Ross Clark Ross Clark

Do critics of the race report have any actual arguments?

I guess the authors of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities didn’t agree to the job for a quiet life. Even so, the sheer bitterness of the volley directed at them by the grievance industry must have taken them aback. The reaction from the left has been straight out of the Marxist playbook: don’t bother to engage with your opponents’ arguments, just try to delegitimise them by attacking those opponents’ credentials and questioning their right to speak at all.

We’ve learned from Twitter and the pages of the Guardian that the panel of ten commissioners – who have all achieved success in their varied fields – are all stooges of the government. Tony Sewell should apparently have been disqualified from taking up the position of chair because he said ten years ago that he didn’t think that institutional racism existed and therefore his mind was made up before he started. Let’s turn that around for the moment: if the government had instead appointed David Lammy to do the job – who indeed was commissioned by a Conservative government to look into race and the justice system – would the left be arguing that his previous pronouncements on institutional racism indicated his mind had been made up and therefore disqualified him from the job?

Some of the charges made against the panel are plain wrong. A letter to the BMJ claimed that the panel hadn’t included any health specialists – which must come as something of a surprise to Lord Ajay Kakkar, Professor of Surgery at UCL. Other objections were laughable. A Guardian headline claimed ‘No 10’s race report widely condemned as divisive’. There’s nothing divisive, of course, about the narrative spun by the left, that Britons are either BAME victims or oppressors pumped up on white privilege.

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