Samir Shah

Faux fury against the race report is unsurprising

The report's substance was lost amid personal attacks against myself and my fellow commissioners

Picture credit: Getty

Back in the 1960s, my brother Asim and I were smitten by the magical Manchester United trio of Law, Best and Charlton. We became London Reds and travelled on the MU Supporters’ Club coach to Old Trafford to watch our team — and we always went to see them play London clubs. But we stopped going in the 1970s; we feared for our physical safety. Marauding bands of skinheads outside the grounds were on the lookout for a spot of Paki-bashing. Instead, during the 1970s, we went on Anti-Nazi League marches and routinely confronted members of the National Front, a fascist party that was briefly the UK’s fourth-largest party in terms of vote share.

Today, Paki-bashing is now largely history, as is the National Front; as are the many egregiously offensive and racist attitudes and behaviour that were our everyday experience back then. The UK is a far better place to live now than it was 50 years ago.

That’s not ‘my’ truth; it’s not ‘your’ truth. It is the truth.

That simple and frankly unexceptional point was made in the race and ethnic disparity report that came out last week. It incurred the wrath of many, predictably amplified on social media, and the resultant clash was gleefully seized upon by many in the mainstream media.

The fury with which this report has been met has not exactly taken me aback. Of course, we knew we would not be loved and that our reflections on institutional racism would kick against an orthodoxy of sorts — and we anticipated that many of the attacks would be ad hominem. There were claims of ‘Boris’s stooges’, ‘toeing the party line’.

But I had rather hoped we would be attacked with something more subtle than an array of blunderbusses. You would be forgiven for thinking we had forgotten to say that racism exists and that more — considerably more — needs to be done to tackle it.

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