‘Facts Don’t Lie: One Working Class: Race, Class and Inequalities’, a new report from the Runnymede Trust, claims government failure to fully enact the 2010 Equality Act has exacerbated inequalities in England in the pandemic. Section 1 of the Act requires authorities to carry out their functions having “due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”. This puts a legal obligation on education authorities in England to ensure working class children on free school meals were fed properly while schools were shut and had access to laptops for remote learning.
Instead, according to the report, the government is “choosing to pursue a politics steeped in division” (quoting the Prime Minister’s Special Adviser on Minorities, Samuel Kasumu,). “From the heart of Whitehall, Kasumu’s words leave no doubt that a government facing unprecedented challenges in unifying a nation has instead chosen a moment of national crisis to divide us, not least by seeking to drive a wedge between constituent groups within the working class, framed around the notion of white marginalisation.”
Report co-author Dr Halima Begum, accuses the government minister for women and inequalities Liz Truss of making a “false equivalence” in claiming white working class children were being neglected because of a focus on protected characteristics such as race. This simply because a substantial number of the working class are BME people. Speaking of a “calculated government strategy”, Dr Begum claims “such rhetoric only pits one vulnerable community against another, while doing little to assist anyone to escape the shackles of their privation and poverty.”
Read more here. Read the ‘Facts Don’t Lie’ report here. Read about “The Weaponisation of the Working Class” by report co-author Nick Treolar here.
