The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities provided an important corrective to the prevailing narrative of systemic racism in the United Kingdom. It repudiated the view that any differentiation in outcome by race is evidence of racial discrimination. It pointed out that if it were the case that racism was built into the system, we would not have a situation where black Caribbean pupils perform badly, but black African pupils outperform their white peers. It would have to be a very targeted form of racism that kept black Caribbean pupils down, but actually elevated those from an African background. Crucially, the report showed that crude racial aggregates are misleading, and that other factors ought to be taken into consideration. These might include different cultural norms, trends in family structures, geographical inequalities, and the lower economic resources that are typical of first-generation migrants. The report was not denying the problem, but rather making the case for a multivariate analysis in order to successfully address it. The response to this compassionate and eminently reasonable approach was remarkable, with many political and cultural commentators simply refusing to accept the findings. Some critics claimed that the report was denying the existence of racism, even though it explicitly stated that ‘racism still exists in the UK’ and ‘has no place in any civilised society’. The report’s authors had committed the cardinal sin of advancing a...