In charts: the racial inequality in British society 

Britain has its own problem with racial inequality.

Protests and riots have rippled outwards from the United States since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement.

It has reignited global debate over racism in society and the UK is not innocent, with an ignominious history of racial divisions.

Anti-racism protests boiled over last weekend in Bristol when protestors hauled the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston from its plinth and dumped it in the harbour.

In many ways the issues faced by black people in the USA and UK are incomparable. Since 2015, 33 BAME people have died in police custody in the UK. In the same period,  1,944 black Americans have been killed by police in the United States.

But accusations of racial profiling remain, as black people in Britain are more often the subject of police force, stop and search and arrest.

Deeper economic and social inequalities are also still prevalent within the UK with black people worse off on everything from representation in high-paying jobs to coronavirus death rates.

Uneven justice

The cry of 'No justice, no peace' echoed around London last week at protests across the capital.

And while the shocking scenes of police brutality in the United States aren't often mirrored here, a less overt undercurrent of inequality flows through society.

At every step of the criminal justice system, black people in England and Wales are disproportionately represented.

Black people are arrested at more than three times the rate of white people in England and Wales, 32 people per 1,000 compared to nine per 1,000 last year.

This has also been true during the Covid-19 crisis with black people more likely to be fined or arrested by the Metropolitan Police for breaching lockdown rules.

As of mid-May, Black Londoners accounted for 26 per cent of Fixed Penalty Notices and 31 per cent of arrests for breaching lockdown in the capital despite only making up 12 per cent of the population.

When they are arrested, black people are then increasingly likely to be at the receiving end of police violence.

They are more than four times more likely than average to be physically restrained, almost six times more likely to be struck with 'less lethal' firearms, and seven times more likely to be shot with conventional firearms.

In the year 2018/19, black people were almost four times more likely to have batons or irritant spray used against them, or to be the subject of 'unarmed skills', including 'distraction strikes' and pressure point and joint locks.

The accusation most often levelled at police in the UK has been disproportionate use of stop and search against black people.

In 2010/11, black people were being stopped and searched by police at a rate of one in every 10. That figure has fallen dramatically in the intervening years as police forces drew back from its use as a deterrent tactic.

 It was partly due to the reputational risks of casting the net too wide.

The College of Policing says: “There are substantial risks associated with stop and search being used incorrectly or inappropriately.

“Disproportionate use of stop and search against particular social groups—most notably black and minority ethnic groups and young people—may increase their perception that they are being targeted unfairly."

In the latest year of data, black people were still 9.5 times more likely then white people to be stopped by police.

And it is on the rise again, after Home Secretary Priti Patel announced an expansion of 'no suspicion' searches to tackle the knife crime epidemic.

At the same time, black people are more likely to be the victims of crime, at a rate of 60 per 1,000 in 2018/19 compared to 42 per 1,000 among their white counterparts.

Race-motivated hate crimes have been on the increase in recent years with 78,991 offences recorded in 2018-19 according to figures from the Home Office. The previous year it had been 71,264.

Covid-19 has forced systemic inequalities to the fore

As in the US, the more overt displays of racial unfairness and outright racism in the UK are underpinned by lingering systemic disadvantages.

Reports in recent weeks from the Office for National Statistics and Public Health England have sought to examine why people in BAME communities are dying at higher rates from Covid-19.

Black men and women are worst affected in this regard, with the ONS calculating that they are more than four times as likely to die from the disease compared to their white counterparts on an age-adjusted model.

The ONS found that around half of this variation could be explained by other demographic factors such as where somebody lived in terms of its level of deprivation and education levels. 

Even after making these adjustments neither the ONS nor PHE were able to offer any definitive conclusions about the increased risk of ethnic minorities to Covid-19.

They admitted their models were imperfect and that further study was needed. Neither believed that this increased risk is purely a function of racial genetics and were therefore reluctant to make concrete recommendations about how people from BAME communities could change their behaviours to reduce their risks.

According to PHE the picture is far more complex and informed by societal factors that are often hard to quantify: "People of BAME communities are likely to be at increased risk of acquiring the infection. This is because BAME people are more likely to live in urban areas, in overcrowded households, in deprived areas, and have jobs that expose them to higher risk.

"People of BAME groups are also more likely than people of White British ethnicity to be born abroad, which means they may face additional barriers in accessing services that are created by, for example, cultural and language differences."

Economic and social disadvantage

In economic terms, black people living in the UK tend to be worse off than their white counterparts with 22 per cent of black children living in low income and materially deprived households. The national average is 12 per cent according to the ONS.

Black people in the UK are less likely to be in employment than white British people at 66.9 per cent to 76.4 per cent according to the ONS. They also earn less on average with a gap of nine per cent when it comes to hourly earnings.

The average black household is also significantly less wealthy than white British households, with those in the Black African ethnic group nine times less wealthy according to the ONS.

Although educational outcomes for some black students have improved in recent years - black students are over-represented at university compared to their share of the population - there still seem to be barriers when it comes to breaking into the upper echelons of British society.

This is true of education - 3.1 per cent of students admitted to Oxford last year were black, compared to 6.2 per cent of all undergraduates - and subsequently feeds through to the labour market.

The proportion of black employees in the top quartile of earners is the second lowest for any ethnic group recorded by the ONS at just 16.3 per cent.

This is a problem because it means that people from these communities are less likely to be in senior level roles within companies and that they are less likely to be able to steer those companies towards becoming more equal.

Systemic racial inequality is still very much in evidence in the UK and big cultural shifts will be required before this changes.