DDU Open Letter to UK Government about CRED Report

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Dear Prime Minister,

We write to commend the CRED report and its recommendations.

The CRED Report’s key objective was a broad-based examination of the data and how it pertains to issues around ethnicity, equality, and disparities in our multi-ethnic democracy. It has helped advance our understanding of these issues. These raised important points about the role of geography, culture, and socio-economic background in UK citizen’ lives and their access to equal opportunities.

While the report states that racism remains “a real force in the UK”, it tackles head-on the pervasive thinking that views all disparities between groups as being due to systemic discrimination. This confuses correlation with causation and ignores key factors such as age, geography, and cultural values that often explain alleged disparities.

The Report provides an important reminder that we need better knowledge and understanding of social problems to build a fairer and less divisive United Kingdom. Better statistical analysis and a wider range of variables, as the report underscores, is vital in this task.

As the report notes, whilst much remains to be done in the UK, theories of wholesale systemic discrimination are hard to square with the fact that non-white ethnic minorities often attain better outcomes than the majority white population across many key metrics. That is the puzzle that the report sensitively attempts to solve to help advance equality for all UK citizens. The report is nuanced and rightly identifies areas of great progress and areas where the UK needs to do more.

It is regrettable that its sensitive recommendations, from tackling online racism to investing in our schools to improve the education of all pupils seem to have been drowned out by an online campaign to vilify the report and those that worked on it. From racially abusive ad hominem attacks on the reports commissioners to the seeming failure to positively engage with the report’s many recommendations, bad faith actors may have wilfully misrepresented the report’s findings to score political points or protect their status as paid interlocutors for race equality think tanks and charities.

Ignoring the complex realities of ethnic and racial disparities in this country serves only those pursuing a racially divisive ideological agenda. Already there are parents of white and ethnic minority children attending schools where their children are being told that they are fundamentally different to each other. That however much they like each other and play together, they are not and can never be equal as human beings because of their skin colour and the power imputed to this single aspect of their being. This is antithetical to attempting to improve living conditions for all citizens.

DDU’s response is that there are things to criticise in the report (see our full response here). We welcome key recommendations that could contribute to significant improvements in our common public life and culture and hope the government will ensure it follows through on these. We call on the Government not to be cowed in pursuing equality of opportunity across the whole of the UK and for all of its citizens, and to engage and follow through on the nuanced recommendations of the CRED report in its “levelling up” agenda.

Signed

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