The British Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, yesterday defended Britain's record on improving race relations after a UN report expressed "deep concern" about the number of racist attacks in Britain and the "serious shortcomings" of investigations into such incidents.
Responding to the report published in Geneva by the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Mr Straw insisted race relations in Britain were better than in most other European countries and that it had consistently met its obligations by reporting every two years to the UN on measures to eliminate racism.
Mr Straw said he accepted and shared the UN's concerns about the level of racist attacks in Britain, but he believed the rising number of reported racist attacks reflected "increasing confidence in the police" and did not mean the actual number of attacks were increasing.
"I am the last person to be remotely complacent about race relations," Mr Straw told BBC R4's Today programme. "I regard the improvement of race relations and the development of a society where there is equality in terms of race, as literally my first priority. We have worked very hard indeed to do that. We set up the Lawrence Inquiry. We have changed the law on racist attacks."
In an embarrassing report for the government, the UN committee, which monitors racism in member-states, concluded ethnic minorities in Britain were feeling "increasingly vulnerable" to racist attacks and highlighted "serious shortcomings" in investigations by the police and other public bodies into racist attacks.
The report urged the government to "take leadership in sending out positive messages about asylum-seekers" and draw up schemes to protect them from racial harassment.
It also called on the government to address high unemployment and social exclusion levels among ethnic minorities and recommended that the government should develop an inter-departmental strategy to tackle racial discrimination.
The UN did, however, praise government measures to increase penalties for racially-motivated crimes. And it welcomed the action plan developed by the government to tackle all forms of racism, particularly institutional racism within the police and public bodies, introduced after the publication of the Macpherson report last year into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
The Conservatives dismissed the report, however, saying it was not for the UN to "lecture Britain" on how it should run its affairs.
But the human rights group Liberty, which sent a delegation to the UN committee, said that while the government had taken steps to combat racism, "there is a long way to go before there is equality of treatment for ethnic minorities in the UK".