 48 hours, two official reports, two white washes. On Tuesday, the government-appointed police inspector found that the police at the Sarah Everard vigil had behaved professionally and appropriately when they wrestled grieving young women to the ground. Then today, the government-appointed commission into racism in Britain has found that there is no racism in Britain, or not much anyway. We'll be discussing both of those findings tonight. I'm delighted to be joined by Dali at Gabriel. How are you doing? I'm doing all right, Michael. How are you doing? Very well. Although when there's two reports dropped in a short space of time, it's too much reading to do before a Tiskey sour, but I think we've managed it, we've got that. Well, we'll talk you through everything you need to know. We're also gonna talk about, well, is it a good news story? Anyway, it's a much more hopeful story, which is school protesters forcing a U-turn from their head teacher. So school students are doing much more, I suppose, meaningful work when it comes to anti-racism than the people who have been appointed by the government to investigate these things. As ever, do tweet your comments on the hashtag TiskeySour, put your super chats in under the video, and your comments on Twitch. Share the show stream as well. Last summer, amidst a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the government pledged to set up a commission into race and ethnic disparities in the UK. Now, it was controversial at the time as campaigners weren't asking for new reports, they were asking for existing reports to be implemented. It was also controversial as it was set up by Manny Ramerza, an advisor to Johnson, and chaired by Tony Sewell, a charity boss who had both expressed opposition to the idea Britain was institutionally racist, people assumed, because you put in people who don't think Britain is institutionally racist, you ask them, whether Britain is institutionally racist, you can guess the answer, and lo and behold, when the report came out today, or at least when it was briefed last night, it found that Britain is not institutionally racist. This is the morning's right-wing newspapers, they were absolutely jubilant at the findings, this is the Daily Mail, Britain's race revolution, landmark reports as UK are modeled to world on diversity and finds no evidence of institutional racism. There'll be lots of people reading that newspaper in the morning feeling very smug about themselves, sort of being easier to dismiss now, anyone who'd complained that there was racism in Britain and that it was a problem. The Times went for something similar, diverse UK hailed over narrowing of race gap. Britain is a beacon to the world, says landmark review. So how did the review come to this conclusion? Well, the main thrust of the report is that while disparities may exist in outcomes, experienced by different ethnic groups, this can't generally be put down to racism. It has other explanations which are separate from racism. I'll give you some key quotes. So in the report they find, we found that most of the disparities we examined, which some attribute to racial discrimination, often do not have their origins in racism. Racism has become one of the most potent taboos in the UK, which was not the case 50 years ago. Some argue this has just driven it underground where it operates as powerfully as ever to deny equality to ethnic minorities. That assumption is at odds with the stories of success that this report has found, together with survey evidence of dwindling white prejudice. So they're saying, look, if you look at racial disparities, people often try and say, this is because of, you know, underlying racism. They're saying, no, the polling, the polling says people aren't racist. There's no reason to believe that racism is the problem which leads to the disparities which they examined. Now, to explain those disparities, those differences between outcomes between ethnic groups, and they put some emphasis on class inequality, that was welcome. And they also put a lot of emphasis, I mean, essentially on blaming ethnic groups themselves. So they write, there is an increasingly strident form of anti-racism thinking that seeks to explain all minority disadvantage through the prism of white discrimination. This diverts attention from the other reasons for minority success and failure, including those embedded in the cultures and attitudes of those minority communities themselves. So they're saying it's cultural issues within the communities. It's not the way those communities are treated by outsiders. Now, some of, this is all quite traditional. You've probably heard these arguments made before. Some of the oddest passages, and ones which were most reminiscent, I suppose, of people writing for the spectator or Boris Johnson himself, is the idea that where there is mistrust of the police, where people from ethnic minorities do feel like they're being discriminated against, this is basically because they can't get over past grievances, I'd say. They've failed to move on. This is from the foreword from Tony Sewell. So he writes, the word mistrust was repeated often as some witnesses from the police service, mental health, education and health services felt that the system was not on their side. Once we interrogated the data, we did find some evidence of biases, but often it was a perception that the wider society could not be trusted. For some groups, historic experience of racism still haunts the present, and there was a reluctance to acknowledge that the UK had become open and fairer. So he's saying, Britain has changed. It's just that some ethnic minorities haven't realized it yet. What you saw on the front pages of some of those newspapers was that he finished that forward by saying, Britain could be a beacon to the rest of Europe and the world when it comes to race relations, especially in majority white countries. And now Tony Sewell spoke to Radio 4's today program this morning on the findings. Let's take a listen. We can chop this thing up into even finer distinctions and we have to be careful because, for example, the commission found evidence that in fact, in relation to sort of exclusions from schools, black Caribbean pupils compared to black African pupils, there's a major difference. Black African pupils, their exclusion rate is less than half of black Caribbean pupils. The group at the moment in the country that's really doing well educationally are West African students. They both sit in the same classrooms. They come from the same estates as the Caribbean pupils. So what we have to do- Be clear what you think is the problem then. You're saying this is a cultural issue that there are certain cultures, certain attitudes that make people perform less well. Yes, and we were looking at, this is the first report that looks at family strain, looks at the pressures on families and the different ways in which ethnic minority groups respond to this. Socioeconomic factors, geography, a Bangladeshan family, Bangladeshan girls are doing extremely well in London, not really doing very well in Bradford. We have to look at a historic mistrust. We have to look at my own community, black Caribbean communities and that historic mistrust around policing and how that's been a burden for us to really move on. To discuss the report, I'm joined by Kojo Karaman, academic at Birkbeck's Faculty of Law. Welcome to the show, Kojo. Thank you for having me, Michael. How are you? We're gonna go through some parts of the report in detail. First of all, I want your first impressions. I mean, the headline there, you heard from Tony Saw, what he's saying is, look, if you break down the BAME category, that's sort of one of the big headline findings. He wants to get rid of that. If you look at ethnic groups on a granular level, you can see that some achieve, some don't. Therefore, any overall distinctions, any overall differences can't be down to racism. Racism isn't the problem here. It's something else. What do you make of the findings? How would you respond to that? Well, I think first of all, it's really important just to contextualize this report. I think what you mentioned right at the start of this particular segment, placing this within the context of the Black Lives Matter protests that emerged over the summer and emerging not just within the kind of metropolitan urban areas of the United Kingdom, but everywhere from St. Ives to the Shetland Islands saw our pourings of public anger against structural racism within the United Kingdom and internationally. It was in response to that particular moment that this commission was actually put into place. And there have been multiple reports, everything from the McPherson report to the Lambney report, which had detailed the way in which structural and institutional racism continues to manifest itself through our society. But the purpose of this report, and there's a reason why there was a lot of suspicion, a real lack of enthusiasm from anti-racist organizations from community groups to this particular commission was because the way in which people suspected that it was driven by a desire to try and dampen down this idea of structural and institutional racism, which you've talked about a lot on the show and I think a lot of the listeners will be aware of, and reduce that back to this idea of racism being a element of individual discrimination, as was mentioned in that little quote there, personal biases and essentially the cruelty or lack of cruelty of individual white people rather than the way in which institutions such as the police, the prison system, our bordering system maintain disparities and differential life outcomes for people across different racial groups. Can you, I suppose, can you explain a bit? What do you mean by institutional racism and how does it differ from what Tony Saul thinks of as individual racism? I suppose he'd say, or one could argue, if the police are institutionally racist, is that not because of the agglomeration of different prejudices that each cop has that sort of adds up to being a racist institution or is it something separate altogether from their own sort of subjectivities from how the police officers think? I mean, how would you explain in sort of, I suppose the simplest terms, what you mean by institutional racism? Well, I think the simplest terms is really this idea of particular institutions that exist in our society and that their kind of operating mechanism requires differential outcomes for different racial groups. So the example that it's often given in terms of the police would be the different statistics around stop and search in positions around different racial groups. And this is something that, of course, could be the result of individual biases or individual hostilities of particular police officers but also has a lot to do with the way in which incentives around our criminal justice system require a certain level of over-policing of particular communities, the way in which systems like section 60 which allow for stop and search without having grounds of requirement are imposed on particular areas of particular times. The way in which, let's say, section 60 will be put into place of the non-held carnival to allow police to be able to stop and search individuals without having sufficient grounds of suspicion, that leads to a situation in which when you tally up the kind of annual statistics, there is a differential impact on different racial groups whether individual police officers are themselves racist or not. I mentioned at the start that lots of people were suspicious of the people writing this report, Tony Sewell and the person who sort of originated this report, which was Manila Mercer. I wanna get up a couple of headlines from them in the recent past. So this is from 2010. So this is Tony Sewell who was the chair of the commission. He's writing in The Guardian 11 years ago. Black boys are too feminized is the headline. And then the subheading more than racism, the absence of father figures is the main problem holding back black kids in school. So it's no surprise that when Boris Johnson chose someone who'd said that in 2010, then they'd find cultural reasons to be, to blame, I suppose, for any racial disparities when it comes to educational outcomes. More recently, this is from 2019. Again, this is an interview from Tony Sewell with The Times where he says, my mate Rod Little is right, absent fathers fuel the killing. So subheading there, the educationalist Tony Sewell says, black people must stop blaming gang violence on racism and poverty and embrace middle class values. So again, individualizing the problem, making any unequal outcome between racial groups, the fault of the individuals themselves. Manila Mercer, she was the other key originator of the report. So she wasn't on the commission, but she was tasked with setting up the commission. She's a key advisor to Boris Johnson and she was a regular commentator with Spiked magazine. These are just a couple of articles she wrote for Spiked. So one, Lami review, the myth of institutional racism. And then she says of that review, this review could do more harm than good for black Britons. Now that's particularly relevant, that one, because one concern about this report is it was written precisely to override previous reports which would have demanded more substantial action from the government. So they read the Lami report, they didn't like what it said, which is that the criminal justice system is going to need significant reform. So they hired someone who they already knew, well, actually Manila Mercer, they tasked someone because she was already hired. They tasked someone who they already knew didn't like the Lami review to be responsible for a review which basically overrode it. Another one from Manila Mercer, just to get an idea of the kind of articles she was writing for Spiked. Stop pandering to Muslims, UK government initiatives to deal with younger Muslims only leave them feeling more alienated from political life. Dalia, I wanna get your comment on the originators of this report and whether or not, is there any level on which you're surprised that they came out with a report that said institutional racism doesn't exist? Did you think maybe they were gonna be more subtle than they ended up being or could we have predicted this last summer? Yeah, I mean, I mentioned this when I was on LBC earlier, but actually myself and a bunch of other people, many of whom people at home will have heard of were invited to actually be expert witnesses on this report and we agreed as a collective not to do that and the reason was very much because of what Kojo outlined, which was that it essentially felt like this report was not being done in good faith. First of all, because of the context, the fact that we had huge demos in the summer where a lot of the demands and a lot of the analysis of why, not just of racism, but how racism intersects with other things like class and geography, et cetera. Rather than addressing the actual analysis and the solutions proposed, the government just sort of commissioned yet another report to make it look like it was taking action when actually it wasn't taking any action at all. And I say that because a lot of the work on understanding racism in Britain, understanding institutional racism in Britain, the ways that it manifests, et cetera, a lot of that scholarship has already been done, whether it's in reports or academic work or books, there's so many just gathering dust on library bookshelves and parliament, et cetera. And there's so much that could be already consulted an action that could already be taken, but it's much easier to respond to those protests with a gaslighting report. And obviously, seeing that Tony Sewell was the head of the commission, I sort of knew where this was going. We have a government who stated AIM has been to essentially convince people that institutional racism is a myth. So it's not a surprise that they commissioned a report specifically to argue that institutional racism is a myth by a guy who is well known for saying that institutional racism is a myth. So it doesn't surprise me that those findings are very much in line with the broader political agenda of the government. And for many of us who were invited to speak to be expert witnesses, we kind of saw that from the very beginning. And clearly, what's going on here is we had a wave of dissent, a wave of protests over the past summer. And the response to that is to try and gaslight the population into believing that these issues are either all in their head or all their fault. But unfortunately, that's obviously not going to work. It's never worked historically. It won't work this time. And we can see with our own eyes, as we're going to discuss later on in the show, this generation, the generation below me in particular, isn't going to buy it. And the reality on the ground is very different. And I think that whilst there's a lot to be concerned about in the fact that this report is going to essentially give a blank check or a pass to a bunch of institutions and a bunch of organizations to essentially dust off any accusations of institutional racism or even just analysis. It's not even about accusing, it's about analyzing and understanding how racism operates. So that's an immediate difficulty that is going to come from this report is that it's going to legitimize and bolster a particular kind of gaslighting narrative that is emerging amongst the rights. But fundamentally, we have to see that this is a counter reaction to the demonstration of power and consciousness that we saw in summer. So that kind of gives us a sense of our own, we're not as powerless, I guess, as this report might make us think we are. Let's go to a couple of comments. We have Nick Cook with a fiver on the super chat who says, reminds me of an old joke, government doing well says government report. That's going to be very relevant throughout this entire show, I think tonight. Rajya Dee with 9.99, thank you so much. Of course, they found very little racism. Not many people will answer yes, if asked, are you racist? That's sort of a reference to them saying in polls, it shows that white people aren't particularly racist. Therefore, racism has declined. I think there's probably a lot of truth in that. And Adam Barma tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. Navarra Medias, Tiskey Sour is the best left-wing news analysis show out there in a media environment increasingly dominated by right-wing news sources. This is more than welcome. Their website also has excellent articles. Yes, it does, quite right. Thank you so much. It's very kind of you, Adam Barma. And a reminder, if you want to get in contact with us and you don't want to super chat, it's easier to get our attention on the tweets because the comments move so quickly on YouTube. I want to go into some more granular detail, I suppose, about how the authors of this report have constructed their argument, which, as I say, is basically suggesting where you see differences between outcomes among ethnic groups in Britain is not because of racism, something else is going on. So this is, I suppose, the key example which has gotten the most media coverage, which they seem to want to sort of put forward as the key takeaway from the report involves education. The report characterizes this as a great area of success for most ethnic minorities in Britain. So we can go to their findings. So they say, taking the threshold of strong GCSE passes in English and maths, the white British group ranks 10th in attainment, that's out of 18 groups. The Chinese and Indian ethnic groups outperform the white British group on this measure by wide margin. So they're saying, look, our education system is a beacon of multicultural integration because there are many groups which are outperforming white British groups. They go further because they say that if you incorporate socioeconomic status, or at least control for socioeconomic status, then actually it turns out that nearly all ethnic groups are doing better than white British pupils. So let's go to this new evidence indicates that attainment is closely related to socioeconomic status. Once this is controlled for, all major ethnic groups perform better than white British pupils, except for black Caribbean pupils with the Pakistani ethnic group at about the same level. Now the commissioners do say they heard quite a lot of contributions, including from people within educational establishments who believed that there was racism in education, especially sort of subtle racism in terms of what expectations you have for different pupils. However, they dismissed this given the other data. So they write, it is very difficult to judge on a national level the extent to which racism could be a determining factor in educational outcomes amongst ethnic minority groups. However, the fact that ethnic groups within the same system can have quite divergent educational outcomes and that even within the major ethnic groups that are quite distinct trends suggests that other factors may be more influential. Indeed, if there is racial bias within schools or the teaching profession, it has a limited effect and other factors such as family structure, cultural aspirations and geography may offset this disadvantage. Blame the differentials between different ethnic groups and a big focus both of the report and of the discussion and from Tony Sewell when the press has been the difference between attainment between black African students and black Caribbean students. To explain that as one possible thing to draw upon, they look to Oxford Professor Steven Strand and he writes in a sort of associated report to this one. The immigrant paradigm suggests that recent immigrants devote themselves more to education than the native population because they lack financial capital and see education as a way out of poverty. So they're suggesting that it's potentially because black Africans are newer to this country that they value education more than people who've been here for three generations, people whose families have been here for three generations. And they say, you know, it's again, these are explanations that exist within ethnic groups not about how they are treated from the outside. They also draw upon family structure and expectations. Kojo, I wanna bring you in on this. I imagine you've probably heard all of these arguments before. People say any difference in attainment among ethnic groups is because of cultural reasons, especially family structure or that people value education differentially. But you also, I mean, they have constructed an argument there which will be convincing to many people. You know, there's some logical coherence there. How would you pick that apart? How would you say what you have presented there doesn't actually demonstrate what you want it to to the office of that report? Well, I think that first of all, there's a real a historicism around this argument around a certain amount of educational attainment means the absence or at least complete minimization of continuations of racism. I mean, the reality is that if we go back to the turn of the 20th century, to the end of the 19th century, you still have elites from Africa and Asia graduating from Cambridge University and the other really institutions in the United Kingdom. People like Joe Casely Hayford graduating from Cambridge University, you know, and I don't think anyone would say at the 10 of the 19th century, that was a nearer weather wasn't racism because we have that educational attainment. You know, this is still the time when, you know, Sarah Bartman and others are being paraded as kind of human examples of almost barbaric creatures around Europe and London. So educational attainment is not itself a disqualification of the continuation of racism within a particular society, but in relationship to the specific kind of narrative that they are presenting this idea that, well, the more recent immigrant groups are achieving higher and particularly school level education than immigrant groups that have been here for a longer period of time. I mean, first of all, I don't think that's the great defense of the lack of racism in the United Kingdom to say that, well, the longer you've been here, the worse your educational experience is gonna be as the kind of generations of racism work down itself upon you. But also it is, again, looking at a very narrow idea of what racism might be in schools. And so it's looking at GCSE results, but it's not looking at the rates of school exclusion. It's not looking at experience around the Eurocentrism of the curriculum which has all been reported. And it's also keeping the conversation at the school level and not talking about it in terms of higher education where the attainment gap widens between white and black students of all different backgrounds, even when they enter universities with the same kind of, the same kind of multi-century LA level. And so there is many different elements that show how racism continues to manifest itself through people's entire educational experience. But also there's this idea that, well, if you are acknowledging the way that racism might exist at school, college, and university level, that you're saying that no other factors are significant. Things like class and things like community aren't significant. That's not what anti-racist organizers say. They of course emphasize the importance of material conditions around how particular families are able to sustain themselves that contribute to the difficulties that people have in their educational experience. But you can't deny when you look at even the story that I believe you guys are gonna talk about a little bit later about the way in which some students in the younger generation now are articulating their frustrations with the way the race impacts their education. This is still something that's a problem and it can't be simply brushed under the carpet. There was so much commentary about this report today. Lots of it very good. My favorite tweet was actually this from Simeon Brown, who's a Channel 4 news correspondent. So he tweets, the report mentions family almost twice as much as it mentions bias and identifies family breakdown as one of the main reasons for poor outcomes. A bold conclusion for a report commissioned by a PM facing his third marriage with an unverified number of children. It is very interesting how the state is so keen, his government is so keen to moralize to people about family structure when we're led by someone who lived a very, very privileged lifestyle. He can't say, oh, my life's been so stressful. That's why the families are broken down. And we don't know how many kids he's had. His Wikipedia page says at least six. So very odd. I wanna go to the weirdest bit of the report. And you mentioned curriculum culture. This is the bit that I think really was like, well, this is weird, which was on ideas of decolonizing the curriculum or demands about decolonizing curriculum. So in the report, they say, we have argued against bringing down statues. Instead, we want all children to reclaim their British heritage. We want to create a teaching resource that looks at the influence of the UK, particularly during the empire period. We want to see how Britishness influenced the Commonwealth and local communities and how the Commonwealth and local communities influenced what we now know as modern Britain. One great example would be a dictionary or lexicon of well-known British words, which are Indian in origin. There is a new story about the Caribbean experience, which speaks to the slave period, not only about being about profit and suffering, but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a remodeled African Britain. Now, I'm struggling actually to understand the grammar of that final sentence, remodeled themselves into a remodeled African Britain. But Dalia, I want to know your thoughts on this idea that they're trying to reimagine the slave trade, sort of revisionist history of the slave trade that should be taught in schools. Yeah, I mean, if I was going to give this like the absolute most generous interpretation, I would say, you know, at least there's a kind of idea of mutuality there, that, you know, colonialism made this idea of, you know, the core and the periphery made each other, but that's clearly not what's going on. What they're saying is that we should talk more about how Britain civilized the rest of the world and how all of the great trains that everyone has that are only going outwards rather than actually throughout the countries are actually, you know, the positives of colonialism, which again, is this farcical attempt to push back against the tide that is so clearly already in motion. And I want to come back onto also, you know, something that Kojo said, which is, I think really, really important, which is how this government, this report essentially had a thesis before it was even started, before it even began and went into the data it collected, which is actually at times very contradicting to the actual conclusions that it comes to and managed to kind of define its terms and define the benchmarks of racism in ways that led, that pushed the data to lead towards particular conclusions, and which ironically is actually exactly how eugenics became such a sort of well-instituted discipline even though it wasn't backed up by data, but it was sort of the manufacturing and the maneuvering of data in order to come to predisposed conclusions. But when it comes to, you know, the education system, it's the selecting and headlining of particular statistics completely out of context, like the GCSE thing, but doesn't question why that, you know, those GCSE grades don't translate to higher paying work, more secure work, better quality of work, or even educational outcomes later down the line, or for the fact that those who fall through the cracks of the education system, like those who are expelled or the fact that, you know, black kids with learning difficulties are much more likely, are less likely to be diagnosed with the learning difficulty and offered the support for that, but rather to be perceived as naughty and then excluded or the fact that, you know, more black people, and this is not an education related thing, but more black people are in prison for drug offenses despite using drugs that let less of a rate of white people. So when it comes to trying to answer those questions, it falls back on those classic things of this is ultimately the fault of communities who are inherently culturally, biologically, physiologically different from communities that do better in those ways. But, you know, as Simi and Brad's tweet mentioned, accusations can be leveled at all different kinds of communities. No community is innocent, no community is perfect. Perfection and innocence shouldn't be the benchmark for basic dignity and rights, but those, when other communities express those things, they aren't blamed for social disorder and inequality. And, you know, the double standard with our prime minister and the way that black families and black people have spoken about. And also on the topic of black families, there's no conversation on how, you know, the higher rate of incarceration of black and brown men might also be part of why families are being torn apart. The, you know, the nature of our migration system is also why families are being torn apart, but rather it's seen as some kind of moral corruption and moral failure of those who are, who we want to reproduce those systems of exploitation and neglect against them. Kojo, before we let you go, I want to bring you in for your, I suppose your comments on where this report leaves us and where it leaves the anti-racist movement in this country. I mean, clearly the government think this is going to be, I suppose, a victory to make the kind of anti-racist organizations and anti-racist NGOs like the Runamid Trust trying to make those seem more marginal. They say, we've got this official report which says institutional racism isn't a big problem. Therefore you can ignore these radical left, critical race theory lefties and listen to us, listen to Tony Sewell. How effective do you think that strategy is going to be? What do you think this sort of strategies for resisting that move from the government are going to look like in the weeks, months and years ahead? I'm actually optimistic in terms of, I don't think that this is going to be very effective. I think that essentially they've overshot the mark. As an educator, I always say to my students, when it comes time to assessment, if you're going to cheat, just don't make it obvious. And with the title of Britain as a model for the rest of the world to follow in terms of post-racialism, would that be in the kind of takeaway headline? This idea of Britain as this kind of post-racial, shining city on the hill that the rest of the white world has to aspire to. I think even people who might not be invested in anti-racist struggles, who might just be relatively centrist and thinking about these questions around race a little bit more keenly following the summer, are going to look at that and think, that's essentially ridiculous. And I think that this is a mistake that they've made in terms of trying to present a report that they could use to discredit all the other reports, going all the way back to the McPherson report, which remember wasn't a kind of radical, leftist piece of propaganda in the way that it's been presented to be now, but is a report that was produced by a former British Army major and high court judge who at the time of the selection was seen as being selected because he was a particularly conservative candidate. Through his investigation of Metropolitan Police Service, he is the one who kind of really established this idea of institutional racism within the British political lexicon. And I think that this kind of report where, Brinn all of a sudden is seen as this kind of post-racial utopia and we all need to go back to the miracle of Daddy Boyle's Olympic ceremony as it constantly refers to out through this report. It's something that I think a lot of people, especially all those people who over the summer in many different areas of the country from our big cities to our little villages came out into the public square during a pandemic to try and understand and express their frustrations with the way racism continues to affect our society, those kind of people just aren't gonna be convinced. And I think we need to, as people who are anti-racist organizers or committed to the left really make that point very clear. Kojo Karam, thank you so much for spending your time with us this evening is sightful as ever. Thank you for having me. Take care. That was Kojo Karam, academic in the legal department at Birkbeck University. It is interesting actually comparing this report to the reports which were released quite recently, for example, the David Lamar report, which were also under conservative governments. And it shows us quite how different the project of the Boris Johnson government is to even the Theresa May government. And she there was sort of trying to construct quite a socially conservative movement, but she still was willing to countenance the fact that there was some sort of institutional racism in the country. People were generally reacted quite positively to that Lamar report. It seems like this report in a way has been written directly to piss off black activists and people of color who work in campaigning organizations where they're focused on racial injustice. And it looks to me like a report which was actually written for white people. It was written for white people to say, yes, no, we wanted Boris Johnson to stand up for this country, they've done that. We now can feel proud of our country and anyone who's trying to make us feel bad about it by protesting and saying, you don't treat black lives like they matter, we can dismiss them and we can feel comfortable at home. One of Boris Johnson's, I think key political strategies and strengths actually, one of the reasons why he's such an effective politician is he makes people feel good. He makes his voters feel good. Obviously, he has a tendency to make everyone else feel terrible but he makes his voters feel good, which means they vote for him. And I think this report is very much along those lines. That seems to be the strategy he's pursuing. What we have to look out for is how big the backlash is. And we have 2,000 people watching if you're enjoying the show do hit the like button. It helps us on the algorithm. Now I said we've got a positive story for you because while a government appointed commission have been encouraging complacency on the issue of racism, school kids in London have been taking a more proactive approach. Students at Pimlico Academy protested today against newly introduced school uniform rules which banned afros and the wearing of colorful hijabs. We can have a look at some footage from that protest today. We want change, we want change, we want change. So chanting, we want change. Students were also protesting against flying over Union Jack outside the school and changes to the history curriculum which prioritized the study of white kings and queens over black history. I should say the school had an explicitly banned afros, they'd banned haircuts which could block the view of someone sitting behind them. I mean it had been used predictably to tell people off for having afros or sending them home. A school student spoke to the Guardian about the changes. They, the changes they were protesting. So they said, we believe the school has unfairly targeted groups of students. The school should protect marginalized races, religions and other groups instead of target them. We should see ourselves and our backgrounds represented in our studies. There have been a lot of changes recently. Previously Pimlico may not have been the best school but we were represented and we felt we were heard when we raised issues but now that's not the case. The flag has become a symbol of us not being listened to. It's strange but feels like we are being colonized. That's from a pupil Pimlico Academy speaking to the Guardian. Now those concerns aren't just from students and they've also been reflected among parents and teachers. National Education Union members at the school are understood to have held a vote of no confidence in the head teacher Daniel Smith. He was appointed to the role last year. So a relatively new head teacher who's brought in quite dramatic changes once he arrived. The Guardian also had some great commentary from parents from the school. So they wrote, one mother who has sons in both year nine and 11 said she felt the school had gone downhill since the new teacher had joined. The school was a really happy environment and my sons were flourishing here but now my son is always scared of getting into trouble for silly reasons. She said her son had received a detention because his afro hair had been deemed not to fit in with the school dress code. The school asked me to come in and said that we needed to change his hairstyle and I refused to, she said. This is his hairstyle and his identity. Why do they want to change that? He is very happy with his hair. Another parent who has a daughter in year 11 said that her child was taking part in the protest because of safeguarding issues rife in the school which have become an unhappy place. Racism is rife in the school and there's a lack of safeguarding. The staff are frustrated of the new setup, the new regime and the head teacher. It's a very unhappy place. So you can see that the effects that these changes were having at the school. I thought it was really sad to hear a parent saying my child was having a successful and happy time at this school, this head teacher's come in who is basically, you know, it seems, I would say, you know, by the perceptions of the children because I want to be careful in terms of, you know, whether or not I impute things on people I can't be 100% sure about, but no, I think we can talk quite objectively here. The changes that have been made do seem objectively discriminatory and that has severely affected not just people's experience of going to school but their attainment. Saying all of that, there was some good news today though because in response to that protest this morning, the school's head teacher has conceded to the student demands. Let's take a look at the celebrations. So the Guardian report of the head teacher, the CEO of Future Academy, that's the academy chain of which the school forms part, and a vice principal met with six students and they agreed to all of their demands, I think. So the flag has been brought down already and the rest of the changes will be introduced after Easter. So a very successful protest movement from some secondary school kids. Dahlia, you know, obviously it's quite upsetting the events that led to these protests, but with the conclusion, it almost seems to me, you know, this could be like a Netflix movie in a year's time. You know, an inspiring story about kids rising up against a nasty head teacher, you know, to further the cause of racial justice. Yeah, and I mean, this is something, this question about hair actually is something that is ripe amongst so many schools. My own members of my own family have been, you know, disciplined at school for having extravagant hairstyles by which they just mean like protective braids, which is like not in any way extravagant, but obviously, you know, we all know what that actually means. And even the language of CEO and educational institution is just gross and it really does seem to me that when they talk about how the school has been changing, they're also talking about, you know, the academisation of schools and just sort of the role that the ways in which schools are operating and are being made to operate differently in relationship to their community, but that's kind of another conversation. But connecting this actually to the first story of the day, you know, this to me is actually what the main purpose of that commission, of that report was. Nothing to do with sort of looking into institutional racism or all of that, but it was to respond to this increasing tide, especially amongst young people, of incredibly astute analysis of capitalism, race, gender, climate change, who won't settle for things that the generation before them settled for, but, you know, just representation or, you know, tweaking around the edges or just straight inclusion, who are understanding as well that the political system increasingly is not set up to actually respond to those concerns, as we can see by the immense generational divides that have defined the past several elections. And so they have been looking, whether it's through the climate strikes or these kinds of demonstrations or what happened over the summer, they are looking to other ways to get their voices not just heard, but acted upon. It's very easy to listen. As we know from Lisa Mandy, she's talking about listening and not doing anything about what she's heard. Sorry, this is just a little unnecessary dick pet, but these are essentially very superficial attempts to curb that moving tide. So the somewhat comical side of it is, you know, these commissions that essentially say that, you know, the UK has investigated itself and found out that the UK is actually the best country in the world. Or, you know, as we spoke about last week, didn't we? Now the fact that every state building has to fly a union jack at all times and that coming in at a time when the country is more divided than ever before, whether it's along economic lines or along the fact that, you know, the union is literally falling apart and, you know, independence movements are on the rise and are unlikely to curb anytime soon. And so the comical side of it is these kind of like classical commissions, this sort of flag shagging, et cetera. But the underside of it, and all of that is gonna make it worse because it's just gonna ferment this trust, it's gonna exhaust people, they're gonna feel patronized, they're gonna feel further ignored by the government. But the underside of it is things like the protest bill, which, you know, seeks to criminalize the very means that disenfranchised people have to resort to in order to intervene in a political system that screws them over. So the wheels of history are in a sense already in motion. I don't wanna romanticize it, it doesn't mean it's gonna go smoothly, it's actually gonna be incredibly difficult and a very turbulent few years and even decades. But it's also not gonna be stopped by a report or a flag. So I think that, you know, connecting the earliest story and the way that the students have responded to injustice in this way, they're actually much more connected, they're not separate stories, they're actually kind of a call and response to one another in a sense. No, that's really interesting. And I do think, you know, the different analyses of the relationship between that protest and the report is, you know, on the one side are the government trying to encourage, you know, curriculum in school, which will I suppose blind people to racial injustices in this country. And so therefore sort of create a student body in a younger generation who are less alert to racial injustices or are they not really, or do they just not care about what happens in school? And as I say, this is all to try and delegitimize that younger generation of activists among a completely different section of the electorate. So it's who was this report for? Is this report for young people from ethnic minorities to say, you shouldn't feel that racism is constraining you because it's not as bad as you've been told to believe or is it for white people across the country who are too tentative or Tory to say, look, even if you see hundreds of thousands of kids and young people and people of color saying racism is a real problem, you have license to ignore them because we had an expert panel which says, they're wrong. And you guys, when you say, no, it's a great country to be non-white in, you're right. Dalia, I suppose quickly your thoughts on that. Which one of those do you think it more is? Do you think that the government is seriously hoping that they can sort of influence the ideology and the expectations of younger generations in this country? Or do you think this primarily is for older white voters? Well, I think it's, the point is, is that the job is not, the job of the report is not to convince anyone of anything different, right? In that, I think what you say about, you know, the fact that Boris Johnson was kind of elected on this platform of, especially as this kind of dissent becomes more and more likely is, you know, things like strikes and protests and all of these things become more part of our everyday life. And that creates a certain amount of fear and a certain amount of, I mean, you know, amongst not just white older people, but property people as well, who feel like I need the government to step in and protect me from this mob. So there's that kind of politicking and reassuring and cultivating that vote. And also the fact that, you know, let's not forget the government is also trying to introduce measures that will restrict voting abilities amongst people of color and working class people through various voter ID laws inheriting from, from the US. But so that, that's kind of that, that function. And I think that that's quite a key part of this. It's just, it's a way of sort of a wink and a nudge to say, we are protectors, we're on your side. But it's also to demobilize, right? Like it's also to kind of, when it comes to what the function it's meant to have to these younger black and brown and working class people who want to see change, it's demobilizing them, but it's also instilling fear. That's what, you know, the purpose of things like this commission, the purpose of the police and crime bill is to basically say, if you try and make your voice heard, your life might be ruined because we live in a society where if someone is touched by the criminal justice system, they are conceptualized as essentially disposed and essentially disposable. So it's to so fear, it's to demobilize, it's to gaslight, it's to, you know, essentially make it seem like you trying to achieve this collective change is no point. There's no point in that. So you might as well just focus on yourself and your own advancement, which is kind of the logic that in a sense shapes the report, which says, you know, if you just, you know, some ethnic minorities do better than others because they just have will and they just are better. It's that kind of sense of, look, this whole collective solidarity change thing that you're going for, it's not gonna lead you anywhere pretty. So your best off fighting for yourself and going through that kind of much more individualist way of moving through the world. So I would say that's the kind of dual function to reassure on the one hand, demobilize and scare on the other. That's super interesting. I hadn't actually thought of that as this report being not to persuade people that racism doesn't exist, but to persuade people there's no point in even trying to change it. You should just look out for yourselves, sort of echoes of the new Adam Curtis documentary, sort of, it's reminding me of. You're watching Tiskey Salah on Navarra Media. If you are already a regular supporter, thank you so much. You make this show possible. If not, please do go to navarramedia.com forward slash support via funded by you guys. This organization is only possible because of the generous support from our viewers and our supporters. We don't have any billionaire backing and we can't just collect 70 million pounds in seed funding like GB News have managed to do. We have one final whitewash for you to cover for the evening. When a vigil to remember Sarah Everard ended in police wrestling women to the ground, the public response was one of outrage. The scenes were particularly unpleasant because of the relationship of the police to Sarah Everard's death. The man suspected of her murder is himself a Met officer. What's worse, the Met had been informed of allegations of sexual harassment by the suspect before Everard's murder. And it appears they had failed to act. Now, in response to the controversy, Pretty Patel requested that Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, quite a mouthful, investigate the incident. And on Tuesday, they reported that the Met did nothing wrong. These were their conclusions. After reviewing hundreds of documents, body-worn video from police officers at the vigil and other media and conducting interviews with the police, vigil organizers and politicians, the Inspectorate found that police officers at the vigil did their best to peacefully disperse the crowd. Police officers remained calm and professional when subjected to abuse. And police officers did not act inappropriately or in a heavy-handed manner. However, HMICFRS, and that's the acronym for the organization, also found there was insufficient communication between police commanders about changing events on the ground. The Inspectorate said that public confidence in the metropolitan police suffered as a result of the vigil and that given the impact of images of women under arrest, which were widely disseminated on social media, a more conciliatory response after the event might have served the Met's interests better. So essentially, they're saying, the police did a great job. They could have handled it slightly better on social media afterwards because people ended up thinking they'd done a bad job. So they're saying the policing was excellent, all that wrestling of women to the ground, that was fine, but you should have been more proactive in terms of defending yourself on Twitter afterwards. Now, of course, the key part there, the big takeaway was the comment, police officers did not act inappropriately or in a heavy-handed manner. Now, let's remind ourselves of the scenes we saw that night. We've got the young women getting dragged away by police when they're just standing very peacefully at a vigil next to flowers that have been laid to remember someone who was tragically murdered. Dali, what do you make of the police inspector at finding that those scenes that we just watched were fully appropriate? I mean, it's a somewhat comical day, isn't it, for reports? I mean, I'm expecting the next Westminster commission to be DJ Khaled investigating him and all of his friends and finding out that they are in fact the best music. It's just absolutely ridiculous. But there is a long, long history of the police and of state institutions who are supposed to do impartial investigations of the police, whether it's the inspector or the IOPC, previously known as the IPCC, investigating the police either through sort of regular reviews or through being the people who, being the institution that people go to with complaints about police conduct and finding that the police did nothing wrong and failing to hold the police account or failing to connect these outcomes of violence or of oppression to structural issues within and of the police. Every prosecution of a death in police custody over the past 15 years has ended in acquittal and found that the police did nothing wrong. We recently had Alice O'Keefe, who is one, I think she's part of the inspectorate or has some kind of role and was involved in the delivery of a report that was released this month on protests and on the policing of protests. And she said that in her experience of being within that institution, the inspectorate showed repeated bias in favor of the police and against peaceful protesters. And she said this really interesting thing where she said, quote, the purpose of the report was not to collect evidence and then make a decision, but rather to collect evidence to support the decision that had already been made. And that's all done within the context of the home secretary looking for, trying to create the context in which she can more easily pass things like the policing bill and the policing crime bill. So what that tells us is that the outcomes of policing that we're seeing of dead people in cells, of black and brown people being stopped and searched and surveilled, of protesters being physically beaten, of people with mental health issues who come from working class or black or brown backgrounds being treated with carceral and punishment-based responses rather than care. But this is not some heat of the moment response by police or some kind of deviation from protocol, but it is according to the police themselves or at least the bodies that are meant to investigate the police, the cell, it is protocol. And it might not be protocol that's written down anywhere, but it's protocol that has emerged through repeatedly taking place and repeatedly being sanctioned. And obviously it goes without saying that this is not the first time that an investigation has been done into the police, particularly when it comes to police responses to protesters or political dissent, the lines here, the scenes of police throwing women to the ground, it's much more clearer because it's to many people or perceived to be a much more shocking image than the police doing the same thing for black and brown teenagers, but that tactic of inflicting harm, as in the case of Sarah Everard, allegedly, and using violence against protesters who are protesting the police, especially who are protesting the police, is a well-known textbook thing. We saw it in, for example, Mark Duggan and how protests and attempts to organize in the wake of Mark Duggan's death was itself criminalized. So, or itself faced extreme responses from the police. So it's a well-hashed technique and I think we need to stop thinking about this in terms of, oh, the investigation has made a mistake here, but rather that as this keeps happening, it tells us something about the fact that the police genuinely do see this as part of its role and then see from that position where do we go from there in our analysis of who the police serve and of what the police do? I mean, I think it's very convincing that idea that this report was written not to find out whether the police had done anything wrong, but rather to look at what evidence can be used to justify what they've done. So they decided the conclusion before they started and what they wanted to do was defend the police. Now, something that's often said, it's often true, is that attack is the best form of defense and I think this report also drew upon that particular dictum because they did go on the attack against anyone who had a different opinion to them. They said the police did a great job and they're attacking anyone who disagreed at the time. So this is from that report. They write, the inspectors write, the inspectorate write, the chorus of those condemning the metropolitan police and calling for the resignation of the commissioner within hours of the arrest and presumably with a very limited understanding of what had happened was unwarranted, whereas a certain degree of uninformed commentary, particularly on social media is inevitable. In this case, some of the leading voices were those in positions of some responsibility. It is one thing, as in the case of the home secretary, to recognize that the scenes were worrying or upsetting and to order an inspection such as this. It is another to jump to conclusions and in doing so undermine public confidence in policing based on very limited evidence. Now that's quite clearly a reference to Sadiq Khan who tweeted and made a public statement at the time that he wasn't impressed by the police's actions and their explanations to him had been unsatisfactory. Also probably a reference to Ed Davy, the Lib Dem leader. He called for Cressida Dick to resign. She's of course the commissioner, the head of the Met. Now this is super interesting because not only are we in a situation whereby you have an organization which tends to just whitewash whatever the police do. So it's an organization the police can generally rely on to say what you've done is fine. They want to delegitimize anyone else who comes to a different conclusion. So even though we've all seen the videos of young women getting pushed over in an incredibly heavy handed way by the police and in a very insensitive way, given the reason of why people were protesting, they're saying to even have an opinion on that is itself something to be condemned. So saying politicians should not be able to make their minds up about police activity. It should be completely depoliticized. It should be put in the hands of a commission who, lo and behold, tend to say that everything the police did was actually right. Now that is a formula for having a police force which has no democratic accountability whatsoever. If politicians are not banned but discouraged, delegitimized when they use their own eyes to look at the police behavior and say, that's wrong, then we're in pretty risky territory. And of course, one consequence of the police handling of that vigil at Clapham Common was to give rocket boosters to the campaign against the draconian policing bill. Those protests have been most dramatic in Bristol. Last night, Bristol held its fourth demonstration in two weeks against the bill. Now, as we've discussed on previous shows, the previous three had got pretty violent with police getting ever more aggressive as they went on. On Sunday, it was kind of a mini-write. And then after that, it was basically the police looking incredibly aggressive against overwhelmingly peaceful protests. In terms of what happened last night, my colleague, Ripka Brown, joined the protest to report on what went down. There was a little bit of a slow start. People came quite early, mainly just to kind of sit and picnic because the weather was so nice. You know, the lockdown restrictions had eased the previous day. And so at first, there was a little bit of a concern among protesters and certainly among journalists that nothing really would happen. But sure enough, someone brought along a mic and started kind of rallying the troops and delivering speeches. But it was a pretty kind of spontaneous affair, really. People had kind of come for the protest, but there was no clear kind of organizer. So when the mic was put up and people started speaking, it just kind of gathered momentum from there. This was great in a way because, you know, wide variety of people spoke, including some of the people I captured on Twitter, guy who'd been homeless, a woman from a traveler community, people from all kind of backgrounds. But at the same time, it did kind of lead us into a little bit of trouble at points. So, you know, there was a bit of uncertainty about where we were going, whether we were marching. Eventually, we did take off and kind of begin a march around the city. But then at points, there was a bit of confusion about kind of the rue and a bit of panic set in. Later in the protest, there was some discussion over, you know, the kinds of tactics that were being endorsed in speeches and so on. So the lack of central organization was pretty impressive, given how smoothly things went and how calmly things proceeded. But at the same time, it was quite a stark contrast to the protests which I attended, or at least the protest on Sunday, I think it was the 14th of March in Parliament Square organized by Sisters Uncut, which was, you know, much more organized and kind of smooth and sort of ideologically unified, let's say, whereas this seemed to sort of be a little bit more kind of a broad coalition of people, some of whom didn't really necessarily seem to see sort of eye to eye about certain aspects of the protest. But broadly, it was peaceful. Police kind of let everyone do their thing. But then one thing I noticed just as I was leaving was a few dozen riot police leaving a nearby car park next to where protestors had kind of been staging a sit-in. They were on standby. What can we look forward to this weekend? I think there's lots of protests planned both in Bristol but across the rest of the country as well. Can you give us a preview? Yeah, well, so this weekend, there's supposed to be kind of protests, as you say, in multiple locations, but I think all with slightly different organizing groups. So again, I think how those protests play out will be a bit unpredictable. I know that Sisters Uncut are doing some work behind the scenes to kind of form coalitions between different groups. Some of those organizing groups, I imagine, are included in that. But because the central organizing, particularly in the Bristol protests, is non-existent, it's hard really to say what will happen. Most people, when I ask them, how did you find out about this? Who's rounding a run up? They sort of didn't know. It was almost quite social media-tized kind of viral spread of just like invitations being shared on social media. So it's not entirely clear how people are being kind of gathered together and who will be coming along on Saturday, but certainly people did seem to think that more people would be present. And so I think we can probably expect a bigger police presence, but whether or not there will be kind of intervention from the police is hard to say. What became clear to me actually on Tuesday or yesterday, in fact, was that police intervention is somewhat arbitrary. Things had been going in a similar vein on Friday when things really kicked off, but yet the police intervened, riot police kind of descended. So whether or not things take a kind of violent direction in terms of police intervention is quite unpredictable, it seems. There isn't necessarily, it isn't necessarily responsive to tactics of protesters despite what we hear from the police. Rivka will be in Bristol this weekend, I think, or she'll definitely be some of the nationwide protest. I do make sure you follow her on Twitter at RivkaBrown to find out the latest goings on on the streets of Britain. Also, you can check out her articles on navaramedia.com. Darlia, thank you so much for joining me this evening. We'll have to look to see if there's been another sort of explosion of social movements and protests this weekend before I see you next week. I look forward to it. And thank you everyone for watching. Thanks for your super chats as ever. Thanks for your subscriptions. If you are supported to Navara Media, you make this possible. We'll be back on Friday at 7 p.m., so do make sure you hit that subscribe button. For now, you've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navara Media. Good night.