curriculum, and other initiatives. But it didn’t improve outcomes. Only when we began talking about leadership and high expectations did anything change.

Really, we’re talking about the thing that people don’t want to talk about, which is human agency – the idea that communities can drive themselves, and that there isn’t anything institutional barring anyone from advancing via their own initiative. But it became a sin to mention that. You can’t say that poor black people should be able to use their own efforts to advance themselves. The message from the left is that they’re incapable.

Myers: Were the Southport riots a sign that race relations have soured, or were they a one-off event?

Sewell: Southport, I think, was quite specific. You can’t excuse people who are basically arsonists, who decide to go after people who are vulnerable – that is a criminal offence, and it must be condemned.

However, some people had serious grievances. Here and in the US, we haven’t been listening to those who’ve been left behind – namely, the predominantly white people on our south coast and in the north. Every government seems to ignore them. But we didn’t in the 2020 report. We looked at disparities, and this group of people have some serious issues in of housing, education and employment. They often get condemned as just a bunch of racists, but as far as we’re concerned, that’s not the case.

Myers: In America, there’s talk of a ‘vibe shift’. Racial politics seems to be on the back foot. Do you think things will go in a similar direction in the UK?

Sewell: Let’s be honest, politicians will go where the wind blows. We’ve seen this with the grooming-gangs situation. They’ll condemn an activity only when it suits them.

Honestly, I’m not happy really with where we’re going with things. Identity politics really isn’t working, and never really did work. My view is that you’ve got to speak to everybody. That’s my bit of idealism. I feel quite strongly that my own government could have used my report as a positive mechanism. Because the report wasn’t really about race – it was about how you level up the whole country. But I think they got scared. Nobody wants to be called a racist. And so they try all sorts of different ways to avoid the truth.

On a positive note, a lot of people have repented their sins. Many people in Labour and the House of Lords – some of whom condemned me in the past – told me in secret that it was a good report.

Fraser Myers was talking to Tony Sewell. Watch the whole conversation here: