Tony sewell

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

What has the reparations movement ever done for victims of modern slavery?

Slavery was – and importantly continues to be – a moral abomination. Its existence in the 21st century is a disgrace. Whole communities such as the Uighurs are subject to forced labour; two years ago it was estimated that 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China. And slavery is a problem much closer to home. Immigrants in the West are also at risk. A student of mine, an Indian national, enquired about the possibility of working at a Brick Lane curry house. He was told that they would ‘employ’ him, but that he would have to surrender his passport and sleep in a locked room on the premises.

Thursday

Tom Slater

Nottingham university’s shameful treatment of Tony Sewell

If you want a glimpse of how toxic the UK’s race debate has become, take a look at the treatment of Tony Sewell. Sewell has devoted much of his working life to improving the lives of ethnic-minority Brits. The charity he chairs, Generating Genius, has been helping some of the most deprived young people get into high-paying Stem fields for more than 15 years. Here is a man who truly walks the walk, amid a race-relations industry that is full of solution-free, identitarian jabber. The cowardice here is breath-taking And yet, he has been thoroughly demonised. As chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, he produced the now

Tuesday

James Tooley

When ‘white privilege’ doesn’t count

First off the blocks criticising Dr Tony Sewell’s report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was Professor Kalwant Bhopal from the University of Birmingham. Writing in the Guardian and focusing on her specialism of education (she is director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education), she took exception to the statistics that showed the majority of ethnic minority groups ‘perform better than White British pupils’. If this were true, of course, it would put to bed the whole idea of institutional racism in education and ‘white privilege’, for it wouldn’t be a racism worth its salt if whites systematically came bottom or near-bottom. In her tweets about