United Nations rapporteur Tendayi Achiume has claimed the United Kingdom is more racist after Brexit, said minorities face “overwhelming challenges and oppression”, and told the British government to reassure minorities, “especially Muslims”.
Zambia-born UCLA assistant professor Tendayi Achiume, the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, levelled the accusations in a statement following a brief mission to Britain, which will be elaborated in a full report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2019.
Achiume claimed the EU referendum had stimulated “growth in [the] volume and acceptability of xenophobic discourses on migration, and on foreign nationals including refugees in social and print media”, and described an alleged “growth in the acceptability of explicit racial, ethnic and religious intolerance” as a “Brexit-related trend that threatens racial equality in the UK”.
She added that it was “important to draw attention to the increase in anti-Semitic hate speech and violence that accompanied and followed the referendum” — a correlation which came under particularly fierce criticism, given all the high-profile reports in circulation which indicate the problem is linked to bigotry among elements of the Muslim community and anti-Zionist sentiments within the left-liberal Labour Party.
Large sections of Achiume’s assessment claiming minorities are discriminated against in the criminal justice system appear to have been drawn from the controversial Lammy Review spearheaded by Labour MP and identity politics champion David Lammy, a former Government minister who now advocates for ethnic minorities in Britain to be awarded “reparations”.
Indeed, Achiume advised the Government to implement all Lammy Review recommendations in full, and that it should “work harder” to build “relationships of trust with … racial and ethnic communities vulnerable to intolerance, especially Muslims.”
She also praised the Tell MAMA as a “commendable independent and confidential third-party hate crime reporting service for those who have experienced anti-Muslim hate” — despite the fact that it was defunded by the Government in 2013 for being deceptive about the scale of Islamophobia.
Former Tory leader, Cabinet minister, and Brexit supporter Iain Duncan Smith was scathing about Achiume’s assessment, saying such reports “are always rubbish”.
“Every single one of these UN rapporteur reports are not worth the paper they are written on,” he said.
“They are a total waste of time. The people who come here have always got an axe to grind”
“All she offered is a rehash of all the tripe spoken during the referendum,” added David Campbell Bannerman, a former UKIP MEP who now sits with the Tory Party.
“This report is garbage and doesn’t add to the sum of human knowledge.”
“The UK is among the most racially tolerant countries in the world; as to anti-Semitism, its rise mysteriously mirrors the rise of [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum stormtroopers,” chipped in Andrew Bridgen MP, another Tory eurosceptic.