CILIP and the CILIP BAME Network would like to express solidarity with our colleagues from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, the BAME community, CILIP members and others who condemn the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, the process by which those findings have been reached and the assumptions which have shaped the findings and recommendations.

In a strong and healthy democracy, public accountability matters. Transparency and due process matter. It matters that our institutions use publicly-available evidence to draw their conclusions rather than selecting evidence to reinforce a specific narrative or justify a specific policy position.

As librarians and information professionals, we have a strong ethical commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), to human rights and to the avoidance of bias in the use of evidence and statistics in public life. We have set out this commitment on behalf of our profession in the position paper Libraries, Knowledge and Information Change Lives.

We live in an age in which misinformation is undermining public trust and confidence in our civic institutions. It is essential that independent processes, such as the Commission, model best practice in their use of evidence. Unfortunately, the use of evidence by the Commission to draw its conclusions appears to be very limited in nature, drawing on relatively few and in some cases contested sources and without drawing sufficiently on independent third party research.

This Commission could and should have presented an opportunity to take collective responsibility to address the reality of racism in modern Britain and its impact on the lives of millions of our citizens. While acknowledging that progress has indeed been made, it should have been an opportunity to explore the systemic drivers of racial inequality and their depressive effect on social mobility, opportunity and attainment.

The Commission could have impartially examined why people from BAME backgrounds in our community continue to experience structural disadvantage in terms of education, employability and income, as highlighted by the Government’s own Ethnicity Facts and Figures website.

Instead the Commission chose to use this data and other evidence to support their assumptions about the reasons for these disparities. No substantive consideration was given about how racism impacts on the creation of these very disparities or how it operates in society to help to generate adverse outcomes. In so doing, the Commission failed for the most part to foreground the lived experience of people from BAME communities living in Britain today and at worst displayed a tone, which was dismissive of those voices of the BAME community it acknowledged; this resulted in their voice being sadly absent from this report. The end result was a final report, which many people do not recognise as a true reflection of racial equality in Britain today; especially by those whose lived experience should lie at the heart of the report.

This Commission had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring the racism and racially-driven disparities in our society into the cold glare of public examination and by exposing them to begin the process of addressing them in a structured, systematic way.

Sadly, it has chosen not to do so and in the process has missed the opportunity to make a positive difference to the lives of millions of people. Moreover, it risks sending a message to the people who harbour racial prejudice in their hearts that the status quo is acceptable, when it is not. Furthermore, we are concerned that if this report is regarded as valid, and therefore accepted as worthy of guiding policy, that it will have a detrimental impact on the current momentum to address racism and inequality in education, the workplace and society at large.

The sections of the report addressing ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum are of particular importance to us as librarians and information professionals. We have developed a considerable body of professional practice focused on ensuring that curriculum-based teaching and learning are broad, balanced and representative.

We support the idea that the taught curriculum must reflect the ‘full national story’ and in our view this means correcting imbalances in the body of knowledge that have arisen from historical inequalities and actively re-balancing whose identity is represented and whose story gets told.

Political intervention into intellectual freedom risks creating a culture in which knowledge and free enquiry are tacitly suppressed in the pursuit of a specific agenda. We strongly urge both the Commission and the Government not to intervene in the informed process of the interpretation and presentation of the broadest possible view of our shared history by professionals.

We refute the idea that drawing attention to racial inequality means drawing focus away from the other mechanics of inequality in our society. All are important, all of them intersect and all must be tackled if we are to build a more equal, just and inclusive future.

We believe that neither equality nor social justice are the preserve of the political left or right. Nobody ‘loses’ by shining a light on how racism impacts on racial inequality in our society. Everybody loses when we deny that these inequalities exist, when we seek to diminish their impact or shirk the labour required to correct them.

Unfortunately, rather than serving as a positive and constructive contribution to one of the most pressing debates in contemporary public policy, the report itself is in fact deeply problematic. Instead of starting from a position of neutrality and drawing conclusions from the evidence presented, it manifestly starts with an agenda – to demonstrate that race is less of a mechanism for inequality in ‘modern Britain’ than class, family or geography – and then retrofits the evidence to this argument.

We feel on this basis that it is necessary to call for an independent public enquiry into the process by which the report was developed and the degree of direct or indirect intervention by Government into its findings.

We further call for a fully-independent Commission to undertake a further review in order to set out a structured approach to tackling the scourge of racial inequality in today’s Britain and to begin to make reparation to the millions of people, of all ethnicities, who have been let down through this process.