UK: Campaign group says government's COVID-19 probe should address systemic racism

A campaign group in the United Kingdom is calling on the government to address how systemic racism affected the country’s death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue should be addressed in all probes by the British government in response to the pandemic.

In an open letter to Baroness Heather Hallett, who is leading the probe, the campaign group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice on Tuesday said the new data released by the government last week showed that Black and minority ethnic people were “overrepresented” in the death toll confirmed that racism played a role. During the pandemic, Black and minorities had a higher death rate than white Britons.

“The most recent data shows that almost all minority ethnic groups died disproportionately from COVID-19. For Bangladeshi men, the death rate was 3.1 times greater than that of White British men, followed by Pakistani men (2.3 times), and Black Caribbean men (1.8 times),” said the group in the letter. “COVID-19 is not just a health crisis; it’s also a social and economic crisis.”

The probe was set up following criticism of the government’s response to the pandemic. The letter was co-signed by the Runnymede Trust, Action for Race Equality, and Asylum Matters. The group has since called for the probe to address the systemic racism in each part of the process, bring in an expert witness, rethink the listening exercise after it was revealed that the exercise was done by PR firms with ties to the government, and ensure the representation of refugee and migrant rights groups as participants.

On the same day, the Public and Commercial Services Union announced an additional 33,000 civil servants in the UK will be taking part in the upcoming strike that will take place on March 15, including workers in the country’s tax service. The upcoming strike is part of a long-running industrial dispute with the government over pay, pensions, and job security.

The union said that the additional thousands would be joining the 100,000 civil servants across government agencies that were already scheduled to strike on that day.