In a year when an official Government report claimed that there was no institutional racism, black and ethnic minority Britons found racism and discrimination all too commonplace. Rosie Carter reports.

The reality of life experienced by black and ethnic minority Britons in 2021 is quite different from that given in a report commissioned by the Government as its response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020.

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by Tony Sewell and which published its report in March 2021, rejected the premise that the UK had a systemic problem with racism and claimed that it should be a “model” for other countries in their response to racism. Yet polling conducted by Focaldata on behalf of HOPE not hate over the Christmas period, shows that this rosy picture of racial relations and racial harmony is not shared by the majority of Britons of black and ethnic minority heritage.

It is no great surprise that in our poll, the majority of people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds see that black and Asian people face discrimination in their everyday lives (67% agree), with female respondents more likely (72%) than male respondents (61%) to agree, highlighting different intersectional experiences. 

Black and black British respondents are also most likely to say that black and Asian people in the UK face discrimination in their everyday lives (75%) than Asian and Asian British (65%), or those who saw themselves as of mixed or multiple heritage (72%), and those from other ethnic minority groups (51%), highlighting the engrained and explicit nature of anti-black racism in the UK.

Our poll is the third we have done in the last two years. Our first was commissioned in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and as the country was gripped by the emergence of the BLM movement.

In January 2021, we revisited some of the same questions, to look at how, if at all, things had changed, and found support for the BLM movement had sustained, and the movement had had a huge impact in changing the conversation on race and racism in Britain, in particular in raising consciousness of anti-blackness. But we also found widespread disappointment around the Government’s response to BLM, and cynicism around their pledges to address racism in Britain.

The polls were designed to better understand the mood of Britons of back and minority ethnic heritage, often poorly represented by small sample sizes in national polls, and to pick apart differences in opinion between ethnicities, heritage backgrounds and religion. 

Our initial poll reflected how the shared experiences of being a minority fostered a mutual empathy and solidarity, with the differences between ethnicities and generations reflected in how people understood and expressed common experiences of discrimination and racism. We saw support for the BLM movement across ethnicities and age groups, with widespread optimism and expectations for change that the protests would lead to lasting improvements for ethnic minorities in Britain, particularly among younger BAME Britons.

In January 2021, we revisited some of the same questions to look at how, if at all, things had changed. We found sustained support for the BLM movement, which had had a huge impact in changing the conversation on race and racism in Britain, in particular in raising consciousness of anti-blackness. But we also found widespread disappointment around the Government’s response to BLM, and cynicism around its pledges to address racism in Britain.

Experiences of racism in 2022

A year on, we have repeated our poll. The results would seem to suggest there has been an increase in racist violence, abuse and racism in the workplace and public institutions over the last year. Overall, 18% of respondents said they had personally experienced racist violence during the past year, while 28% said they had witnessed it. In our poll from January 2021, 11% of respondents reported having experienced racist violence, while 16% had witnessed it, and 13% had both witnessed and experienced racist violence over the previous 12 months.

And overall, just as many respondents had experienced racist violence directly (18%) as had experienced threats of racist violence (17%), while almost a third (27%) had witnessed such violence.

More than half of respondents (52%) had witnessed (24%) or experienced (28%) racial abuse in the last 12 months. And while experiences of racially aggravated violence were higher among 18-24s, racial abuse was experienced and witnessed by large numbers across all age groups.

Among 18-24s, fewer than a third (32%) of respondents could say they had neither witnessed nor experienced racist violence in the last 12 months; 43% said they had witnessed this happen to someone else, but one in five (20%) said that they had personally experienced it. And more than one in five male respondents said that they had personally experienced racist violence in the last year (21%), while 15% of female respondents said the same. The highest reports of personal experience of racist violence came from respondents in the North East (28%), Yorkshire and Humberside (29%).

The depth of explicitly anti-black racism and anti-Muslim prejudice is profound. Black and mixed race respondents were both more likely to report having personally experienced racist violence (21-22%), while around one quarter of BAME Muslim respondents said that they had personally experienced racist violence in the last 12 months (23%), and 30% said that they had witnessed racist violence towards another.

Despite 10 years of attempts by social media companies to regulate and moderate hate speech, and statements that they would do more to address racism and support racial justice following the global response to George Floyd’s murder, our poll finds that overall one in five (19%) respondents had personally experienced racism on social media, while more than a third (35%) had witnessed it. Among young people (18-24s), 27% had personally experienced racism on social media and half (48%) had witnessed racism online.

And overall, despite many working from home as a precaution to stop the spread of COVID-19, fewer than half of respondents said that they had not experienced racial discrimination in the workplace (49%). Just as many said they had not experienced racial discrimination from a public institution (48%). Again, Black Britons were most likely to have personally experienced racial discrimination in the workplace (28%) or from a public institution (23%) than respondents of other minority ethnic heritage.  

Depressingly, 2021 has been another year of empty promises to take action on racism, putting to shame the Government’s claim of outright rejection of institutional racism, and Britain’s claim to be a model when it comes to addressing racism.

Two years on from BLM

More than two years since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a global movement against police violence and structural racism, the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the UK remains significant to Britain’s black and minority ethnic populations.

Support for BLM has remained constant during this time, and a majority of respondents in our poll (59%) maintained that the BLM movement spoke to their concerns about racism in Britain – just 14% disagreed. Black respondents were most likely to feel their concerns were represented by the BLM movement: 77% agreed, while just 8% did not feel represented.

Black respondents were also more optimistic about the impact of the BLM protests – half (50%) agreed that they had led to lasting improvements for ethnic minorities in Britain, compared to 45% of all BAME respondents. And black respondents were slightly more likely to think that white people had taken racism more seriously after the protests (51% agreed with this statement). Overall, 49% of BAME Britons felt that white people had taken racism more seriously after the protests.

At the same time, there was a strong feeling that many white people had responded poorly. Half (51%) agreed that white people often played the victim when called out for racism, while a third were unsure (34%) but only 15% disagreed. Black respondents were most likely to agree that white people often played the victim: 63% agreed, with more than a third (36%) in strong agreement.

Racism in politics

After the last General Election in 2019, just 10% of Members of the House of Commons and only 6.6% of Members of the House of Lords were from ethnic minority backgrounds, both of which are below the overall proportion of the population. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that just a quarter (25%) of respondents agreed (and just 7% strongly agreed) with the statement “people like me are well represented in political discussion”. Female respondents were even less likely to feel represented: just 21% agreed, with 6% agreeing strongly (29% of male respondents agreed and 9% of those strongly).

But there are many other reasons for people of black and minority ethnic heritage to feel that they are not well represented in politics. While the far right’s electoral success has sharply declined in recent years, racism within the main political parties has become a focal point of national discussion, including explicitly anti-Muslim prejudice in the Conservative party and antisemitism in the Labour Party.

When our poll asked how racist each person perceived the main political parties to be, respondents generally saw Labour as the least racist party, while the Conservatives and Reform parties were seen as more. In fact, more respondents felt that the Conservative Party was “very racist” than the Reform Party (formerly Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party).

Policies may have had some sway here, including Priti Patel’s hardline stance on immigration, and in her attempts to pass the new Nationalities and Borders Bill. Clause 9 of the bill is causing particular controversy, as it means six million people with dual nationality, or who were born outside the UK, could be stripped of their British citizenship without fair warning. Post the Windrush debacle, this would most likely impact Britons of black and minority ethnic heritage, sending a message that those who are not white and British do not hold the same sense of belonging in the UK. More than a third (38%) of our poll agreed with the statement: “The British immigration system is racist”, though 37% neither agreed nor disagreed, and a quarter (25%) disagreed.

Moreover, the impact of Islamophobia exposed in the Conservative Party has clearly stemmed their appeal with Muslim voters. More than one in five (21%) of Muslim respondents scored the Conservative party a 5 (very racist). Recent allegations by the Conservative MP Nusrat Ghani that she was sacked from a ministerial role for being Muslim have revived calls for action against Islamophobia in the party.

HOPE not hate’s polling from Autumn 2020 found that found that almost half of Conservative Party members believed Islam was “a threat to the British way of life”; more than a third of card-carrying Tories also believed that Islamist terror attacks reflected a widespread hostility to Britain among the Muslim community; and nearly six in 10 thought “there are no-go areas in Britain where sharia law dominates and non-Muslims cannot enter”.

Indeed, until parties are ready to take meaningful action on racism within their own ranks, people of black and minority ethnic heritage will continue to feel misrepresented by our political system.

The impact of Covid-19 on BAME groups

When asked about the impact of the pandemic, it is clear that many people from BAME backgrounds are struggling.

The financial impact of the pandemic has disproportionately impacted people from BAME communities. When we carried out comparative polling in early 2021, more than a third of BAME respondents were more likely to say they had had their hours reduced, lost their job, or struggled financially to meet basic living costs, and black respondents were twice as likely to say they had applied for Universal Credit than white respondents, and more than twice as likely to say that they had lost their job than white respondents.

A year later, the impact of the pandemic on people from BAME backgrounds has, if anything, worsened. The vast majority are feeling the pinch, with three quarters of respondents (74%) saying that they had less disposable income after housing, food and fuel than a year ago. Only a quarter (26%) said they were doing better.

More than a quarter (26%) of black respondents also said that they had applied for Universal Credit, while one in five (20%) said that they had used a foodbank in the last 18 months. Sixteen percent (16%) of respondents who described themselves as Asian or Asian British said they had lost their job in the last 18 months, while around a third of people across different BAME backgrounds said they had seen their working hours reduced or struggled to meet rent or mortgage payments.

With the cost of living rising substantially, all of these impacts will be felt even more, with people from BAME backgrounds more likely to have disproportionally high living costs as they are more likely to pay a ‘poverty premium’, more likely to be in precarious and low-wage work, private rental accommodation, and more restricted or costly access to credit, banking and insurance.

Clearly, action needs to be taken to build security for those facing the sharpest effects of the pandemic, and the disproportionate impact for people from BAME backgrounds must be addressed.

Methodology

Focaldata’s polling of 1082 respondents of black and minority ethnic heritage carried out between the 17 December – 04 January 2022. Data was weighted to be nationally representative of the GB BAME adult population – weighted to age, gender, region, ethnic group, and religion.