The truth about race and pay in modern Britain

When the Black Lives Matter protests struck London in the same week that Public Health England published a report into the higher death rate from Covid among the black and ethnic minority population, the Prime Minister did not quite know how to react. He did what modern Prime Ministers so often do when presented with a little difficulty: he kicked the matter into touch by appointing a commission — on ‘race and ethnic disparities’.

At least the person charged with overseeing the commission, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, was brave enough to challenge those who were lazily trying to make out Britain is a racist hellhole. Britain is, she asserted in the Commons, ‘one of the best countries in the world to be a black person’. This caused uproar, but it’s indisputably true, as evidence out this week has shown.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) published its figures for pay disparity between ethnic groups — and it must have made painful reading for Britain’s tiny and dwindling band of white supremacists. The ethnic group called ‘White British’ came only fifth in the pay rankings, with a median hourly pay that is 7 per cent lower than ‘White and Asian’, 16 per cent below ‘Indian’, 23 per cent below ‘Chinese’ and a whacking 41 per cent below ‘White Irish’. Among the under-30s, the ‘White British’ come out even worse: they are fifth from bottom, earning 2 per cent less than ‘Bangladeshi’, 3 per cent less than ‘Black Caribbean’, 13 per cent less than ‘Black African’, 15 per cent less than ‘Indian’ and 46 per cent less than ‘Chinese’.