Cut and paste of an article in today's Telegraph, in which Sir Tony Sewell comments on the factors underlying the riots.
In 2020, Sewell was asked by Boris Johnson to be chairman of a Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with 10 other commissioners, all but one of whom were from ethnic minorities, he produced a 258-page report into the fissures in society.
Driven by data, it reported that “most of the ethnic minorities in Britain, particularly in education, but also in some employment outcomes and in aspects of health, were doing well”, he says.
“The group that was doing the worst was the white group. If you’re an ethnic minority, living in London, your chances in education are much greater than any other group in the country.
“So what we concluded was that, in fact, the biggest driver for disparities was nothing to do with race at all, but geography … all those areas today that you see in riot situations.”
What those areas have in common, he says, is that: “All of those areas have been left behind or neglected and we just pointed that out in the report.
“It’s actually got the answers, or at least part of the analysis, as to why we’re here today.”
He says that Right-wing groups have “manipulated” the situation and that racism is clearly driving many of the rioters, but by failing to deal with “left behind” white communities, politicians have “allowed the fox to come into the chicken coop”.
If you wanted to give a name to that fox, it might be Tommy Robinson, the English Defence League founder accused of helping stoke unrest in the chicken coop of deprived white communities.
If, as he says, there have been “rumblings” for several years, is it just bad luck for Labour that the riots have happened on their watch or is there a direct link to the change of government?
“A lot of people now feel homeless politically,” he says. “They didn’t vote for Labour. They felt let down, Boris Johnson came in as a champion of their cause and then they got let down by him and … they found themselves in his no man’s land. Nobody’s really championing their cause.
“So in a sense, what you’ve got is a situation where people who’ve got nowhere to go politically go to the streets, or get manipulated by these extreme groups.
“What you can’t do in your country is leave your populace disenfranchised, which is really what it is - a sense that nobody is listening to you.”
I ask whether Labour’s decision to drop the Rwanda scheme without having an alternative ready to go might have contributed to the anti-immigration sentiments on display. He says “there is some sense in which that being stopped and no alternative being put is definitely an answer” but is adamant that “if you went to a great school and had good job prospects you wouldn’t take to the streets in this way because you would have had a comfortable existence”.
Born in Brixton and raised in Penge, south London, Sewell experienced plenty of racism as a child in the 1960s and 70s, saying that the police’s behaviour towards young black people was “like The Sweeney times 10”. Some of his contemporaries, he says, have never come to terms with it to this day.
Despite that experience, Sewell has little time for the Black Lives Matter movement, a response to the murder by a white police officer of George Floyd, a black father of five, in Minnesota in 2020.
The Black Lives Matter protests began in the US but soon spread to London in 2020 Credit: Anadolu
He rolls his eyes at the recollection of Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner taking the knee to show solidarity with the BLM movement the same year.
“Taking the knee, him and Angela Rayner - disaster!” he says. “Both of them were just taking their lead from the US. They’d found this strange cause that was in America and were bringing it to Britain and yet the Sewell Report was telling you that for [disadvantaged] white people the outcomes were poor. Were you taking the knee for them? It was nothing to do with them, so you’ve just alienated half the population, why would you ignore the majority population?”
'It was nothing to do with them' ... Sewell is disparaging of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in 2020 in support of Black Lives Matter
He suggests that Sir Keir and Ms Rayner “went along because it was the trendy thing to do, so that for me was the Achilles heel in there.
“I think he regrets that. I think looking back, probably a lot of people are embarrassed by a lot of that stuff that came after BLM.”
He believes that the police response to BLM protests, which resulted in injuries to police officers and the toppling of public statues, is at the root of current accusations from the far- Right of “two tier policing”, in which protests against some causes are allegedly policed more harshly than others. Sir Keir and Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, have denied such a thing exists.
“I think that what happened after BLM was very strange,” says Sewell. “The police got themselves in a scenario where they didn’t police that in the way they should and almost – they ran with the whole kind of George Floyd thing themselves because they felt it was about police, they were part of the problem, so they were taking the knee as well.
“So the problem started there. Normally what you would do in that situation is crack down, but they allowed people just to let off steam so I think they got themselves in this scenario and I think that that’s where the two-tier has its origins because there is a group of white people coming along and protesting and they’re getting cracked down on, so that’s the problem.”
Sewell is speaking on a Zoom call from Jamaica, where he has just celebrated his 65th birthday. Although he lives with his wife Adele – with whom he has one daughter – in Coulsdon, south London, he has a holiday home on the north coast of Jamaica looking out onto Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s beloved writing retreat, where the author rattled out his James Bond books while smoking himself to death.
“He is my role model, apart from all the smoking and the womanising!” Sewell grins. “I hope the next Bond is somebody that we can be proud of, and that means getting back to having a traditional Bond, not a woke Bond, because it’s all about the character. There are plenty of others who can do shoot ups and car chases but with Bond, the character is the character.”
After studying English Literature at Essex University and later obtaining a doctorate in education, Sewell forged a career as one of the country’s leading educational consultants, where his work with academy schools brought him to the attention of Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London. Having been chairman of an inquiry into education in the capital for him, he was asked in 2020 to become chairman of the race commission.
Sewell began his career in educational consultancy and later attracted the attention of Boris Johnson Credit: Rii Schroer
Having received a CBE in 2016 for his services to education, in 2022 he was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Sewell of Sanderstead.
When Sewell was teaching in Jamaica in the 1980s he decided that while every empire in history – including the British Empire – had been guilty of atrocities, it was also important to acknowledge the positives from Britain’s legacy, such as Jamaica’s legal system, its educational system and its parliament.
“What’s frustrating,” he says, “is that you see in the university sector, you see in parts of the media, this almost sadomasochistic kind of indulgence in saying ‘we are so terrible’, yet the legacies we have left have not been that, it’s not been all negative.
“This whole notion of decolonising everything, which is really just another way of saying just be ashamed of yourself, does not acknowledge the positives.”
He recalls a lecture he did for American students attending a summer school in Oxford, where he taught them about the British roots of so many of their structures and traditions, and says he realised that white British children would have enjoyed it because “they don’t understand their own history, they don’t understand their own culture”.
Instead of having something to be proud of, “they’ve been told, mainly by a London elite, that they’re rubbish and they’re part of this white privilege.
“If they’re living on a council estate in Newcastle they are not really in touch with anything that is privileged but they’re told they are.”
As for his own childhood, Sewell, the eldest of three children, speaks fondly of his church and his Sunday school, which fed into a sense of community, and of his formidable Jamaican mother, “a towering figure, even though she was tiny”, who worked in a factory where she was the only black woman, alongside 20 white men.
“I felt sorry for the 20 white men because woe betide if they missed her birthday or anything,” he laughs.
He saw in the Caribbean community a resilience, a refusal to be defined as victims, and an entrepreneurial spirit that convinced him that an individual’s drive and determination played a far bigger role in their chances of success than their skin colour.
One of those who spoke out in support of the Sewell Report was Kemi Badenoch, who Sewell is now backing for the Tory leadership.
Badenoch, pictured earlier this year at Downing Street, has been backed by Sewell in her bid for Tory leadership Credit: Hollie Adams
He says she “got it” because she picked up on the need for an “inclusive Britain”, though Sewell prefers the term united Britain.
The way to achieve it, he says, “isn’t just people getting around a tree and singing Kumbaya or feeling good when we’re playing football and suddenly the country is united for a day”.
Instead, as you might expect for an educational consultant, he believes the answer lies in our schools.
If children work and play together in schools – as distinct from doing that side-by-side – they are more likely to grow up living and socialising together, he thinks.
He points out that the most racially integrated schools are private schools, but says that their success can be replicated in state schools if good head teachers are allowed to get on with the job of transforming their schools into centres of excellence.
Hackney in north London is his case study: in 1990 only 14 per cent of children in the borough achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A to C, but the introduction of academies in the early 2000s has lifted the equivalent pass rate to more than 80 per cent in some schools today.
As a result, Hackney has become more prosperous as middle-class parents move into the area because of its now excellent state schools, which is in turn contributing to better racial integration.
“So if you get people coming in and spending money that’s transformative that is levelling up in itself, isn’t it?” he says.
That is a long-term plan, but what would Sewell tell Starmer he needs to do right now to promote harmony?
“Get rid, first of all, of all of the identity politics, all of the nonsense, all of the rhetoric around diversity, exclusion, inclusion, blaming the majority for ills in the past. It’s not actually taking us anywhere. It’s actually making the country disunited.”
Another immediate change should be to pump more resources into academy schools, and he also believes that some “second tier universities” need to close and become skill centres, effectively a return to the polytechnic system.
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, should have been “straight out of the box” tackling issues of inequality of education, but instead, Sewell says, Labour is obsessing about diversity, equity and inclusion.
Sewell now runs a charity called Generating Genius, which encourages and helps children to study science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects at university.
It began as a programme for black children in London but has now spread to the whole country and all ethnicities.
Last week, he says, a group of children from Newcastle came to the House of Lords for a dinner he had organised, and some of their teachers were close to tears because, they said, “nobody gives us anything from London”.
It sounds as though Labour needs to adopt the Tories’ policy of levelling up, I suggest, and he agrees, though he insists it must focus on education rather than housing or transport.
He says he would be happy to help Sir Keir, and would tell him “he has to now get a grip”.
“But getting a grip does not mean just dealing with the policing issues,” he adds. “You know, we need to see a Prime Minister who says, ‘OK, I get it now. I’m in charge of the whole country’.”