National News
7 DECEMBER 2020
Human Rights of Black Britons: Another Damning Report for the Pile, Changes Yet to be Made Eliza Bacon, MA Media in Development The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has released the report ‘Black People, Racism and Human Rights’. The report unpacks racism in Britain across issues of health, criminal justice, immigration, and democracy. In what the Committee described as ‘a damning indictment of our society’, it found that 75% of Black Britons do not believe that their human rights are equally protected, including the right to liberty, free trial, and a family life. In response, 22 points of action were proposed to tackle racism against Britain’s Black community. The report highlights the lack of ‘sustained political will’ to implement recommendations from previous reports concerning racism and inequality. Report such as the Windrush Lessons Learned Review (2020) and The MacPherson Report (1999) both found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist following the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. The committee reiterated that the promises made by the government in response to the Windrush scandal must be enacted ‘as a matter of urgency’, with focus on ‘securing the cultural changes needed to ensure that people are treated with humanity’. Baroness Lawrence, a racial justice campaigner and Stephen Lawrence’s mother, told the committee: ‘I am not sure
how many more lessons the government needs to learn. It is not just the government of today, but the government of the Labour Party. How many more lessons do we all need to learn? The lessons are there already for us to implement.’ Recently, the relationship of Black communities and the criminal justice systems worldwide have fallen under scrutiny this year following global Black Lives Matters protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the USA. This report has found that Black Britons continue to be overrepresented at every stage of the Criminal Justice System. A situation that has in fact worsened since the 2016 Lammy Review, from which only 6 of 35 recommendations were implemented thereafter. The report also called for a robust response to the Angiolini Review into Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody (2017), as Black Britons continue to die at a disproportionate rate in police custody. A recent poll also found 85% of black participants surveyed did not believe that they would be treated the same as a white person by the police. The widespread distrust that burgeons in response to Britain’s criminal justice failures was stressed upon by Lord Woolley as a major factor in the discrepancy of voter registration. Woolley, founder and director of Operation Black Vote, told the committee, ‘Part of the problem is that we have hundreds of thousands of young people, particularly black and minority ethnic, who still see our institutions,
particularly the police, as against us and not for us. They do not see the policies of central and local government working for us, so they say to me, ‘Why bother? Why engage in this rigged system?’’ 25% of Black voters in the UK are not registered to vote, compared to a 17% average across the population. The committee recommends implementation of automatic voter registration as a means of increasing democratic participation. In the healthcare sector, the report found that 47% of Black men and 78% of Black women do not believe their health is equally protected by the NHS, compared to the majority white population. In November 2019, a report into maternal morbidity in the UK from researchers at Oxford University found Black women are five times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth or in the postpartum period, compared to their white counterparts. A statistic which has been found to continually increase for years. More recently, research from Public Health England found Black and other Minority Ethnic groups are disproportionately at greater risk of dying from Covid-19. For the Runnymede Trust: ‘This new report reinforces what we already know: Black and Minority Ethnic people are not given the same privileges and rights as the rest of the population as a result of systemic and institutional racism.’
Government in Hot Water Over 'Cronyistic' PPE Contracts Samia Majid, MA History The National Audit Office (NAO) recently published a report on the UK government’s procurement of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), highlighting chronic mismanagement of public funds. The report revealed that ‘high-priority’ suppliers with political connections were 10 times more likely to be awarded PPE contracts than companies using standard channels. Whilst the government awarded a total of £18 billion in contracts in the first six months of the pandemic, £10.5 billion was awarded without competitive tender. Government auditors stated that there was ‘no documentation on the consideration of conflicts of interest, no recorded process for choosing the supplier, and no specific justification for using emergency procurement’. Adequate checks were not carried out until after contracts were signed, with missing paperwork increasing the risk of underperformance and negligence. The NAO highlights potential conflicts of interest and emphasises a lack of transparency regarding supplier decisions. The government now faces accusations of cronyism and corruption from The Good Law Project and EveryDoctor, which have brought court proceedings against the Department of Health and Social Care. They assert that the government is guilty of unlawful mismanagement of public funds,
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violating rules stating that contract notices must be provided within 30 days in order to mitigate the risk of fraud. The Prime Minister has since asserted that he is ‘proud of securing PPE supplies and any government would have done the same’. Appearing on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show in November, Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a similar vein asserted that during the desperate time on the onset of the Covid crisis in Britain, he and the government ‘had to act very quickly’. In the first virtual Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson added that all government contracts will be made public. The PPE crisis continues to unfold in light of news that the government awarded multimillion pound PPE contracts to businesses with little or no experience. These include a £252 million contract to Ayanda Capital and a £32 million contract to Crisp Websites; it was later revealed that 50 million supplies obtained from Ayanda were unfit for purpose due to safety concerns. The UK’s precarious dependence on outsourced PPE has highlighted an urgent need to invest in domestic manufacturers. It was revealed that a Spanish businessman received £21 million of British taxpayer money in return for secure PPE equipment. Gabriel Gonzalez Andersson worked as an intermediary for the British government and Michael Saiger, owner of a Florida-based jewellery company, Miansai. Miami court documents show that Mr
The UK government is facing a PPE crisis. (Credit: Simon Davis, DFID, UK Department for International Development via Wikimedia Commons)
Andersson was awarded ‘a number of lucrative contracts’ to supply protective garments to the NHS. Although the Department of Health maintains that proper checks were in place, court documents claim Mr Andersson ended his work with Mr Saiger shortly after the contracts were signed, prompting a massive delay in PPE deliveries to frontline workers. Despite this, Saiger LLC was poised to receive an additional three PPE contracts in June. More recently, a Guardian investigation exposed the government’s dependence on PPE manufacturers that have been found using forced labour. Chinese factories in Dandong, keep North Korean women in conditions akin to modern slavery, according to the UN. They toil under 18-hour workdays with little or no breaks. And, subject to constant surveillance, labourers are prevented
from leaving work. Dandong factories are a hub of PPE production, exporting supplies to the U.S., Germany, Italy, and the Philippines, among others. North Koreans form the bulk of the workforce in Dandong factories, which are situated on the border between China and North Korea. Workers earn as little as 2,200 (£240) to 2,800 (£310) yuan a month, but the North Korean state appropriates around 70% of wages. This is not the first instance where the British government has faced backlash over its PPE procurement practices. In September, it sourced PPE from Top Glove, a Malaysian medical glove manufacturer accused of using forced labour. The company allegedly forced labourers to work 12-hour shifts and provided no protective measures against hazards or risks to its employees.
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