“BRITAIN IS by far the best place to live in Europe if you are not white,” according to Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. And the police should no longer be accused of “institutional racism” – the damning phrase used by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of young Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993.
In a landmark intervention ahead of next month’s 10th anniversary of the Macpherson finding – “a badge of shame” that has hung over the police ever since – Mr Phillips said that, whatever its validity, the term “institutional racism” had “created more misunderstanding and defensiveness than action” and today “misses the fact that in many parts of the country the colour of disadvantage is white as well as brown or black”.
Mr Phillips acknowledged the continuing problems of racially motivated attacks and “the lamentable failure of some institutions to move with the times”.
He also stressed that his commission continues working on issues such as “stop and search”, where a disproportionate number of those stopped by police are young black men, and will back police chiefs coming down hard on the “canteen culture” of insults still rife in some units.
Writing in the Daily Mail,however, Mr Phillips said police authorities had striven hard to improve matters, not least by improving racial diversity among recruits, and that he thought the charge of "institutional racism" was no longer valid.
It also failed to take into account “the fact that almost always where we find old-fashioned racial prejudice, we also find an organisation that won’t promote women, which makes fun of lesbians and gays and is heedless to the needs of the disabled”.
Ahead of a speech on the same themes, Mr Phillips said this part of the Macpherson “legacy” had “inadvertently put ‘racism’ at the top of what became . . . a ‘hierarchy of inequality’”.
Racism thus became “the first duty” publicly funded organisations had to test for, while “a new approach” was now required: “Inequality today is as much to do with whether you are struggling economically as it is to do with the colour of your skin, your gender or your sexuality.”
Mr Phillips said the growth of the “mixed-race” generation was one of the most fundamental changes Britain would see over the next decade.
On the eve of the new US president’s inauguration, he said: “Leona Lewis and Lewis Hamilton are just the start: make way for the British Obama generation.”