The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is an exercise in gaslighting

Editorial: This report will be disregarded and forgotten, and rightly so – it was produced by a committee inclined to think that if we all stopped going on about racism it would go away

(Dave Brown)

At best, the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is well-intentioned but self-satisfied, complacent and preordained. At worst, it is a deliberate and cynical exercise in what we have now come to call “gaslighting”.

Born out of a need to say or do something, anything, to respond to the Black Lives Matter protests last year – an explosion of pent-up frustration towards the racial injustices that still permeate British society – it has ended up, sotto voce, concluding that it is white working-class lives as much as anyone’s that are being undervalued and blighted by inequalities.

The whole BLM phenomenon, we are invited to believe, was based on a misreading of survey statistics. It is absurd.