The things we won’t say about race that are true

Summary of the transcript:

In this film, I’m going to say some things about race that we usually never discuss on the telly. By the first ad break, you may be wondering whether I’m breaching every equality law in the book. I’m not. I should know – I helped create those laws, and I used to enforce them. My name is Trevor Phillips. For ten years, I led Britain’s Equality Commissions. It was my job to ensure different racial and religious groups got on. Campaigners like me sincerely believed that if we could prevent people from expressing prejudiced ideas, they’d eventually stop thinking them. But now I’m convinced we were utterly wrong. In a world riven by racial and religious strife, some things are too important to leave unsaid, even if they might offend people. So in this film, I’m going to say some of the things we once told you were forbidden.

And I know that in the next five minutes, some of you will be saying, “I don’t care what colour he is, he’s being totally racist.” This is Parliament Hill, one of the highest spots in North London. From my earliest days, I had a pretty good idea of who lived where around here. So if you look straight through there, that’s where we first settled when my parents came here in 1950, and they lived next to the Irish near Arsenal’s ground in Highbury. My mother’s best friend was Irish, Peggy. They sewed together in a sweatshop. Then, when we got a bit better off, we moved around here to Greenland, which is where the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots settled.

And if you go a bit further around, you’ll see White Hart Lane, where Spurs have their ground in Tottenham. Every Saturday afternoon, of course, Spurs fans would come, a lot of them Jewish, to see the match. But the Jewish people didn’t live in Tottenham; that’s where we lived. They lived round there in that rather greener, nicer part in Highgate, in Hampstead, over there in Golders Green. So even at the age of seven or eight, I had a really good ethnic map of North London in my head. Of course, everybody who lives here knows all this, but as you grow up, you realise that polite people don’t talk about this kind of thing. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Yes, it does say what you think it says, and I know nobody usually says that out loud. But is it true? Throughout recorded history, Jews have been vilified. Anti-Semites accused them of amassing great wealth and of sinister influence. This is the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater. This fabulous stained-glass window is just one of the treasures of this jewel of a synagogue in the heart of London. It cost a packet to build and obviously costs a lot to maintain it. But from the start, the congregation has been able to call on the wealth and the devotion of its most successful members, amongst them the most successful banking dynasty in history – the Rothschilds were the Jewish billionaires of their time.

But what of their modern-day successors? Out of Britain’s entire population, fewer than 1 in 200 of us is Jewish – that’s less than half of 1%. Today, there are just over 100 billionaires in the UK. Statistically, there should be hardly any Jews on the list. In fact, they make up 1/5 of Britain’s billionaires’ club. What all that tells us is that some Jews are very, very rich indeed. But maybe the billionaires are some kind of aberration. Not exactly – the net wealth of the average British household is just over £200,000, but the average British Jewish household turns out to be more than twice as wealthy.

What about the powerful thing? Well, if this is the national seat of power, you’d expect to see just three or four Jewish MPs in the House of Commons. In fact, there are 22. There are, of course, other ways of measuring power. Take business – in comparison to the average, Jewish people are over three times as likely to be top managers in a FTSE 100 company. Or finance – Jews are four times as likely to be non-executive directors in banking. We know why speaking of Jews in this way makes most of us uneasy. Seventy years after the Nazis’ defeat, the long shadow of their crimes still makes even simple facts unsayable. And any talk that hints of Jewish superiority evokes just one set of images. The real point is this: we should envy other more successful groups, we shouldn’t fear them. After all, each of us is a creature of our own family background, our cultural inheritance, the neighbourhoods we grow up in. What we should actually be doing is learning from them.

The organisations I led worked hard to prevent people from perpetuating racial stereotypes, but we were swimming against the tide because many of them are largely true. Yes, Irish people do tend to dominate the building trade, and Greek Cypriots are more likely to run small businesses. And it really isn’t racist to observe that Indian women are eight times as likely to be your local chemist as the average person. The thing is, there’s no prejudice in numbers. I don’t think we should be put off talking about ethnic patterns of behaviour because of what bigots and racists might say. Of course, even positive stereotypes can make some people feel a bit uncomfortable, but things get really explosive when you ask who’s committing which crimes.

May 1997 – Tony Blair sweeps to power. Part of what was supposed to make New Labour really new was its enthusiastic embrace of multi-ethnic Britain. All the people shine through. When the Blair government asked me to lead the Commission for Racial Equality, both to them and me it seemed a crucial role, and I had, in some respects, had a lifetime’s preparation. I’m driving through the area where I grew up, doing something that millions of people do every day – it’s a kind of unofficial motoring offence called “driving while black”. I’ve managed it in a Citroen Dyane, a Mazda, a Volvo and even a Jaguar – some sort of social mobility record, I guess. Nothing wakes you up to your colour as sharply as being stopped and hearing the words “IC3” – which is cop talk for “black coming at you” – back through the police radio as they check that you haven’t stolen your own car. It’s the kind of thing that’s convinced people like me, black Britons, that if you’re going to be stopped by the police, they’re going to regard you as a potential criminal.

Back in 1980, you didn’t see many black folk talking about this or anything else for that matter on TV. For that April, I had the chance to tell people who aren’t black exactly what it felt like. “Here we go, Mr Trevor Phillips is president of the National Union of Students. He’s the first black holder of that position. He’s 26 and was born in Britain of Guyanese parents. His great-grandmother was a slave in Barbados.” This is just 24 hours after black youths and police had fought a pitched battle in Bristol. “Yes, but if you have a search warrant hidden somewhere in your person, none of the people in the club had X-ray vision to know that they… I’m sorry.”

It all seems so simple back in the 80s. We saw the police as the bad guys, but in 2003, an Assistant Commissioner of the Met showed me new research that massively complicated the picture. Taric Ghaffur used to be the highest-ranking minority policeman in the country. A decade on and now out of the Met, he’s agreed to talk publicly about the data he had compiled. It was then, and is still, incendiary.

(10:37) “If you take West London, which is Hounslow, areas around there, basically large South Asian, Somali kind of a network, we found violence, drugs, a lot of protection rackets. And then as you go to, as East London, you’ve got Newham, a very strong South Asian, Pakistani influence, a couple of very nasty murders up there. You get into Hackney, you got the Turkish influence with heroin. Then as you come down into the south, the Chinese factor, particularly human trafficking for sex trade purposes, you know, largely taking place in the middle. And of course, the very big Eastern European factor, you know, in central London where you know, Romanian pickpocketing gangs or, you know, ATM machine attacks there by these, from Europeans.”

“There was another criminal network operating in South London that Taric’s unit had spotted. We go towards Stockwell. The widely held view a decade ago was that the African Caribbean drug gangs dominated crime in Lambeth. In fact, the serious crime in the area was run by Colombians. ‘We were building quite a strong surveillance, intelligence picture on large-scale cocaine importation into London from Colombia, a network that was worth up to about £200 million, and our teams were following some of these drug dealers. And believe me, not here, some of these guys were carrying up to £50,000 that they accumulated from drug deals right around an area that is sometimes a robbery hotspot, you know, street crime hotspot. So they were never touched.'”

“It’s obviously really important to understand who is doing what so you target the right people, because actually, people think ‘Brixton, black crime’, yeah? But actually, the big crime here was absolutely… because if you generically go for people, then what you end up at doing is is upsetting the whole community, stigmatising a…am…stereotype. But intelligence-led policing is about using the data, building the evidence and then going in. And I can tell you now, no community would not give you a mandate for for that type of operation to take place.”

Many equality campaigners worried about relying on ethnic crime data. They think it will be misused. But I think it’s minority communities who lose out, often terrorised and used as camouflage by criminals. “The top tier of criminality, organised criminality, were living in, in these particular flats. These guys are trending over hundreds of millions. They’re living on a council estate they are, because you know, it gives them relative safety.”

Back then, none of this figured in the public debates about police community relations. What might look like racial profiling or preparing to stigmatise one ethnicity or another? “Unfortunately there has been, you know, over the years, great politicisation of policing. And to a certain extent, we seem to have created this totally unnecessary mantra that, you know, there are certain communities, if we do something that is going to impact, actually positively, on on safety and security, that becomes a racist or…the anxiety, I suppose, would be, ‘God, yeah, maybe you’ll get more criminals, but people might think we’re a bit racist.'”

The idea that different groups really do commit different crimes may sound like a racial slur, but it’s true. Let’s take pickpocketing in London. Here’s the number of arrests the Met made for that offence in 2012. Of those, over a third were from a single group – Romanians. Some people would say it’s dangerous to pick out Romanians in this way; experts call it racial profiling and worry that it encourages the police to discriminate. But would it still be racist if we could accurately say something similar about other ethnic groups?

Consider black people in England and Wales – they’re over twice as likely to be sentenced for a violent crime than the average and over six times more likely to be sentenced for robbery. And white Britons? Well, alcohol-fuelled crime seems to be their speciality. None of these statistics tells us why they’re true, but they are. I don’t think we should be shy about trying to find out what they mean. But even some of my best friends would say that way lies madness.

Simon Woolley is a longtime equality activist. Together we waged a successful campaign on stop and search. We made our breakthrough by crunching mountains of data to show that the police weren’t just discriminating, they were wasting time and money. Still, we don’t always see eye to eye. “Do you think it were wrong to use ethnicity data against criminals in the way that we used it against the cops?”

“No, I’m not sure about that. Why would you say that? You have a black gang in London and you have a white gang in Glasgow, you wouldn’t…there’d be gangs, and they’d be involved in criminality, there’s no need to racially, racially code a gang if it’s a gang.”

“But sometimes against our gangs because they are racially coded. There are crime families, there are organisations which are based on ethnicities. All sorts of groups shall have crime, so why, why would it be wrong? I think it’s to be able to talk publicly about that fact.”

“No, but it’s not the dangerous when it gets too lazy and attach all description. Nobody wants to go down there, so if it’s nuanced then fine, but if it’s this headline, ‘You’ve got to do something about black gangs’, it’s dangerous, you know that and I know that. We can’t control the newspapers, but my point is, the longer we keep sort of soft-pedalling this and pretending that it’s not really true, you know, the more we keep sort of fuzzing these things, the harder it is to tackle, and the more these things become myths.”

“Sure, yes your whole community. I mean, I don’t think there’s a, you’d have to, you have to fudge it. I don’t think you have to dodge it, you just have to be, you just have to be articulate about it and and if you are, you can talk about it, yeah, as it is without having this generic stuff going on.”

“Trevor, it’s that’s what I worry about. We have a lazy media, we often have lazy politicians, and they will take what you say and too often, you’ve seen this time and time again, then we’ll use that to beat us with.”

“But I would say that what you’re now doing is inviting me to self-edit according to the values set by the Daily Mail and The Sun. I’m just saying, we have to be mindful, yeah? But the point is, whatever you say, they’re gonna follow their line. Then don’t make it our problem, then is that we never talk about any of these things. We’re so afraid to say anything because we think it’ll be misused that we just shut up, and we never tackle…in these guys have to be smart, rather. But what does ‘smart’ mean?”

Some would argue that the real factors behind these patterns are poverty, lack of education and discrimination in the justice system. But for me, that can’t be the whole picture. Some racial patterns aren’t explained away so easily.

Take murder in England and Wales. If you’re white, you have a 9 in 1 million annual chance of being murdered. But if you’re black, that goes up to a 26 in 1 million chance – almost three times as likely. But of those black victims, most – three-quarters – are killed by black perpetrators. That’s an awkward fact for anyone who believes that the major cause of black disadvantage is discrimination by whites.

Like many people faced with some inconvenient truths, I rather hoped that if I sat on them long enough, they’d go away by themselves. And maybe they would have done, but then something happened that forced me to face up to the realities.

By 2005, it felt as though we’d gone a long way to changing Britain. London’s pitch for the 2012 Olympic Games was based on the success of our drive to embrace diversity. When the verdict was announced, it felt as though the world had given us a stamp of approval. The New Labour vision of Britain as a multi-ethnic, multicultural beacon was at the heart of London’s victory. For us in the Equality Commissions, it wasn’t quite job done, but certainly a good day at the office.

“Good morning. Good morning, we’re just trying to figure out exactly what this is. We’ve been told that there was something that happened.” And yet, less than 24 hours later, this happened – four bombers had struck London’s transport system, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700. Within hours, a grim-faced Prime Minister appealed for unity. “When they tried to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided, and our resolve will hold firm.”

But when the country learned that those bombers were British Muslims, our unity was balanced on a knife-edge. Suddenly, I was being pressed to explain what this meant for community relations. Yet for nearly three months, other than joining in the appeal for calm, I elected to remain silent. The truth is, I was stunned by what had taken place here. After 9/11, most of us had expected some kind of terrorist attack on Britain, few expected this kind of violence to come from young men born and brought up in the UK, speaking in the accents of Yorkshire and London. This really wasn’t supposed to happen according to a version of events.

So what had we all missed? Over the following 10 weeks, we did some serious soul-searching and some detailed research. Our key conclusion – the ugly perversion of Islam that had led to this carnage would thrive only in isolated communities. By late September, I was ready to say my piece, but I already knew the message was one nobody really wanted to hear.

Summary

• Trevor Phillips was head of Britain’s Equality Commissions for 10 years, campaigning against racial prejudice
• He now believes suppressing prejudiced views was the wrong approach
• He advocates openly discussing racial differences and patterns of behavior
• Notes disproportionate representation of certain ethnic groups:
– Jewish wealth and overrepresentation amongst billionaires/business elite
– Ethnic breakdowns of criminals by types of crime and location
– Higher rates of violent crime sentencing for Black people
• Claims data should guide unbiased intervention, not racial stereotyping
• Recounts backlash for discussing Muslim sexual grooming gangs targeting white girls
• Cites tension between celebrating diversity while ignoring negative patterns
• Argues open discussion is needed to understand and address root causes
• Believes resentment over stifled views contributed to rise of UKIP
• Calls for using data responsibly to identify and support underperforming groups
• Suggests fear of being called racist has prevented constructive dialogue

Comment

Trevor Phillips was almost the chief architect of modern multiculturalism, positive discrimination and directly or indirectly a supporter of the race blame culture. After years of contributing to what has become ‘tribal Britain’ it was in many ways to his credit that he had the honesty to admit that this was the wrong way to deal with immigration.

Unfortunately, the damage may be beyond repair, as this has laid the foundations for the impending sectarian social unrest that has already gripped our nation, and this is just the beginning.

Does this in any way make amends for the terrible damage that he and his cohort have done to our country? I say not, they unleashed a culture of contempt for our society, our culture and the white European race that has evolved in to open discrimination and a sense of entitlement that is without argument, ‘out of control’

If we are to address this, before our nation is lost, we are in need to strong leadership and difficult decisions, however any leadership that attempts to address this will be faced with a world of opposition from many different directions.

The ‘catch-all’ terms for shutting down any attempt to counter this madness are used freely and without due consideration, people fear for their jobs, their careers, the bank accounts, their very credibility in our increasingly dystopian society.

Is the British public brave enough to vote for change? That remains to be seen, but as we have seen in the by-election in Rochdale, the protests in support of Hamas and Gaza, the anti-Semitism, the complaints the Britain is ‘too white’ are a clear indication that our entire nation is on the brink of sectarian social unrest, the like of which has never been seen in this country for centuries.

There is only one thing that matters now, and that is for the silent majority, those who have been silenced, to put their fear to one side and take the decision to be brave at the ballot box.

If we want change, we must vote for it.