Ethnic Minority Adviser to Quit Role

It has been announced that Samuel Kasumu, the government’s senior ethnic minority adviser is to quit his role next month.

Just yesterday, a race report commissioned by the government was published. Campaigners of racial equality have highly criticised the report. Adding to this, Labour have also accused the government of not taking enough notice of the issue of institutional racism.

Although Kasumu’s exit comes so soon after publication, Downing Street deny it has anything to do with findings in the report. Kasumu himself, has refused to make any comment on the matter.

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) was founded last year following the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020. They state that the UK do not have a system rigged against minorities anymore.

Letter of Resignation

Kasumu has been working for the government since 2019. His originally handed in his resignation in February, but it was later retracted. In his resignation letter he said that he wished to continue working on fighting misinformation surrounding the Covid vaccination. He intended to leave at the end of May.

He believed that the Conservative party had lost the support of black and Asian voters following the general election in 2015. Although they had previous success in attracting these minority groups, they were now failing. He accused the Conservatives of pursuing divisive politics.

After talking with vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi, the letter of resignation was retracted.

A spokesman for No 10 claimed that the adviser on ethnic minorities had been planning for several months to leave his role in government in May. He emphasised that any suggestion of the decision to depart being linked to the report, were totally false.

Marsha de Cordova, Labour’s shadow equalities secretary, labelled the report as “divisive”. She claimed it was no surprise that the government were losing such expertise from their team.

The senior advisor on ethnic minorities quitting at the same time as the publication of the report is a real blow to the Tories. It shows just how little they understand the everyday lives and experiences of Black, Asian and ethnic minorities.

Downing Street in Crisis

Lord Simon Woolley, the former equality and human rights commissioner, stated that Kasumu had felt “disheartened” whilst at Downing Street.

Implications of the report’s criticsim is that No 10 have an inability to acknowledge and deal with ongoing race inequality. It is fair to say it is a crisis situation for Downing Street.

The conclusion of the report was the UK was not yet a country without racial issues, but race wasn’t the main factor regarding the outcome of people’s lives. They claimed that a bigger impact came from social class and family structure.

There are many situations where racial discrimination is wrongly applied, as it is used to account for all visible disparities between different ethnic groups. However, the differences may have nothing to do with race, as other factors will play a part.

According to Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a member of the commission, the report was not claiming that institutional racism didn’t exist. However, they had not found evidence of it in the areas looked at. Racism in the UK being referred to as “institutional” or “structural” is confusing. The use of these terms often don’t have sufficient evidence to back it up.

The report has since sparked criticism from charities, unions, and opposition politicians. They accuse the commission of downplaying the significance of factors in racial inequalities.

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