Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.
The senseless murder of Henry Nowak has served as a reminder of the extent to which many of our institutions are now dominated by the idea that avoiding racism, or the perception of racism, is more important than keeping people safe.
Just 18 years old, and a student at the University of Southampton, Henry was murdered when walking home from a night out. Yet when police arrived at the scene, it was Henry that they handcuffed, rather than his killer, Vickrum Digwa.
Henry told officers that he couldn’t breathe, and that he’d been stabbed. They ignored him. Instead of treating him as a dying victim, officers treated Henry as the aggressor – because, when the police arrived, his killer Vickrum Digwa had accused Henry of racism.
This is far from the only case in which the overriding desire to avoid being perceived as racist has generated terrible consequences. In 2022, the police regulator said that police forces should reduce the use of ‘stop and search’, because the practice is disproportionately used on ethnic minorities. Never mind the fact that stop and search saves lives, including those of ethnic minorities.
In 2023, Valdo Calocane stabbed two university students to death, and then did the same to a school caretaker. He’d been known to authorities for years, but he wasn’t sectioned. NHS professionals who oversaw his case were told to consider the “over-representation of young black males in detention”.
And for decades, the police and local government officials turned a blind eye, or actively covered up, the rape and grooming gangs, often because they feared that telling the whole story would see them accused of racism. In her audit into the gangs last year, Baroness Casey “found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist”.
These cases didn’t arise from nowhere, and nor were they the result of individual bad actors imposing their personal beliefs on the institutions that they were running. They were, as Kemi Badenoch rightly said in her speech yesterday, downstream of deliberate policies.
In particular, the public sector equality duty (PSED) has created an institutional culture in which public servants are explicitly required to consider the impact that their decisions might have on different groups.
PSED means that, if a minister is considering implementing a certain policy, they have to consider whether that policy might have a greater impact on people of a particular racial or religious group. It means that the police have to consider whether their operational decisions might have a disproportionate impact on a particular group – even if that disproportionate impact is the result of applying the same laws, equally, and to everyone.
It explicitly attacks the idea that people should be treated as individuals, based on their conduct and character. Instead, it forces public servants to view people, and to view their decisions, primarily through the lens of group-based identities. It is explicitly hostile to the idea that everybody should be treated according to a uniform set of rules – instead, it seeks equal outcomes for every group.
If this were just guidance, it would be bad enough. It’s obvious that telling public servants to think constantly about how different policies might impact different groups will create a culture in which group-based identity politics trumps individual responsibility and individual merit.
But, thanks to PSED, the decisions made by public servants and public bodies are subject to legal challenge. Decisions can be overturned if courts decide that decision-makers didn’t give sufficient regard to the impact that a policy might have on a particular group.
That’s what happened last year, when the High Court ruled that the policy of separating terrorists from the rest of the prison population was discriminatory. The Court argued that the prison officials had failed to consider the disproportionate impact that the separation policy had on Muslim inmates. Never mind the fact that the policy was designed to protect prison officers and prevent terrorists from radicalising other prisoners – or the fact that the vast majority of terrorists are Muslim, which means that a terrorist separation policy is always going to be more likely to apply to Muslim inmates. What mattered was that one group was disproportionately impacted by the policy.
Given that public servants, including those advising ministers, will always be keen to avoid legal challenges like this one, PSED means that the decisions that they make, and the advice that they give, will always put huge emphasis on the importance of characteristics like race and religion. It embeds a culture of thinking primarily, or exclusively, about policy in terms of group-based identity.
This idea is poisonous. The horrible case of Henry Nowak is one of the clearest examples yet about the real human cost of this ideological capture. People have died, and thousands of children have been abused, because our public services have been infected with this fixation on group-based identity.
This fixation is completely contrary to the ideas which have made Britain so successful for so long – including equality before the law, and the principle that people ought to be treated as individuals. As Kemi so rightly said, if we want the British state to work again, and for people to trust in their government again, we must “take ideology out of our institutions, restore equal treatment, and give public servants the confidence to use common sense”.
The Public Sector Equality Duty has been a complete disaster. It’s long past time that we restore equality before the law in its place.