Dr Tony Sewell: ‘When people are this desperate to silence you, you must be saying something true’

Dr Tony Sewell: “Reasonable people will look at this report and see this isn’t some extreme thing or a denial of racism – but an attempt to use evidence to help people”

Nine minutes on a Minneapolis street last May sparked a long, defiant summer of Black Lives Matter protests across Britain. Following George Floyd’s death, Boris Johnson launched the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, to examine race relations in the UK – chaired by educationalist Dr Tony Sewell.

Now, as Minnesota police stand trial for using restraining methods that it is alleged killed Floyd, the publication of Sewell’s report last Wednesday has triggered fresh anger and racial recrimination on this side of the Atlantic.

The study was compiled by 10 independent commissioners – nine of whom are black or Asian. Sewell himself is the London-born son of Jamaican parents, part of the Windrush generation who came to Britain in the 1950s.

Yet this exhaustive 258-page data-driven report finds that, when it comes to the life chances of the 13 per cent of the UK population from ethnic minorities, “impediments and disparities do exist, but are varied and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism”. The commissioners “no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities,” the report concludes. “Britain should be seen as a model for other white-majority countries”.

Over recent months, there have been public clashes over traditional hymns, the Union Jack and colonial-era statues. Some commentators say post-Brexit Britain has sunk into a “culture war”.

But even within this context, the venality of the response to Sewell’s Government-commissioned study – which acknowledges that “outright racism still exists in the UK” but highlights “a reluctance to acknowledge Britain has become open and fairer” – has been astonishing.