Is Britain really the least racist country on earth?

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1:02This is a Global Player original podcast. Kemi Badenok is calling for a return to common sense. Common sense is a cop-out of a phrase. That I say common sense and everyone nods and everyone's thinking something entirely different. I am absolutely astonished at the number of politicians, including now Kemi Badenok, who seem absolutely certain about what happened that night with Henry Novak. So why is she now thinking that this is fertile political ground. Modern Britain is the least racist country on earth. I speak from experience. As a child, I lived on three different continents. I have seen what life is like for ethnic minorities in other places.

1:41There is nowhere else on earth I'd rather be. There is nowhere else on earth that I would be doing the job that I'm doing right now as a black woman in a majority white country. It is because we are not racist, because we care so much about equality, that we have overcorrected and actually brought in rules that are actually discriminatory. That is Kemi Badenok saying her party would seek to abolish a duty for teachers, for nurses, for police officers to consider the equalities law because she thinks fear of being racist means authorities are not stopping tragedies from happening. She wants the whole debate on identity politics to change.

2:22She believes it's seeped into too many areas of our public life. Is she right? Welcome to The News Agents.

2:37It's John. It's Maylis. It's Lewis. And Kemi Badenock is following up from last week when she was actually widely praised for her response to Henry Novak. But she is choosing to make a bigger argument here in a speech that she's made today as emily was saying she wants to scrap rules that require government bodies such as schools hospitals police to consider promoting equality in their decisions we're taking a step back here she's in a way doing a sort of halfway house from where labor and reform are reform want to scrap the equality act 2010 the quality equality act 2010 has proved a really totemic piece of legislation which has affected all sorts of things that government does it was passed at the very basically the last big law that the labour government actually got on the statute book back in 2010 before that government left office and the Tories are saying they don't want to scrap it entirely it protects people with protected characteristics whether it's sex or race or sexuality but they are saying they want to scrap a very important part of it which is something that sounds dull but it has been very important, which is the public sector equality duty, the PSED.

3:48What does that do? Well, it requires public bodies carrying out public functions to have due regard to those characteristics and to advance equality of opportunity between people who share and people who do not share relevant, protected characteristics. I.e., they need to think about how they promote equality between people in everything that they do. And Kemi Badenok's argument is to say that that bit of the legislation basically leads to outcomes, as we've seen with the police, she argues, and Henry Novak, where they are too worried, these organisations, worried about actually advancing equality and looking like they're advancing equality for discriminated groups rather than doing their job.

4:36This is a bit more of what she had to say. Over centuries, we have enshrined in our law our belief that everybody in this country is equal. There is a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded. The idea that each person should be treated the same regardless of who they are is a value so deeply ingrained in our culture that most people in Britain accept it as a self-evident truth. But while we have been going about our business, activists have been taking Lady Justice's blindfold off. They want the law to treat people differently on the basis of identity groups, eroding a centuries-old principle that has made Britain the amazing country that it is today.

5:20Equality law, properly designed, should protect us all in the same way. It should be a shield, not a sword. It should protect people from discrimination. It should protect people from being treated differently because of their race, sex, religion, sexuality, disability or age. This understanding and this principle are being perverted. She then makes a link between three very high profile crimes that most of our listeners will be familiar with. The Manchester Arena bombing of 2017, the stabbings of two students and a caretaker in Nottingham in 2023 and the Southport murders of those little girls at a dance class.

6:02She says they were all examples of crimes in which the equalities law had a factor because people around them saw things that they thought were suspect but didn't step in because they were scared of being labelled or thought racist. And what Kemi Badenock is calling for is a return to common sense. And she says, look, this is what common sense looks like. And I always bear in mind, Lewis, the sort of coolers you get on LBC on a Sunday where someone starts by saying, I know I speak for millions of people. And you think, really? Do you really know that you're speaking for millions of people? And of course, we all want common sense in the application of law.

6:44And clearly what happened in the Henry Novak case, things went badly wrong. and maybe this was about implementation i i think we've just got to be careful before we say okay all this equality stuff all this public service equality duty is a load of old nonsense we need to get rid of that um we need to be kind of a little more careful about analyzing this stuff that we know for certain that the police acted in the way that they did in southampton because of this or was it something else or what was what were the other factors in play of course we don't want to see the law being applied in the way that the police did on that dreadful night in Southampton.

7:24It was disastrous. No one is making any bones about that. But, you know, you could easily have the pendulum swinging back the other way and say, OK, you're free to do whatever you like. And as a society, do we really believe when we look at who's got power in this country, who controls things in this country that the white man is now the victim of discrimination and that they are the downtrodden person in terms of power prestige finance wealth status in this society and i'm just not sure that there's any evidence to back that up look There is, I felt in a way, initially being away last week following the Henry Novak stuff abroad, I've increasingly felt, not for the first time with these matters, that there are just twin realities operating, right?

8:23I mean, absolutely, it is worth having a conversation and a discussion about how pieces of law, important law like the Equality Act, are actually translating it in practice. It may well be that on some occasions, and I'm sure it's true, that certain public bodies have been a little too officious or have decided to go further than actually the law suggests they should. The actual law is more limited than some of its critics suggest. And it may be true that certain types of anti-discrimination training and so on have occasionally created a culture which isn't good. We know that there are occasions where the culture of fear of the accusation of racism has been a pernicious one.

9:07Obviously, we saw that most clearly with the grooming gang scandal. But there's a very clear difference there, isn't there, between, say, the grooming gang scandal, where we had years worth of evidence which has come forward. We've had people look into it and we've had exact occasions which we can see, either in email or documents or whatever, where we can say, yes, this has been pernicious. I am absolutely astonished at the number of politicians, including now, Kemi Badenok, who seem absolutely certain about what happened that night with Henry Novak and absolutely certain what the genesis was, absolutely certain what was going through the heads of those police officers that night.

9:47Right. Kemi Beidnok is saying, and others have said, that the policing culture has become too sensitive to racism allegations and specifically as a result of, say, the Equalities Act, the National Police Chief Council's Police Race Action Plan, which includes language saying police should not necessarily treat everyone the same or be colour blind but seek racial equity and so on. They are pointing the finger at that culture and those documents and saying this is likely to be part of what we saw that night. Let us just not forget at this stage before any of the inquiries are concluded, before the police chief counsel have looked into it, There is no hard evidence whatsoever that that specific guidance directly caused the officers to arrest or handcuff Henry Novak or influenced what they did that night.

10:37And yet if you had listened to a lot of the right wing commentary, a lot of the politicians on the right in this country, you would think that they would know for a fact that the police officers that night, when they were making the decisions they were making, literally thinking, hmm, what does the National Police Chief Council's police race action plan say I should do in this situation? A, do we think that's likely? And even if it did happen, which maybe it did, and maybe the wider culture did lead to it in some way, maybe they don't know that yet. And so therefore propose to dismantle a lot of this legislation, which has been important, on the basis, frankly, so far of supposition, seems crazy to me.

11:12I think, frankly, it is an incredibly complicated question that we're asking today. And it does seem from what Kemi Badenock is saying so far that she doesn't she is not using statistics. She is not using anything other than hearsay reporting following three absolutely tragic events. And what do we know about the Henry Novak case? As you say, we're still waiting for the inquiry. But we know that in that phone call that was made to police, the brother told a lie. He alleged it was a racial attack. In other words, the police did not turn up at a scene. They didn't come across a scene and assume that the white guy was the murderer and the black guy, the brown guy was the victim.

11:57They followed what they thought was a witness phone call telling them what had happened. So I think it is not it is not bizarre that they had one narrative in their head and they found something completely different because he was a liar. I mean, that is the whole horrendous truth of what we understand about them arriving at the sea in that point. I do think politically it's really interesting what has happened because Farage, you'll remember last week, kind of went straight for the jugular. You know, all this talk about cold rage and all this talk about, well, I hope things aren't going to get worse.

12:36I hope more people aren't going to turn up in Southampton. I hope the crowds aren't going to get bigger. Yeah, we're sure you hope that, Nigel. But Kemi Badenot walked such a sort of a thoughtful tightrope at that point. And I thought she really landed in a good place. And I don't want to be sort of, you know, swayed by polls. But it's interesting that a week on the public's reaction to Farage was you got that wrong. And to most other party leaders, you got that right. so why is she now thinking that this is fertile political ground for her to be moving into to say oh actually sorry I'm not sure I sounded quite right wing enough I'm not sure I sounded quite sort of pro-white enough you know I think it is a I know what you're going to say and that's why I started by saying it's really complicated because there could be something in the ether that is making people in public bodies act in a certain way without even realising they're doing it.

13:32But I just feel that if we are now entering a world in which we genuinely think that the majority white population are the victims of racism more often than the minorities in this country, we're absolutely fucked. I wasn't going to say I don't think what you think I was going to say. I was actually going to say I think Kemi Badenock has always held this position. I think that there's nothing new in what Kemi Badenock has said. Maybe it's a bigger speech and she set it out. But I think this is part of who she has been for a very long time. And I think there are elements where a lot of the British public will be sympathetic.

14:05I mean, I was really interested to read about our old employer, the BBC, and the kind of the knots it's got itself tangled up with, with identity politics. And a piece, you know, by our former colleague, Rob Burley, that he wrote for Unheard about, you know, the power of the trans lobby within the BBC to shape what it would do and say and how it would cover certain issues on the television. And, you know, even culminating in the director of news at the time, Fran Unsworth, saying, I felt bullied out of my job by this sort of stuff. Now, those sort of things, I think that people will have a certain sympathy for what Kemi Badenock is saying, where, you know, do you go to work, whether in a public sector organisation, as a representative of this group or that group, Or do you go there as a nurse or a doctor?

14:57And if you go, you know, when you turn up at the BBC, you're going there as a journalist with the BBC producer guidelines and the rules about impartiality. The signals that she's sending out is it's fine to say we're not a racist country. You know, I totally want to believe that Britain's not a racist country. Would I say that there are racist elements in this country? God, yes, I would. And would I say that it is not great to allow them to flourish and come out and feel like the victims? I think that's quite important, too. So, you know, I get what she's trying to do. She's trying to say don't be hung up by something that was written down on a piece of paper when you're trying to solve a crime.

15:34I really get that. But I think that what will land in the ether is this kind of like, oh, finally, yeah, we've got our country back. We can stop being the victims again. We can we can shovel this out the way. No, I think there's a nobility to what she's saying in the sense of we should all be equal before the law. Yeah. Who's going to who's going to argue against that? We should all be equal. We are equal before the law. But it is giving the impression that from this Henry Novak case, which is ghastly, where the police that went to the scene obviously didn't do their jobs properly. It is going from the very, very specific to the most broad general.

16:15Yeah. And if you were another officer, if you were watching your colleagues and thinking, what fuckwits, I would not do that because I have been taught how to police properly. Why didn't we just say, well, that was clearly a bad bit of policing? Exactly. I think there's so much going on here in terms of, I mean, just for a start. The way that the way that Kemi Baynock in that speech kind of got around one of the logical problems, which is to say, well, OK, look, of course, you should all be treated equally before the law. And we actually are. I mean, this is one of the problems with this obsession you're seeing from the right at the moment.

16:48It sort of suggests that that we aren't like that's not true. That we are all protected. As Debbie Bedrock herself says, said, you know, the Equality Act has been used in some cases to protect white people or white Christians or so on. It is about the characteristics. It's not about being black or it's not about being a woman. It's about your sex or it's about your race. It just protects your protected characteristics. Right. So she herself acknowledges that's true. The question here is how public sector bodies should reflect the fact in how they operate that we know that in the realities of life, beyond just what the law is, people are sometimes treated differently.

17:27some people do have different historical experiences. We know that. That's just a fact. And the way that, I mean, for example, you know, we've been talking a lot recently. We saw the report last week into anti-Semitism in the NHS. Should public sector bodies just ignore that? Just say, no, we're all equal. We're all equal. The law is exactly the same. Or should they reflect the fact that there is clearly a problem there in certain places? And maybe we'll have to have specific policies or, say, specific types of training. Now, it seems to me that Kemi Boidnock, on the basis of what she's saying here, would object to that sort of training because it would be in some way discriminatory against identity politics and the way that she gets around that is by saying well let's use our common sense but you say john common sense is a very fluid concept it can mean very different things to different people so for example if i were one of the officers i mean i don't labor the novak case but but let's say there were a case where an officer is called with an accusation of racism being made and there's a black person and a white person the white person also claiming they've been a victim of racism?

18:28Well, you could say that common sense would say to you, well, I'll probably take the black person's accusation more seriously because if we're looking at what is most common and actually the basis of most lived experience, it's more likely to be that the black person's account is real and legitimate. So common sense, using common sense as a way of getting around, actually, what are, let's be honest, like really difficult decisions. Common sense is a cop-out of a phrase. It is. Frankly, it's as simple as that, that I say common sense and everyone nods and everyone's thinking something entirely different.

18:58Right? And the other problem is, you've alluded to it as well, John. I mean, I think... Look, I think we can all agree that there will have definitely been occasions where the pendulum swung a little bit too far and there was overreach. Certain groups decided to prosecute a quite radical version of kind of what most people would think equality law was and should be. And I would go along with that. I think we are in danger of the pendulum swinging back. I mean, not just back to where it was, but so far in the other direction. I mean, I can't... What you've got at the moment, I'm not saying Bainock is doing this all the time because she's not.

19:29As you say, John, she's always, to be fair, had a very consistent position about all of this going back to the way when she was Equality's Minister. But we're starting to see this discourse appear on the right increasingly. I saw a right-wing podcast yesterday, which, you know, shall remain nameless. But their title yesterday was actually, Is Britain Racist Against White Men? Seriously? Is that where we're at? Are we honestly saying, I was speaking to a senior police officer last week who said to me, this idea that so many of my former colleagues who you know they were saying that the median police officer in this country is a white man who is on the right okay the idea that they're getting up in the morning and and honestly like prosecuting an anti-white agenda let's make a white man is is such bollocks is so fanciful and absurd and again that is not to say that there have not been overreactions or overreach but this and we saw it in american politics and what what What disturbs me about this is that it really is mirroring this, you know, what we've seen in American politics, which is increasingly a kind of white anxiety and a kind of agenda from certain political figures to cultivate that white anxiety, to make white people feel that they are being, it's pure old power politics, that they are being discriminated against, that there is this two tier which permeates every bit of life.

20:46And although there are and have been problems, maybe parts of the liberal left haven't always helped themselves with regards to this. There just is no real evidence for that. And I think it's incumbent upon not only journalists, but others as well, other people in politics to fight that idea pretty aggressively because it is a pernicious one. Because what she's saying is and she's warned about it in the most graphic terms this week, which is that we need to move on from identity politics. because she says that identity politics, and she reflects her own biography on this, having lived in countries where what she calls identity politics, tribal politics, she also calls it, you know, can lead to civil war.

21:21And that's what she, she didn't exactly predict it, but she said that's a danger for Britain in a very long term. She said that in a BBC documentary. But there is a, there's a tension, right? Which is because she's saying, you know, we need to stop obsessing about race. We need to stop dividing citizens into groups. We need to become more universalist. But let's be honest, the entire direction of politics on the right in recent years, And Kenny Badenock has been a leading prosecutor on this, has been to focus on trans issues, race disputes, institutional wokeness, cultural grievance, you know, dividing people into these groups.

21:52Now, she would say, ah, no, I'm just reacting against the liberals who are doing it. But that's a pretty finely balanced thing. And let's be honest, that isn't always true. That isn't always true. So if the right and she wants to lead and I actually agree with her about, you know, the idea that there is a legitimate debate to be had between, you know, we're definitely a multi-ethnic society. Do we want to be a multicultural one? Where do we want to put, where do we want to draw the line on that? I think she's right. We probably do need a stronger sense of British identity and civic identity. Wouldn't disagree with any of that.

22:20But then she's got to lead. But that's a very different, that's a very different agenda to the agenda that, to be honest, the Conservative Party that she's been part of and others in the right wing have been generally leading in recent years, which has been to hammer identity issues day after day after day. it's endless. Also you have to say what that means in practice. Does it mean that you don't have different religious schools you just have you know no religion in any school? Does it mean you're not allowed to wear anything religious in terms of your dress or your head you know what would you say about the cupa what would you say about the burqa what would you say about the cross you know the trouble as always is it's a great top line to say everyone needs common sense.

23:02As soon as you have to define what that actually means to people's lives to what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do critically it gets really sticky and you just look at the example of the way the debate has gone in america where black lives matter is now seen as a sort of term of abuse about the way the liberal kind of america went way too far in support of george floyd George Floyd died when some police officer kept his knee on this poor bloke's neck until all the oxygen was starved out of his body. And it went on for minutes and it was all filmed and it was excruciating.

23:39And there was no wonder there was a kind of outrage across America that this sort of thing was still happening to a black person. But it has been weaponised by the right to say that, oh, you know, the liberal America wants to take us too far in the other direction and we've got to fight back. Let us be sensitive to these issues that exist. And as you say, one person's common sense could be very threatening to someone else. We'll be back in a moment as a Somali football referee has been denied access to the US, his visa restricted. we'll be asking what this World Cup tells us now about power, politics and money.

24:27From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. He was actually treated in a way that meant an accusation of a racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder. They wanted riots and they got riots, aided and abetted by people who really should know better. But the next dimension of this tragedy could be even more troubling. Listen on our free Global Player app or the LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation. Hero Bread delivers the stacked sandwiches, loaded bagels, rich mac and cheese you love, just with a better protein to calorie balance that may help fuel you longer.

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25:41Well we've got with us in the studio Joey Durso who is a journalist who writes about football and its relationships with politics and power your book Joey More Than A Shirt is a brilliant opening into what you can read from a football shirt that takes you into the world of power global politics, money so if I said tell us instead of the shirt what this World Cup is telling you about power relationships and money now what is it? I think so World Cups have always been very political of course you had Qatar and Russia very recently but you also had Mussolini's Italy in 1934 so the idea of World Cups being political isn't something new I think what is new is basically this idea that the country and the leader of the country is bigger than the World Cup which I think Trump kind of is or feels he is the World Cup doesn't have to, in Qatar they were sort of bending to the institution that was the world cup whereas now i think it's almost the other way around the other thing that's different is they're not welcoming the world um russia and qatar for the many many many sins of those two countries in those two world cups they fundamentally wanted everyone to come and have a good time and in russia there was surprisingly little crime and problems and people had a good time in qatar again like you know there wasn't trouble people were able to go and the alcohol was banned but fundamentally it was welcoming and the usa isn't and all these countries are banned and i was in senegal very recently and i spoke to fans there who can't go.

27:02And they went to Russia and they went to Qatar. They can't go to the USA. They can't get a visa. But I guess in a way that's obvious, isn't it? Because Qatar felt, I mean, so lucky to have got a World Cup that they probably shouldn't have got. Russia, the same. There was talk of all those infrastructure deals being done, you know, energy deals, gas deals being done into, you know, between governments in Qatar, right? So they knew that they lucked out onto this one. Whereas Trump, I guess, feels like, you know, America's the centre of the world anyway. Yeah, and I saw a good stat that was Infantino, the president of FIFA, the sort of somewhat sinister cartoon villain president of FIFA.

27:36Who gave Trump the gold statue. Who gave Trump the gold statue, the FIFA Peace Prize. Yeah. Said that the US is 3 % of the football economy, of the GDP of football. The US is 25 % of the GDP of the world economy. So, in FIFA terms, they think, look at all that catching up to do. We can make so much money here, because I mean, I was just in New York, and it is kind of getting big there. The Arsenal stuff was big there, you know, on the sort of liberal types, people that go on holiday to Europe. It's kind of been growing with those people for a while. But I think in the middle, in places like Texas, which I talk about in the book, I think it's getting bigger quite quickly amongst kids, amongst younger people.