Mediaboss Marketing

On a rainy Tuesday evening, a couple of weeks ago, Tom not his real name, for reasons that will become clear took his 12-year-old son to football practice. Training is two miles away, and usually they would travel by car. But, over the summer, the area where they live in Ealing, west London, was designated a low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN). This meant that its streets would be altered to encourage active transport such as cycling and walking, typically by placing planters and bollards across key intersections. The introduction of the LTN scheme in Ealing had created confusion among motorists and congestion on the main roads. It also led Tom to dig out his bicycle, which he bought when he moved to London in 2003 but which had been gathering dust for 15 years.

The journey to football was unremarkable, wobbling through unfamiliar streets, scrabbling to make it on time. Cycling back, though, the rain falling harder now, a strange feeling came over Tom. There were no cars around, he recalls. It was dark. It was wet. But it was magical. It was just seeing the place where I live in a totally different light. Everybodys quite angry at this moment in time, and I just felt for the first time in a long while that lift and that mood change. When he and his son got home, they decided they would go on their bikes again the following week. I hope maybe when he gets older, if we keep it up, hell remember cycling to football with his dad, Tom says. Rather than sitting in the back seat of the car.

Its a sweet story. Just something normal, says Tom, or something that should be normal. Its also exactly the kind of experience that low-traffic neighbourhoods were designed to encourage. There have been similar, albeit more limited, initiatives in the past in the UK, but the LTN proposal only dates back to May this year, when Boris Johnson announced during prime ministers questions that we would soon be entering a new golden age for cycling. He put his money where his mouth was: soon after, the Department for Transport released 250m of emergency active travel funding to English local authorities. Encouraging walking and cycling was now regarded as essential to avoid overcrowding on public transport systems as we begin to open up parts of our economy.

LTN schemes would be trialled in cities including Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham, but their introduction was deemed particularly essential to London. In May, Transport for London (TfL) needed a government bailout of 1.6bn and was required to institute LTNs as a condition of the recovery package. The fear was that Londoners, wary of using buses and the underground, would take to their cars, causing unprecedented congestion and pollution. TfL outlined a strategy to increase the number of journeys made on foot by a multiple of five, and the journeys made on bike by 10. By the end of the summer, at least 160 new schemes had been introduced across the majority of the capitals 32 boroughs. It was perhaps the most dramatic reshaping of these streets since the second world war.

The scheme generated by Johnsons Conservative government was rolled out with great enthusiasm by Labours mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. At last, something was being done to address the problem of traffic on Londons residential streets, which had increased by 72.2% between 2009 and 2019, and of air quality that had become filthy, toxic and a public health crisis, according to Khan. Increasing the use of active transport would make citizens fitter, improve their mental health and give them greater resilience to Covid-19. Low-traffic neighbourhoods were a win, win, win one of the few potential positives to come out of the pandemic.

You wonder whether Covid has to some extent given the government cover for forcing certain things through

Just a few months after the first low-traffic neighbourhoods were introduced, its safe to say that few people think they are a miracle policy any more. In Ealing, which was given more than 600,000 by TfL for active-transport initiatives, opposition has been especially fierce. Planters marking the new road layouts have been defaced and overturned, the bollards have been stolen and the holes left in the road filled in with cement. A march to protest against the LTNs in September had a turnout estimated at 2,500, while more than 10,000 people have signed a petition objecting to the scheme.

Low-traffic neighbourhoods have been similarly contentious in other parts of London. John Locker, a Conservative councillor in Wandsworth, said: It is clear that the LTNs are not delivering the benefits we want to see. In fact it looks like the combination of changes are unfortunately having the opposite effect. The borough scrapped its scheme in September.

Lewisham plans to make significant changes to its LTNs this month. In Hackney, Labour councillor Jon Burke received a death threat over the new measures. We intend to burn down your house while you are sleeping, a scrawled note read. Stop this traffic open all road now or we will get violence [sic].

Start looking into low-traffic neighbourhoods and the vitriol, suspicion and chicanery is disturbing. It is no surprise that Tom from Ealing asks to use an assumed name. I know a lot of the parents that were marching against the LTNs, even the ones holding the banners, he explains. And you think, OK, do I really want any hassle or blowback next time we turn up to football?

Some of the objections to low-traffic neighbourhoods come from predictable sources: motorists, for example, who now find a five-minute errand takes them 20 minutes or who have had a chunk of time added to their commute. Delivery drivers, an essential service in the Covid age, have been inconvenienced by the new measures, forced to adapt to new road layouts while still making their requisite number of drops per hour. But what has been unexpected is the diverse nature of campaigners within the anti-LTN groups. Even some of the individuals themselves are surprised. Rosamund Kissi-Debrah says: If you randomly rang me up and said, Rosamund, what do you think about a low-traffic neighbourhood?, Id say, Ooh, that sounds great definitely. But where I live, and I can only talk about Lewisham, it has been a disaster.

Kissi-Debrah is a World Health Organization clean-air advocate whose nine-year-old daughter Ella died in 2013 after suffering a series of severe asthma attacks. She lives in Hither Green, south-east London, just off the South Circular, one of Londons busiest roads. Ella loved to cycle, scoot and skateboard you name it and her two siblings are similarly obsessed with two wheels. Kissi-Debrah follows behind them on a scooter: A manual one, not electric, she exclaims. So I cant be anti-cyclist.

For Kissi-Debrah, the issue with low-traffic neighbourhoods is air quality and fairness. For people who live in an LTN, yes, life is better, I dont deny that, she says. But their traffic is going somewhere. And this brings up all sorts of issues: social justice and environmental justice. You cannot live in a neighbourhood where one part has an LTN and children are cycling and playing outside and the roads are safe, then pop along a couple of roads later and theres gridlocked traffic. We cannot live in a society like that.

Kissi-Debrahs intervention in the debate appeared to be influential in Lewishams ongoing rethink of its LTNs. And she has received considerable opprobrium on social media for her stance. She says: This is the hardest time people have given me. But I can only speak my truth. No, some people are not happy with me at all. Others have told her that she has secured a victory for the anti-LTN campaign, though Kissi-Debrah doesnt like that angle either.

Its not victorious that I know a mother who had to rush her three-year-old to the local hospital to put them on a nebuliser, she says. I dont want any other family to go through what we went through. Thats my aim all the time, but unless we change things right now Im not going to get my wish, am I?

For some, the whole cycling, clean air, low-traffic agenda is about their neighbourhood changing in ways they dont like

Even the most impassioned advocates of LTNs have to concede there have been fundamental problems in some areas. Along with unprecedented investment back in May, local authorities were given the power to introduce the schemes as emergency traffic regulation orders, ostensibly because of the fast spread of Covid and the need to offer social distancing to residents. Typically, consultations on such matters might last months, even years, involving mail-outs, meetings and even local votes. The new LTNs would instead be given a six-month trial and then reviewed. In boroughs such as Ealing, where the council has a stated ambition to become the cycling Copenhagen of London, there were fears that these reviews would be akin to them marking their own homework.

Theres a set of objections that it was done too fast, says Dave Hill, editor and publisher of the website On London, which has tracked the LTN debate closely. Some of them havent been very well designed. And some people are furious, because they feel this has been done to them without anybody asking. Thats a small example of a bigger thing, about people feeling that politicians dont listen to them.

Where does Covid come in? Hill continues. Well, you wonder whether Covid has to some extent given the government cover for forcing certain things through.

Hill also thinks that the typical demographic of the London cyclist has become a factor. According to TfLs Cycling Trends Update of July 2019, only 27% of cycle trips are made by women and more than 85% of the citys cyclists are white. A high proportion often more than 20% or 30% are from households with a yearly income of over 75,000. Some of those opposed to LTNs clearly feel that the schemes encourage gentrification by stealth. For some people in some of those areas, says Hill, the whole cycling, clean air, low-traffic neighbourhood agenda is another example of their neighbourhood changing in ways they dont like and dont have any control over.

And yet, it also feels like something does have to change. There are, in 2020, 38.4m licensed vehicles in Great Britain; this number has grown every year bar one (1991) since the second world war. In 2019, according to the Department for Transport, 130m more miles were driven in Ealing alone than in 2012. TfL has found that more than a third of all car journeys made by London residents are under 2km (1.25 miles).

For a cyclist such as broadcaster Jeremy Vine, who rides at least 14 miles each day between his home and work in London, urban transport in Britain needs to be overhauled. In a city as compact as London, you cant justify people driving around in two-tonne metal boxes with an empty armchair beside them and an empty sofa behind them, he says. Its just nuts. But once you start to say, right, if you want to drive in a big metal box, thats fine, but you cant go down here, here and here people just go completely mad about it. To the point where somebody says, your neighbourhood is going to be an LTN and everyone goes, youre fucking joking! I dont want that.

Vine would start by reallocating road space and strongly enforcing penalties. If youve bought a really fancy car to whiz around London, because you want to listen to Bruce Springsteen playing Born to Run, you need to find a different city, he says. Go and rent a car in America and you can do that. You cant do that in our big cities in Britain.

I wonder what kind of parallel universe are we living in? But then I think a lot of this is blocked-up anger from Covid

At a glance, Ealing does not appear to be a community in chaos. It is a place of comfortable family homes and sprawling green spaces, plantation shutters and side returns still the queen of the suburbs, as the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted approvingly. But there are some signs of the current conflict. In many of the bay windows, alongside drawings of NHS rainbows, there are either green posters to show support for low-traffic neighbourhoods (Safer, Healthier, Quieter, Greener) or red ones in opposition (Bollards to LTNs). It is not uncommon for houses next door to each other to have rival posters.

I borrow a bike from the Ealing Cycling Campaign, and its borough coordinator, a jovial American called Nick Moffitt, gives me a tour of the most acrimonious spots. We start with an oil slick on a street in west Ealing. Moffitt wrinkles his nose: the police were alerted, but it was impossible to prove whether the oil had been deposited deliberately to unseat cyclists, or had come from, say, a car snagging its undercarriage on the latch fitted to lock the bollard in place. But you think, gosh, are we actually this kind of neighbourhood? says Moffitt.

Moffitt, who works in IT, moved to west London in 2006, and his main reason for joining the cycling campaign was to provide safer streets for his daughters ride to school. The sabotage of the planters has been unpleasant, even scary, but Moffitt was heartened by the speed at which pro-LTN residents took to the streets to set them right, replant the greenery and water them.

With these schemes, there always tends to be a moderate-sized number of people who are loudly opposed, he says. There tends to be a smaller group who are loudly in favour, and then a vast majority of people who say: Well, it seems all right. Lets wait and see.

Opinion polls on low-traffic neighbourhoods as with everything else on the schemes are vigorously disputed, with questions raised over sample size and bias. Broadly though, there seems to be at least theoretical support for them among Londoners. A TfL survey in September found that 51% of respondents agreed with LTNs (subject to a consultation process for individual schemes) with 16% against. A survey of 2,000 residents for On London in October found 52% were broadly supportive of LTNs, while 19% were either opposed or strongly opposed.

For Laura Begg, a campaigner for the group Ealing Residents Against LTNs, it comes down to how much your life has been affected by the new schemes. A lot of the pro-campaigners in this area dont even live in an LTN, she says, when we meet in Jays Superstore, opposite one of the most controversial spots in west Ealing, or bollard land as she calls it. Whereas everyone in the anti-campaign lives in an LTN.

Begg could seem an unlikely opponent of low traffic neighbourhoods: every day she walks with her two children, aged five and two, to and from school. The family owns, and regularly uses, bicycles. And she has never taken any interest in local politics before. Beggs annoyance with LTNs comes from her experience running a dog-walking company. Every day, she has to navigate a set of LTNs to collect her dogs, go through more LTNs to get to the park, and then repeat the process on the way home. Today was horrendous, she says, with a deep sigh. I actually sent an email to the leader of the council telling him I was on the verge of having a mental breakdown.

Other local businesses in Ealing clearly feel the same way as Begg, from the owner of Jays Superstore to the hairdressers on the high street to the local pub. All of them feel the impact of the LTN scheme on their trade at a time when Covid has already made their survival precarious. And Begg reels off other examples of residents whose lives have been adversely affected, such as a disabled woman who missed her hospital appointment in central London because neither of the taxis she called couldnt reach her house. Now she wont be seen until April.

There has been annoyance, too, at the fines imposed by camera-enforced checkpoints: Lewisham council, for example, issued 3.1m in penalties on the new road layouts in about two months of operation.

These are bizarre times in Ealing, and many areas of London. Begg was walking a dog recently through the streets on a Sunday, and saw a cyclist hiding behind a planter taking photos of drivers ignoring the road signs, while a local woman berated him, telling him to stop. What kind of parallel universe are we living in? says Begg, shaking her head. But then I think a lot of this is blocked-up anger from Covid.

Any political unity that existed back in the summer feels shattered. It has been jokingly said that the whole thing is a plot by Dominic Cummings to turn people against their Labour councils, says Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, whose mailbox has seen the objections far outweigh a handful of messages in support. Large numbers of my colleagues have also found these schemes contentious.

How this toxic situation resolves itself is likely to differ from borough to borough. Already, the government appears to be going cold on low-traffic neighbourhoods: No one should be in doubt about our support for motorists, wrote the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, last month in a letter to English local authorities. If there is a lesson to be learned from the LTN fiasco as both Rosamund Kissi-Debrah and Dave Hill tell me it shows what happens when politicians create a policy and dont bring the people affected along with them.

Back in Ealing, Tom hopes but doesnt expect that most of the planters and bollards will remain. Either way, he plans to be out on his bike more often, so thats one less car on Londons roads. When I look back, in 10 years, 20 years time, which side would I have wanted to be on? he says. I think Id want to have been on the one thats trying to do a bit better. Trying to make this a better place to live.

Continue reading here:
Car-free neighbourhoods: the unlikely new frontline in the culture wars - The Guardian

US voters in Europe say the election outcome could influence their plans to move their families back to the country.

Many Americans said they were feeling stressed and were concerned about the future of the country after this election.

If for example [Republicans] repealed the Affordable Care Act and there was no longer a protection for people who have pre-existing conditions, that would be a factor in me never moving back to the United States which I currently plan to do in the coming years with my husband, said Rachel Oakland, an American voter who has been living in Lyon, France, for four years.

If something bad were to happen and if theres no protection in the healthcare system I think that would be a huge deterrent to moving back there, she added.

For her, healthcare is a top issue in the United States, and she is closely following both the presidential and Senate election this year.

Being [in France] for so long you get used to not having to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the basic necessity of healthcare, Oakland added, stating that in the US she often had to pay hundreds of dollars for doctors or would have to prove that she did not have a preexisting condition in order to get insurance coverage.

Stacey Kruckel is an American who works at a professional services firm and has lived in Germany for two years. She also hopes for a change in the administration so that her children could feel comfortable moving to the US.

I really do feel that this is the most critical election of my lifetime. I have two small children and you know I want my children to feel comfortable moving back to America, Kruckel said.

As the mother of two Black boys, Im worried. I want my children to feel safe and that their voices will be heard and that as young Black children they have opportunity and will not be racially profiled. And I think that this president has stoked racial divisiveness to such a point that its very problematic, Kruckel said.

She began volunteering with Democrats Abroad this year to help encourage other Americans overseas to vote in the election and now is Secretary of the Frankfurt chapter.

Max N and Albert R, who preferred not to share their full surnames, have lived in Lyon, France, for the past 4.5 years and said the 2016 election was traumatic and now theyre doing all they can to help Biden and Harris.

Especially thinking about the Republicans and Trump winning the election this time, it makes me a bit more doubtful that the US will be a country that I want to live in although so many of the people I love are there and it will always be home in my heart, said Max.

Clara Abbott, a 24-year-old teacher in the UK, said that she could want to move back to fight for the issues I care about. Shes originally from St. Louis, Missouri and was inspired by the protest movement following the death of George Floyd.

I really had wanted to be back in St Louis during that time because following the legacy of the Ferguson protests, there was so much incredible organising happening, Abbott said.

Living in the UK has also impacted how she views policy issues in the US. When she was a teacher in Arkansas, she explained she had to do lockdown drills in case of an active shooter.

Coming here has made me realise how insane that is, that we have to do that and always be prepared for that situation, Abbott said.

Americans abroad said they overall felt stressed and anxious about the election and what could happen afterwards.

Many said they were closely following the current events in the United States and stayed very connected to people there.

"Im exhausted. I havent slept. Ive been talking to my mother who is crying. There have been ice storms in America so my family is not only in confinement but theyve been out of electricity for a week. Everyone I know is just completely exhausted and stressed out," said Kendall Lack, an American who has been living in France for six years and who is about to start a vegan food truck business.

Lack noted that in France she has healthcare whereas when she lived in the United States, she didn't, something that makes her feel blessed to be overseas.

Sometimes it feels like Im in a false reality living where I do and seeing what things that happen at home, said Shayna Marmon, an American voter who has been living in Aalborg, Denmark for the past year.

She said that often Europeans have a romanticised view of the United States, which is why she feels its important to follow the news of whats going on in the country. She said one of the ways she felt connected this year, was by making sure she voted.

Gabrielle Czymbour just moved to France and despite trying to get a ballot from South Carolina, said her emails went unanswered. It's "disheartening", she said, adding that she was "pretty worried" about the election.

One of the things that worry me is that people are talking a lot about a Civil War or taking to the streets and I think regardless of the results we are going to have people who are very unsatisfied, said Patricia Duroseau, an IT consultant who lives in France.

Sarah Elliott, who runs the UKs chapter of Republicans Overseas, said she was worried about potential unrest in the country regardless of the outcome.

The one thing I really hope for this election for the nations sake is that its decisive. We are literally in a culture war. We havent drawn our guns even though youve seen inklings of what can happen in our cities. Im very concerned, Elliott said.

Shops in the US have recently begun boarding up windows and hiring increased security amid fears of unrest following the election results.

Typically, just a small percentage of voters overseas cast their ballots in the country, something that many are hoping will change this year.

Trends already point towards record turnout among overseas voters who resoundingly say this is a huge election for many Americans.

Elliott said she has heard from tons of voters in the United Kingdom who wanted to make their voices heard.

Im having people who have never voted before asking how to vote this time, she said.

Every weekday at 1900 CET, Uncovering Europe brings you a European story that goes beyond the headlines. Download the Euronews app to get an alert for this and other breaking news. It's available on Apple and Android devices.

Go here to read the rest:
Healthcare, race and culture wars: Why are Americans in Europe so stressed about the US election? - Euronews

Lois Frankel won reelection in her South Florida House district, fending off a challenge by the right-wing self-described Islamophobe Laura Loomer.

The Associated Presscalled the race in the states 21st district shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday evening.

The race pitted two Jews at different poles of the sociopolitical culture wars against each other a moderate Democrat in Frankel and a far-right agitator in Loomer, who plays on her Jewish identity in her adamantly anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Were putting the Jews on trial here in District 21, Loomertold the Jewish Telegraphic Agencyin September. They have a choice between a Republican Jew who is going to advocate for their survival in their best interests, or they can stand with self-hating Jew Lois Frankel, who is doing the bidding for the jihadists in the Democrat Party who are just literally walking Jews to the gas chamber.

Loomer, who has been banned from platforms such as Twitter for her rhetoric, was supported by the Trump campaign. President Trumps daughter-in-law Lara campaigned for Loomer in Florida in the fall.

See the original post here:
South Florida race that became a Jewish culture war ends in GOP defeat - The Jewish News of Northern California

Two important books of cultural history are worth a renewed reading as explorations of the late-20th- and early-21st-century roots of Trumpism. Together, they show how Trumpism was a symptom, rather than the creator, of grievance politics and our rigid polarization. He hardly invented the racism he employed, but he had honed it well in his plutocratic and hyper-entitled world.

In The One and the Many: Americas Struggle for the Common Good, the theologian-historian Martin E. Marty posited that the motto E pluribus unum had collapsed into almost shattering controversy.

By the end of the 20th century, Professor Marty argued, Americans had engaged in myriad culture wars that rendered stories of any shared past all but impossible. He saw the country divided into totalists and tribalists. Totalists were people who felt left behind, cast aside by elites, and who craved a story of wholeness about the American nation. These folks felt assaulted by mass media and wanted nothing to do with complexity and conflicting identities.

The tribalists, who might assert race, gender, ethnicity or religion, demanded their story as the source of group cohesion against claims of any unifying whole. Professor Marty saw Americans retreating into separatenesses by choice, and he worried, with Reinhold Niebuhr, that the chief source of mans inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to the other man.

In Age of Fracture, the historian Daniel T. Rodgers brilliantly studied the big ideas and debates in political culture over the past three decades of the 20th century down to the attacks on Sept. 11. Mr. Rodgers found a culture in which the very notion of human nature had changed from the post-World War II moment of stress on context, social circumstance, institutions, and history to a 90s emphasis on choice, agency, performance, and desire.

Baby boomers, on the left and right, now ran the country, but they inherited a politics shaped by Reaganism, which thrilled to city on a hill mythology, but sought votes by stoking resentments and hatreds born of vast changes wrought by the 1960s. Ronald Reagan largely avoided explicitness, but his legion of followers believed civil rights, feminism and various liberation movements had gone too far. The sense of society as imagined collectivities shrank, Mr. Rodgers said. Americans were splintering into increasingly divided enclaves of thought. The last quarter of the century, he wrote, was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture. The country may have unified in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, but soon broke into political camps already formed and growing in tenacity.

Mr. Trumps presidency is the result of a long history of the Republican Partys descent into moral bankruptcy, but also of a culture of social media-driven alienation involving all of us. The presidency of Barack Obama was startling progress, but the bitter reaction to him on the right came from well-cultivated precincts of media, think tanks, racial nationalism and corporate organizing.

Originally posted here:
For Biden and Harris, Defeating Trump Is Just the Beginning - The New York Times

AT THE end of Black History Month, it is important to reflect on the crucial juncture for race relations that we find ourselves in. Across the world, racism and the far right are on the rise. Yet we have also seen the largest mobilisation of anti-racist protest for decades in the form of the inspiring Black Lives Matter movement.

It has never been more important for us to learn from the history of racial oppression and to end the injustices that exist to this day. Yet the government has chosen Black History Month to wage war against an accurate teaching of institutional racism in our schools.

During a debate on Black History Month, Kemi Badenoch MP, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury who is also the Women and Equalities Minister, strongly criticised the Black Lives Matter movement and declared that schools teaching critical race theory will be breaking the law. She prohibited teachers from telling children about the fact that white privilege exists.

This means that our government is in auspicious company, as a month previously President Donald Trump declared that critical race theory (CRT) is like a cancer, and signed executive orders banning its use in federal agency training schemes.

We should be very alarmed that our government is directly copying culture war strategies from Donald Trumps racist playbook. Yet even more than that, we should be worried by their refusal to recognise the reality of institutional racism.

During the Black Lives Matter movement, weve rightly seen renewed calls for our schools to teach the true brutal history of the British empire and the legacy of imperialism, colonialism and racism which continue today to have generational impact.

Present day global inequalities remain permanently shaped by the horrors of extractive colonialism and racialised subordination. It is unacceptable that instances of appalling murder and violence at the hands of the British state have been erased from present-day memory of empire.

It is barely known, for instance, that one fifth of the billionaires in Britain owe their wealth to the transportation of our Black ancestors. If we are to end the scourge of institutional racism and the destructive legacy of colonialism, it is vital that young people are taught the true history of race relations.

Despite what our government believes, it is simply not the case that the existence of institutional racism is up for debate. For instance, it is beyond dispute that Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. The latest ONS data on ethnic contrasts in Covid-19 deaths showed that in England and Wales, males of black African ethnic background had the highest rate of death, which was 2.7 times higher than males of white ethnic background. Women of a black Caribbean ethnic background also had the highest rate, which is 2.0 times higher than females of white ethnic background.

These inequalities are grounded in class inequalities and reflect the severe racial disparities in our economy. The Resolution Foundation think tank estimate that Black, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi employees experience an annual pay penalty of 3.2 billion. The grim intersection of racial and class discrimination has had a deadly consequence during this pandemic.

In May, I asked the Prime Minister how he intended to protect African, Asian and minority ethnic communities from the virus.

Five months later, his government has refused to take any actions that would specifically protect our communities. If it is unwilling to even recognise the connection between economic and physical wellbeing, it is clear this government is not serious about combatting health inequalities.

Many have tried to dismiss the imbalance in deaths as being explained by cultural or even genetic differences. Yet discrimination is deeply ingrained in our social, political, and economic structures.

The scourge of institutional racism results in unequal access to quality education, healthy food, liveable wages, and affordable housing which are the foundations of health and wellbeing.

According to the Office for National Statistics, key workers are more likely than average to be from Black, Asian or minority ethnic communities, be women, be born outside the UK, and be paid less than the average UK income. An Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) study in September 2020 showed that of all the people from minority ethnic groups who were employed or self-employed at the start of the crisis, 13 per cent had lost their job by June compared to 5 per cent of the overall population.

The IPPR thinktank, who published research with the Runnymede Trust, found that almost 60,000 more deaths involving coronavirus could have occurred in England and Wales if white people faced the same risk as black communities.

It is two years since the Conservative government launched its consultation on ethnicity pay reporting which sought to enable government and employers to move forward in a consistent and transparent way. The consultation closed in January 2019 but still the government have not reported back on it or confirmed a date for mandatory ethnicity pay reporting to start.

The governments decision to wage war on critical race theory reveals their contempt for African, Asian and minority ethnic communities. We on the left cannot allow their divide and rule culture wars to win. We must keep pushing for economic and public health support for our communities, and keep fighting against the divisive tactics of this administration.

Claudia Webbe MP is the Member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at facebook.com/claudiaforLE/ and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe

Read the original here:
The government's divide and rule culture wars must be opposed - Morning Star Online