How to stop anti-racism harming our institutions and our country
An anti-racism inquiry, reforming the Equality Act, transforming the incentive structures within public bodies, and changing minds.
Recently there have been several good articles on the increasing harm that anti-racism is doing to our institutions and our country. These include Michael Murphy’s “Why anti-racism kills”, Lara Brown’s “The uncomfortable truth about the new Mental Health Act” and Ed West’s “Britain is institutionally ‘anti-racist’“, “Secret State: The Nottingham Inquiry”, and “Moloch must be fed: Anti-racism and child sacrifice”. I’ve also touched on the subject in a couple of my own, see “The war on noticing in modern Britain” and “Grooming gangs and the failure of social science”. It’s clear that anti-racism today has little to do with combatting racism in any commonly understood sense, and that it is having an increasingly corrupting influence on our society.
However, none of these articles have offered much in the way of solutions, and that is my intention in writing this one; I want to look at what can be done in areas ranging from politics to law, the incentives within institutions, and in the world of ideas. This is, obviously, a controversial topic to tackle, but it is a vital one, or we will live with the consequences of this ideology for the rest of our lives.
First though, I’ll give a few examples from the above articles of what anti-racism enables, ranging all the way from mass murder to medical malpractice. The most dramatic cases are those where people avoid making reasonable judgements because they are afraid of stereotyping or being accused of racism. The most striking example was the security guard at the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 who noticed Salman Abedi acting suspiciously but did nothing because he “did not want people to think I was stereotyping [Abedi] because of his race […] I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist”. This sort of thing goes all the way back to 9/11 where a ticket agent recounted that he thought, “‘Jeez, if this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, I don’t know who does.’ But then I slapped myself, and I said this is not right.”
Then there was the revelation in the Southport inquiry that Axel Rudukabana’s deputy headteacher’s attempts to raise the risks he posed to others were discouraged for racially stereotyping a ‘black boy with a knife’. Or the neighbours of Sara Sharif who didn’t report their concerns for fear of racism accusations. And there were the various ways that fears about racism inhibited tackling the grooming gangs.
Then there are the cases where the functioning of state institutions has been corrupted because they prioritise removing ethnic disparities in outcomes over effective functioning. This is a consequence of the idea, now substantially encoded into law, that disparities are prima facie illegitimate if they concern a protected group. One example is the General Medical Council’s ‘targets to address areas of inequality’, regarding the higher proportion of ethnic-minority and foreign-trained doctors being referred to the regulator for malpractice. Despite there being an obvious reason why foreign-trained doctors in particular are more likely to commit malpractice, the GMC simply defaults to discrimination as the explanation.
Another example is the efforts to reduce numbers of school exclusions on the grounds that too many black students are being excluded, even though these elevated rates only apply to Caribbean students not African ones. Or the Met police officer rapist who was allowed to join despite failing vetting because of a diversity drive. There have been continual efforts to change mental health laws to raise the bar for sectioning anyone, all because black men are disproportionately likely to be sectioned. This was the institutional atmosphere in which Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane was released to roam the streets. Finally, there are innumerable examples of where recruitment or promotion standards have been lowered in the service of diversity goals. For just one, see how Greater Manchester police ‘created a more inclusive promotion process’ (to increase the numbers of BAME officers) by no longer requiring written application forms, providing interview questions ahead of time, and removing the requirement for line manager approval.
Some have talked of the supposed receding of wokeness over the last few years since its peak in 2020 - 2022, but there is not much evidence of this in British institutions. See again, as an example, the College of Policing, which only launched its anti-racist commitment for policing in March 2025. Anti-racism’s grip over our institutions will, therefore, require a concerted effort to overturn. The possibility of a Reform victory in 2029 provides a historic opportunity to remake the British state; below are some ideas for what the incoming government should do.
“The Anti-Racism Inquiry”
Public inquiries have been criticised as a waste of time and money, and as a way to kick difficult issues into the long grass. However some inquiries, such as the 1999 Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, have had a major impact. The Macpherson report mainstreamed the concept of ‘institutional racism’, which, despite being an idea based on little more than unconscious bias, insensitivity, and ethnic disparities in contact with the police, has come to be received wisdom. The report’s consequences (see its recommendations in chapter forty-seven) also included the rise of diversity training, and the institutionalisation of the idea that anything perceived as racist by the victim, or anyone else, must be treated and recorded as racist.
As Michael Murphy wrote in his article mentioned above, “[t]he Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence lent this ideology [of anti-racism] its institutional authority […] We are long overdue for a Macpherson-style reset which puts our institutions on notice that there is no excuse, no matter how lofty, for this dereliction of their duty.”
What is needed now therefore is “The Anti-Racism Inquiry”: an official public inquiry into the harms this ideology has caused. This should include a comprehensive and detailed account of the examples I listed above, together with recommendations for policy changes to prevent things like this from happening again. Such an inquiry would also help to provide the evidentiary basis for the other changes I propose.
Changing the law
Over the last couple of decades anti-racism has been increasingly incorporated into law. The first place to look for this is, of course, the Equality Act 2010. Following James McSweeney, I propose that rather than abolishing the act, the highest impact action would be to remove sections 158 and 159 that allow for ‘positive action’, i.e. treating protected groups more favourably in order to boost their numbers in recruitment and promotion. In McSweeney’s words, “[w]ith this adjustment, any private or public body pursuing diversity targets would become liable to near-bottomless lawsuits for violating the Equality Act’s prohibition on discrimination on grounds of race, sex, religion, gender identity or sexuality”.
A second useful step would be to clarify the definition of ‘indirect discrimination’: when an apparently neutral policy is held to be discriminatory because it leads to differential outcomes. The act, in Section 19, defines indirect discrimination as putting members of a protected group at a disadvantage in the absence of a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. You’d think that protecting the public from violent mental health patients or criminals would be a legitimate aim, but this does not seem to have filtered through to people working in our institutions. Therefore the definition of a legitimate aim should be clarified and strengthened, to stress that things like public safety and maintaining institutional effectiveness must always take priority over equalising outcomes.
Changing the incentives within institutions
Institutions are subject to the law, and if implemented, the legal changes I suggested above would have already made it illegal for public institutions to pursue ‘positive action’, and should have prevented them being sued on spurious grounds of indirect discrimination. But changing the law does not change these institutions’ internal dynamics or incentive structures. Within all large organisations, a few ideologues notwithstanding, most ambitious people are more interested in their own career progression than in whatever ideology their institution purports to hold. This makes promotion criteria one of the most important factors shaping their practice and culture. If you listen to accounts of what has happened to the police for example, you invariably hear that actively promoting DEI, or more recently anti-racism, has become essential to advance in the force.
These incentives should therefore be expunged from the promotion criteria within our institutions. Take our old friends in the College of Policing again as an example. Their National Police Promotion Framework purports to be based purely on merit, and yet, as mentioned, they proudly display a case study on their website where the promotion process has clearly been modified with the aim of modifying the outcomes by ethnicity. Given that the chair of the College of Policing is appointed by the Home Secretary, an incoming government should appoint a new chair with the mandate to stop this sort of perversion of institutional processes.
The big picture and the power of ideas
The steps above are just a few examples of what could be done. I plan to develop further ones, and I would welcome any suggestions for improvements or additions. However, without a transformation in the guiding ideals of our society, this process will always be a struggle, and always at risk of being reversed by a hostile future government. Additionally, many of the malign consequences of anti-racism that I listed above are not due to explicit policy, but to the atmosphere of fear and shame around violating the overly broad and incoherent racism taboo that our society has created.
It is therefore vital to continue to make the case to as wide an audience as possible that anti-racism in its contemporary sense is simply a bad idea that offends both truth and morality. Differential outcomes are an inevitable consequence of a multi-ethnic society; most of these differences are not the result of genuine racism, and it should certainly not be the duty of the state to mitigate them. This is particularly the case in the British context, when our multi-ethnic society is entirely the result of voluntary immigration, which is still very much ongoing. Maintaining a public commitment to equalising outcomes and avoiding pattern recognition in the name of ‘anti-racism’ in a rapidly diversifying society is an insane position, and this must be argued for at every available opportunity.
A version of this article was also published in The Critic.