The last of the bandwagons plays on

Smooth-moving Trevor Phillips, that beacon of tolerance and decency and all round racial lerve who (mis)manages the £70 million, 400-strong mega-quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has shocked the nation ... yes, shocked it, I tell you ... with his latest report, How fair is Britain.

Now, you might think it a bit odd that Trevor, although a Guyanan and not one of those purpley-black, ultra-other central African tribal types, is concerned for the declining incidence of fair skin in cool, cloudy Britain.  And you would be right.  He isn’t.  Not in the slightest.  Indeed, the “fairness” for which egalitarian Trev yearns is precisely more of this decline - accompanied, as always, by official attention to his own victim group.  So it is absolutely no surprise that the EHRC’s three-yearly report on “fairness” in my benighted land finds that:

On average, five times more Black people than White people are imprisoned in England and Wales, where 1 in 4 people in prison is from an ethnic minority background.

... There is now greater disproportionality in the number of Black people in prisons in Britain than in the USA.

Over the next few days a small but clamorous industry will be spawned in “evil white racism” advocacy.  Official reponses will be drafted for ministers by people whose career prospects do not allow them to mention the word “biology”.  Committees will be formed deep down in the dry gulch that is the Home Office, where the Prison Service meets the Crown Prosecution Service meets the Met.  Third sector tit-suckers will whip out their favoured causes and brandish them at Whitehall policy-makers like ageing tarts whose New Labour clients have suddenly deceased.  Lefty journalists will spin the facts, confident that nobody will require them to research any further than Das Kapital.  Here is how the Guardian newsdesk has already been spinning:

More black people jailed in England and Wales proportionally than in US

New study finds seven times more black people per population are in prison – in the US number is just four times as many

The proportion of black people in prison in England and Wales is higher than in the United States, a landmark report released today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission reveals.

The commission’s first triennial report into the subject, How Fair is Britain, shows that the proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated here is almost seven times greater to their share of the population. In the United States, the proportion of black prisoners to population is about four times greater.

The report, which aims to set out how to measure “fairness” in Britain, says that ethnic minorities are “substantially over-represented in the custodial system”. It suggests many of those jailed have “mental health issues, learning disabilities, have been in care or experienced abuse”.

Experts and politicians said over-representation of black men was a result of decades of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and an overly punitive approach to penal affairs.

“People will be and should be shocked by this data,” said Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust. “We have a tendency to say we are better than the US, but we have not got prison right.”

Lyon said that although there had been “numerous efforts to address racism in the prison system … we have yet to get a better relationship between justice authorities and black communities. Instead we have ended up with mistrust breeding mistrust.”

Evidence of this damaged relationship can be found in the commission’s report. On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an “excess” of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3% of the population, yet made up 15% of people stopped by police.

The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two thirds. The commission says that the total number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite “a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s … the volume of indictable offences has fallen over this time”.

No surprise that the “experts” mentioned above consist solely of Ms Lyon, who happens to be a Guardian writer just like Trev, and Dr Ben Bowling, a negro academic who specialises in race, ethnicity and criminology.  But, really, I reckon he specialises in race politics.  The politicians consist solely of Diane Abbott who, of course, would never do such a thing.

It is all very impressive, and til now it has rewarded the tiny anti-white professional caucus in this land handsomely.  The question is, though, does it have any purchase whatsoever now the government is at least partly Tory, and the Prime Minister sees fairness, somewhat ominously, as “giving people what they deserve?  What is the point, beyond PeeCee window-dressing, of a three-yearly “Fairness Report”?  In fact, what is the point of Trevor Phillips?  Why hasn’t he been fired for mismanagement, and why hasn’t the EHRC been added to the list of quangos to be cut?

Why, indeed, are any repellent race politicians still in employment when so many real jobs are being taken away?  The people deserve to know.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, October 11, 2010 at 10:19 AM in British Politics
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