Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

My hon. Friend is right that local authorities have a very important role to play in this space. I am very pleased that he has actually read the recommendation and not just the reports about the report. Local authorities have played an important part in mitigating the disproportionate impact of covid on some ethnic minorities via the community champion scheme, for which we announced funding last autumn. With regard to his other comments, the Government response is not yet prepared; it will be coming in due course in the summer. We will consider the recommendation that he has made in the light of the full report.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab) [V]]

In her responses, the Minister repeatedly conflates disagreement with this report with misrepresentation or not having read the report, so let us draw a line under that—we have read it, but we know that institutional racism is still felt across every area of the UK and that there is no new story to tell about slavery and colonialism. She may disagree, but does she at least recognise and understand why people—more specifically the people this report is about—overwhelmingly see this report as steeped in denial and why it is viewed as a complete insult to those who have been the victims of institutional racism, such as black women, who are four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth? Does she recognise that denial is a core mechanism of institutional racism? Can she explain how she plans to push ahead with this report when it is so widely rejected by those it impacts?

[Kemi Badenoch]

If the hon. Lady reads beyond The Guardian and perhaps statements in the Morning Star, she will realise that the report has been welcomed by many, many organisations, not just the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but even the Royal College of Physicians and many more. I am not here to reel out a list of who supports the Government. It is interesting that she says that I confuse disagreement with divisiveness, because it was her colleague the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) who just stood up there and called people “racial gatekeepers”. I wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees with that comment, which is unbelievably divisive rhetoric. What I would say to her is that she does not speak for all ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities are not uniquely left wing, and to claim that a report about black and brown people can only talk about issues from her perspective completely ignores the fact that there are many of us, of various skin colours—she can see my face and she knows I am a black woman, just like her—who disagree. We disagree. She raises the point about maternal health, and I would like to take the opportunity to make this point: in a debate on 11 March, she said that

“one in four black women dies in childbirth”.—[Official Report, 11 March 2021; Vol. 690, c. 1089.]

That statistic, which thankfully she has now corrected, is completely wrong. The actual figure is not 25% of black women, but 0.34%. It is a very confusing statistic because we often represent the numbers in terms of numbers per 800,000.[Official Report, 27 April 2021, Vol. 693, c. 2MC.] What I have been doing is working on maternal health. I have spoken to the chief midwifery officer and to Dame Donna Kinnair, the head of the Royal College of Nursing; we in government have had conversations and they all accept that because the numbers are so small, it will often be very hard to target effectively, but that does not mean we will not try. We do have a maternal health strategy, which I know the hon. Lady has seen, and I wish that for once she would acknowledge the work that the Government have done, rather than repeating false statistics and pretending that nothing is happening, when that is far from the truth.