UN experts slamming UK for 'normalising white supremacism' is a projection of America's divisive identity politics

Instead of an organisation promoting peace and harmony across the globe, the UN has shown it sees the world through the prism of intersectionality, by projecting American woke imperialism to accuse the UK of systemic racism.

Over the years I have learned that reports that bear the imprimatur of the UN are likely to circulate self-serving mendacious propaganda rather than anything approximating an objective account.

So, I am not surprised that so-called United Nations human rights experts have published what the New York Times described as a “devastating critique” of the UK’s government’s recent report on race.

As far as the UN’s jumped-up experts are concerned Britain is the land of white supremacy. They accuse the authors of the government’s race report of normalising white supremacy and failing to acknowledge Britain’s “atrocities of the past.”

The UN panel of experts stated that in “2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent.”

The authors insist that Britain is institutionally racist and they condemn the rejection of this account of life in British society as equivalent to a grave cultural crime. They claim: “This attempt to normalise white supremacy despite considerable research and evidence of institutional racism is an unfortunate sidestepping of the opportunity to acknowledge the atrocities of the past and the contributions of all in order to move forward.”

What the UN panel is really getting at is that unless you confess to being irredeemably racist and take the knee you are a white supremacy denier.

As someone who has written several books on racism, I am aware that prejudice and discrimination still continues to play a role in society. However, the claim that Britain is institutionally racist is absurd. Whatever the weakness of the government’s report it provides compelling evidence about the significant decline of the influence of race in the life chances of people.

The report of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent serves as a paradigmatic example of woke advocacy masquerading as expertise. The five members of the panel led by human rights attorney, Dominique Day, possess no expertise about the situation in Britain. They are professional NGO operatives who feel empowered to hold forth on anything to do with people of African descent. It is far from clear who appointed them and why they were chosen. In other words who made them the Gods, whose verdict the world needs to take seriously? 

In recent months the UN’s woke imperialism has been reinforced by the election of Joe Biden as the president of the United States. Predictably, one of the first things that Biden’s UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated was that if the US is going to join the UN’s Human Rights Council, we must acknowledge “our own failures,” since “White supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles.” 

It looks as if the Biden administration will attempt to globalise its values through the UN and insist that the world acknowledge its white sin and adopt the ritual of taking the knee at least three times a day. 

It is in many ways tragic that the institutions associated with the UN have become vehicles for promoting American identity politics. The world needs an international institution that the people of all nations could respect. Sadly the authority of the UN is being misused by campaigning organisations who are in the business of scoring points. 

I still remember an absurd report published last year that drew on ‘data’ from UNESCO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This international report claimed that the UK is one of the worst countries in the world for respecting children’s rights! It ranked the UK 169th out of 182 nations, behind Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Iraq.

Things are far from perfect for children in the UK. But you don’t need a Ph.D. in the social sciences to know that on balance British children are no better or no worse off than just about anywhere in Europe.

The claim that children in the UK are worse off than in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Iraq is about as credible as the verdict that Britain is institutional racist by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

It is tragic that the noble ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations have become corrupted by some of their agencies who appear to be more interested in settling scores than in promoting the cause of humanity.

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