Saturday 4 June 2022 07:46 AM ANDREW NEIL: The Jubilee shows Britain is far from the divided nation woke ... trends now
Seventy years have passed since Elizabeth became our Queen and two years since George Floyd was killed by a brutal policeman with his unrelenting knee on the black man’s neck at a street corner in Minneapolis.
Two anniversaries with nothing in common, you might think. But consider this. Floyd’s death spurred the rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and with it the spread of cancel culture and associated wokery, which instructed us to see everything through the prism of race.
When we did that, the zealots argued, we would see that institutional racism was everywhere, race still determined outcomes, previously revered white historical figures had to be besmirched, their statues toppled or removed from public gaze and privileged whites (defined as all whites) had to bend the knee and ask forgiveness for benefiting from, and still perpetuating, a great evil.
Even a glance at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations these past two days suggests we are nowhere near as racist and divided as the BLM acolytes would have us believe
Yet even a glance at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations these past two days suggests we are nowhere near as racist and divided as the BLM acolytes would have us believe.
Instead, we see an increasingly diverse society remarkably at peace with itself, united in celebration and thanks for the Queen’s seven decades of unstinting public service.
Yesterday morning on Sky News a young Muslim woman outside St Paul’s Cathedral explained, in a clear Scottish accent, how excited she was to have a speaking role in the Jubilee Thanksgiving service about to begin, her brown face beautifully framed by her hijab.
The camera then cut to a middle-aged white woman and a black woman with a lilting Caribbean voice, echoing each other about their admiration for the Queen and how excited they were to be so close to the cathedral’s entrance.
These brief snippets of television, I thought, tell us more about the real state of Britain in 2022 than the relentless self-loathing and aggressions of those who push the BLM agenda.
They are reflected in the celebrations up and down the land involving folks of all colours and backgrounds, waving Union flags, proud to be British, enthusiastic about an institution which defines our Britishness across the globe.
The Jubilee has brought us together in a way that defies race-obsessed woke activists, for whom a society racially at ease with itself is their worst nightmare, because it takes away their very purpose.
Of course, we still have a long way to go to reach a colour-blind society. Knuckle-dragging racists are still amongst us, peddling their poison, though mercifully far fewer than before.
Discrimination still exists, even as we work to banish it and deal harshly with those who are bigoted when it comes to race. Some ethnic groups are trapped in poverty because of their colour and, sometimes, religion. But the problems we still need to overcome should not blind us to the progress we have made.
In many areas it is quite remarkable. Consider our overall attitude to diversity. Only a decade ago, more than half of us thought that a variety of backgrounds and cultures undermined British culture and sense of identity. Today, according to a report from the think tank British Future, around 75 per cent of us are comfortable with our growing diversity and see it as an integral part of our culture. It is a sea-change in opinion which bodes well for the future.
Some 84 per cent have no problem with the idea of an ethnic-minority prime minister; only 10 per cent think this would be a bad thing, a percentage bound to diminish even further as the years go by.
Politics is only one of many areas where those of recent immigrant stock have done well. Boris Johnson’s first cabinet had more ministers from ethnic minorities than all other British cabinets in our history put together (admittedly a low bar but also a sign of how quickly things can change for the better).
So we should be celebrating how far we’ve come. Yes, on average, a Bangladeshi Brit will have an income 20 per cent lower than a white Brit. Black Britons earn, on average, 9 per cent less. But British Indians earn 12 per cent more than whites and Chinese Brits 30 per cent more.
These statistics — and I’m grateful to Fraser Nelson, my colleague at The Spectator magazine, for them — suggest that skin colour alone can’t explain differential performance between the races.
There are differences even within races. Black Brits from African backgrounds are twice as likely to go university as those from a Caribbean heritage.
On average around 35 per cent of black Brits go to university, which is pretty much the national average for all ethnicities. But half of young Asians go to university and an incredible 68 per cent of young Chinese — versus only 30 per cent of young whites, which is below the national average. Poor white boys are the worst performing ethnic group in the UK.
Clearly many complicated factors are at work here, involving history, culture, attitudes to education and the strength (or not) of the family unit. Yet to bring up any of that is to incur the wrath of the woke, who have a single explanation for everything: racism.
Of course, we still have a long way to go to reach a colour-blind society. Knuckle-dragging racists are still amongst us, peddling their poison, though mercifully far fewer than before
Martin Luther King, the great American civil rights activist, wanted a society for his children in which ‘the content of their character’ would matter more than the ‘colour of their skin’. Amen to that. But for BLM and other woke activists colour clearly matters more than character.
Their simplistic (and factually wrong) analysis is no longer confined to a few race warriors on the campus. It has taken hold of the intellectual, cultural and power elites which control all our great institutions in the
