Polling has exposed how blind Britain remains to its own endemic racism

We think we’re doing so much better than our American counterparts. The Lammy Review tells the real story, writes James Moore

Why protest? Bame men and women make up 25 per cent of prisoners in the UK (EPA)

I see an awful lot of polls in my inbox. There is an entire subsection of the financial public relations industry that specialises in spamming frivolous “research” in an attempt to get mentions for the clients who pay their fees. Nevertheless, I do find the occasional diamond in the rough – a poll that proves interesting and worthwhile. One of those came last week courtesy of YouGov.

YouGov published the results of a survey of just over 3,000 adults in the UK who were asked: “To what extent, if at all, do you think the USA is a racist society?”

Some 40 per cent agreed that “it is a very racist society” while another 40 per cent thought that “it is a fairly racist society”. By contrast, just 6 per cent agreed that “it isn’t a very racist society” while a mere 2 per cent plumped for “it isn’t a racist society at all” (the remainder was made up of “don’t knows”).

I thought it would be intriguing to see the results were a similar question to be asked about Britain. YouGov duly obliged with its daily poll on 4 June, which asked 5,146 adults the same question having substituted the UK for the US.

The results were markedly different: just 8 per cent said they thought this country is “very racist” while 44 per cent went for “fairly racist”. “Not very racist,” won the support of 36 per cent. Some 6 per cent opted for “not racist at all”.

If I were an American looking at the two sets of results, I might be inclined to ask if Britain had ever heard the expression “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

On Friday, BBC Scotland shared on social media an interview with the sister of a man who died in police custody in Fife. Kadi Johnson believes her brother, Sheku, would not have died if he was white. The opening of the Lammy Review, commissioned by the Cameron government into the treatment of black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) individuals in the criminal justice system, accepts the following: “Despite making up just 14 per cent of the population, Bame men and women make up 25 per cent of prisoners, while over 40 per cent of young people in custody are from Bame backgrounds.

“If our prison population reflected the make-up of England and Wales, we would have over 9,000 fewer people in prison – the equivalent of 12 average-sized prisons.”

Then comes the killer line: “There is greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons here than in the United States.”

Many of Britain’s governing politicians have been guilty of swimming in the same nationalist swamp as Donald Trump. Before writing this I checked out the Twitter feed of a well-known racist troll. They had 1 million followers. In the UK, black footballers are still – still – confronted by monkey chants when they take the field.

In the wake of Floyd’s murder, there are signs that America has at least started to hold a difficult conversation with itself about the issues raised.

Yours,

James Moore

Chief business commentator