August 29, 2026 - 44 views
Andy Burnham: Britain Was Told It Is Not Institutionally Racist. Do You Still Believe It?
An open letter to the Prime Minister—and an appeal to the conscience of Britain
Prime Minister,
Black Britain is not asking whether racism exists. We have lived the answer.
The question is whether you, as Prime Minister, have the courage to acknowledge the scale of Britain’s race problem—and whether your Government is prepared to confront it honestly.
In 2021, the government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by Tony Sewell, concluded that it had found no evidence of institutional racism in the areas it examined. Britain, we were effectively told, was no longer a country in which the system was deliberately stacked against ethnic minorities.
For many Black people, the Sewell report was not simply mistaken. It was an act of national gaslighting.
It asked us to distrust the evidence of our own lives. It reduced structural inequality to geography, family background, culture and individual circumstances. It placed the burden of explaining racial disparities upon the people experiencing them, while allowing the institutions producing those disparities to escape meaningful examination.
United Nations experts warned that the report distorted evidence, repackaged racial stereotypes and attempted to “normalise white supremacy”. Yet five years later, Britain has still not formally reckoned with what that report represented.
Now your own Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, says that racism has become normalised in Britain.
Both propositions cannot comfortably coexist.
If racism has become normalised, where has it been normalised? Only inside private minds and anonymous social-media accounts? Or has it also become embedded within our politics, our press, our public institutions and the machinery of the state?
The evidence from Sewell’s own four sectors
The Sewell Commission’s conclusion must now be tested against the record in the very areas it examined: health, education, employment and enterprise, and crime and policing. The persistence of a disparity does not by itself identify every cause. But neither can class, geography or culture be invoked as catch-all explanations that relieve institutions of the duty to examine their own rules, decisions and failures of accountability.
In health, the disparity is measured in lives. The latest MBRRACE-UK data for England found that Black women faced more than twice the risk of maternal death experienced by White women in 2021–23. NHS England has also reported that ethnic-minority staff remain more likely to experience discrimination and abuse and less likely to believe that their trusts provide equal opportunities for promotion.
The contemporary evidence is not confined to tables. In August 2026, findings reported by the Society of Radiographers described patients refusing treatment from Black and Asian staff. One patient reportedly rejected a Black radiographer who was due to perform a chest X-ray specifically because of his race. These were incidents involving some patients, not a claim about White patients generally. They nevertheless demonstrate that overt racial exclusion is occurring inside a public health service whose institutions have a responsibility to protect staff, record incidents and refuse to accommodate discriminatory demands.
In education, the Government’s own evidence remains troubling. Its Inclusive Britain update acknowledged that Black Caribbean pupils remain more likely to be excluded than their peers even after economic disadvantage is taken into account. Professor Jason Arday’s treatment is a current human case through which to examine the wider questions of whose achievement is presumed legitimate, whose errors become spectacles and whether institutions protect Black academics with equal urgency.
In crime and policing, the disparity remains stark. Home Office figures for the year ending March 2025 show that Black people were stopped and searched at 3.8 times the rate of White people across England and Wales. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has said that systemic problems in race discrimination persist, even while noting resistance in some quarters to the term “institutional racism”.
In employment, unequal access and progression have not disappeared. NHS England’s Workforce Race Equality Standard found that White applicants were significantly more likely than ethnic-minority applicants to be appointed from shortlisting in 80 per cent of trusts. Fewer than half of ethnic-minority staff believed their trust offered equal opportunities for progression, falling to 42.3 per cent among Black staff.
This is why the Sewell report requires re-examination. The argument is not that every unequal outcome proves a single racist intention. It is that repeated racial patterns across the same sectors, combined with evidence about institutional practices and responses, make it untenable to treat the question of institutional racism as closed.
Professor Jason Arday was not an abstraction
Professor Jason Arday may represent the most terrible recent manifestation of what the Sewell report encouraged Britain to deny.
A Black, autistic and profoundly vulnerable man was subjected to what felt like a Category 5 hurricane of press coverage. What began with allegations concerning academic work expanded into an extraordinary public dissection of his life, achievements, disability and identity.
Professor Arday denied deliberate plagiarism. An earlier investigation by Liverpool John Moores University had cleared him, although Cambridge subsequently announced a further investigation after receiving additional information. Whatever legitimate questions may have existed, they cannot explain the scale, tone and relentless nature of the coverage that followed.
His family has said that he endured years of abuse and that the pressure eventually became too much. The Good Law Project, joined by parliamentarians, academics, equality organisations and more than 100,000 members of the public, has demanded an immediate public inquiry into the conduct of the press and its potential contribution to his death.
The allegations against Professor Arday did not take place in a racial vacuum. Neither did the media frenzy.
White academics, politicians and senior public figures have faced allegations involving plagiarism, embellished qualifications and professional misconduct without being engulfed by anything resembling the same volume or ferocity of coverage.
Professor Arday was not scrutinised merely as an academic. He had been celebrated as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, as an example of progress and as evidence that institutional barriers could supposedly be overcome. When allegations emerged, his identity became part of the spectacle.
The same press that had held him up as a symbol appeared determined to tear that symbol apart.
This was not accountability in any recognisable or proportionate sense. It became annihilation by publicity.
Prime Minister, you must commission an independent public inquiry capable of examining the conduct of the press, the role of racialised narratives, the failure of self-regulation and the responsibilities of the institutions that knew Professor Arday was vulnerable.
No newspaper, regulator, university or government department should be permitted to investigate itself and then present its own findings as public accountability.
Windrush proves that Britain cannot be trusted to mark its own homework
The Windrush scandal provides another devastating answer to the question of whether institutional racism exists in Britain.
Black Commonwealth citizens who had lived in this country lawfully for decades were treated as illegal immigrants. People lost jobs, homes, healthcare and benefits. Some were detained [ including myself ] and up to 53 people are now know to have died. Some were removed from the country. Families were divided, lives were shortened and identities were shattered.
The Windrush Lessons Learned Review concluded that the scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable”. Officials and ministers ignored repeated warnings.
Yet there has never been a statutory public inquiry into how the British state inflicted this harm.
Instead, the principal examination was a review commissioned by the Home Office into the conduct of the Home Office. The department responsible for the injustice was allowed to control the process through which Britain supposedly learned from it.
That is not justice. The tortfeasor cannot remain investigator, evidence-holder, compensator and final judge of whether adequate repair has been made.
Even the compensation process repeated many of the scandal’s defining behaviours: disbelief, excessive evidential demands, bureaucratic delay, fragmented decision-making and a reluctance to exercise discretion. A remedy that produces the correct result only after escalation, political intervention or threatened litigation is not a functioning remedy.
The victims of Windrush deserve an independent, survivor-centred and trauma-informed public inquiry—or a properly funded People’s Inquiry with the power to obtain evidence, hear testimony and examine the historical foundations of what happened.
Until Britain permits that examination, it cannot credibly claim to have learned the lessons of Windrush.
Jamaica should not have to plead with Britain for justice
On 6 September, a Jamaican delegation is expected to come to Britain to petition King Charles III over reparatory justice for the British enslavement of African people.
Let us name this history accurately.
This was not some remote, impersonal “transatlantic slave trade” for which responsibility dissolved somewhere over the ocean. Britain organised, regulated, protected and profited from the enslavement and forced transportation of African people. British institutions accumulated wealth from it. British law treated human beings as property. When enslavement ended, Britain compensated the enslavers—not the enslaved.
Jamaica’s petition asks the King, in his capacity as Jamaica’s head of state, to refer legal questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Those questions include whether the forced transportation of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, whether it constituted a crime against humanity and whether Britain owes restitution for enslavement and its continuing consequences.
Think about the moral obscenity of that journey.
After centuries of extracted labour, stolen wealth and colonial rule, representatives of Jamaica must travel to the former imperial centre and petition the descendant of the Crown under which that system operated simply to have the legal questions considered.
Jamaica should not have to come pleading to Britain for recognition of an historical truth Britain already knows.
Your Government must not meet that petition with silence, procedural evasion or the familiar declaration that reparations are “not on the agenda”. Britain must engage respectfully with Jamaica, CARICOM and the wider reparations movement and accept that reparatory justice is not confined to an apology or a commemorative monument. It concerns debt, development, health, education, land, institutions and the enduring economic consequences of British enslavement and colonial extraction.
This is your moment of decision
Prime Minister, Britain cannot repair what it continues to deny.
You now have an opportunity to break with the complacency represented by the Sewell report. You can begin by acknowledging that institutional racism is not an insult directed at every person working inside an institution. It is a description of systems whose rules, cultures and practices repeatedly produce racially unequal outcomes, whether or not every participant consciously intends them.
We ask you to:
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formally reject the Sewell report’s denial of institutional racism;
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commission an independent public inquiry into the treatment of Professor Jason Arday and the failure of press self-regulation;
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establish a genuinely independent, survivor-centred public inquiry into the Home Office's Windrush scandal;
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remove responsibility for judging Windrush compensation from the department responsible for the original harm;
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and engage in good faith with Jamaica and the wider Caribbean on reparatory justice.
These are not requests for symbolic inclusion. They are demands for truth, accountability and repair.
Britain cannot continue celebrating Black achievement while abandoning Black people when they become inconvenient. It cannot praise diversity on the way up and unleash humiliation upon those it decides to tear down. It cannot point to exceptional Black success as proof that racism has disappeared—and then ignore the unequal ferocity with which Black people are punished for real or alleged failure.
Professor Jason Arday reached one of the highest levels of British academic life. His success did not protect him. His vulnerability did not restrain those pursuing him. His humanity did not stop him from becoming public prey.
That is why his story confronts Britain with the question the Sewell report tried to dismiss:
Is this country prepared to recognise the racism operating within its institutions—or will it continue insisting that Black people have simply misunderstood what is happening to us?
Andy Burnham, you are now Prime Minister. The question is no longer what the Sewell report thought of Britain.
The question is: what do you see—and what are you prepared to do about it?
Euen Herbert-Small
British nationality researcher and campaigner for justice around historical legislative unfairness and its impact on members and descendants of the Windrush generation
