Nigel Farage has called for police to release the ethnicity of suspects. Fleet Street Fox says one look at the statistics shows minorities get the rough end of the justice system
If ever you needed proof that Nigel Farage is on a one-man mission to raise the nation’s blood pressure over the embolism threshold, then his call to release the ethnicity of criminal suspects must surely fit the bill.
If you really believe there’s a two-tier justice system in which people get let off, or worse encouraged in criminality, then you’ll pop a gasket just by his question appearing to confirm it. And if you suspect it’s a finely-tuned dog-whistle more likely to jerk the nation’s knee than a kick in the scrotum, you’ll spit tacks that police have been advised to do as he asks.
And if you’ve actually worked in the justice system, you may know that Michael Weston King’s opinion on the matter got less attention than Nigel’s, but was a damned sight more accurate. The grandfather of Bebe King, murdered in Southport at a summer dance school in a triple murder which sparked Far Right riots and misinformation, said: “The ethnicity of any perpetrator, or indeed their immigration status, is completely irrelevant. Mental health issues, and the propensity to commit crime, happens in any ethnicity, nationality or race.”
He pointed out the failures of education and social care which enabled the murders to take place, and he could have said the same about the vast majority of people who were attracted to those riots like moths to a flame. When angry white people were arrested in their hundreds at the direct instruction of the Prime Minister, they claimed to be victims of ‘two-tier Keir’. In fact, the evidence shows they are the beneficiaries of a justice system stacked in their favour.
If the justice system were entirely fair, 84% of suspects, arrests and convictions would be white. Instead at every stage the proportion of white suspects is lower, and the number of ethnic minorities is greater. To Nigel, and any passing eugenicist, this is because people of colour are pre-destined to criminality. And perhaps they are, in a way.
For a third of teenage murder victims are black, compared to the 13% who are white. Between 2018 and 2022, white defendants served an average sentence of 21 months in jail, compared to 30 months for Asian offenders, and 28 months for black prisoners. If you’re black, you will probably serve 68% of your sentence in custody, compared to 64% if you’re white. And yes, that includes serious offences like rape and murder.
Minorities are disproportionately more likely to be searched, to be prosecuted, to be a child who is prosecuted, and to reoffend. And get this: prison surveys show white prisoners feel more respected, less victimised by staff, and even get better access to showers.
And we know this means the justice system is racist because of one more, literally-kills-people fact: the white people who are cautioned or sentenced have the lowest educational attainment of all ethnic groups. Doing badly at school increases everyone’s risk of jail, but white people have to do REALLY badly at school. Even then, they are less likely to be jailed, are imprisoned for shorter periods, and enjoy it more.
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Nigel is not trying to fix a great criminal injustice, because we already know what the data shows. What he’s calling for is more evidence that people of colour are more likely to have a lifetime of crap thrown at them, often by privately-educated ex-City traders in yellow trousers whose voices travel a lot further than their brains. But then, fixing it is not actually the point: all Nigel wants to do is normalise a trope, and blame behaviour on skin colour.
The real two-tier system in this country is about class, education, and opportunity. About being able to see the shiny palaces of power, but not the route by which you could get there. There are no stepping stones between the social housing estates and the skyscrapers that tower over them, and it’s the inability to migrate that is the real root of half this nation’s problems. The other half are all down to the refusal to notice.
According to the Ministry of Justice, offenders from all ethnic groups are more likely to have been on free school meals than the general population. The people who fill our prisons are not a rainbow coalition of minorities. It’s the kids who were excluded, who fell through the cracks of a safety net which after years of Treasury cutbacks is now the kind of rope bridge even Indiana Jones would hesitate to trust.
Yet Nigel is getting his way, with a handful of MPs and the combined professionalism of Del Boy Trotter and his pals on a coach trip to Margate. Police have been issued guidelines, welcomed by the Home Secretary, that they should ‘consider’ releasing the ethnicity of suspects. Presumably they think it will both show up and shut up Nigel, but neither seems likely.
To admit that crime is driven by poverty, trauma and poor education means spending money, changing policies, and admitting failures, which is why all previous governments have shrunk from it. They left a void which racists can populate with a bogeyman, and if he happens to be black, well, black people are more likely to go to prison, innit?
It would make more sense for police to publish a suspect’s school report: the colour of a person’s childhood matters more than that of their skin. And if you want proof, look no further than the talentless, persistently-absent, achievement-free, gobby pub-bore grifter Nigel Farage, who wouldn’t be invited on Question Time quite so often if he was black, and from Hulme, and actually knew what he was talking about.