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Badenoch claims police who arrested Henry Nowak influenced by guidance saying ‘hate crimes should be treated as priority’ – UK politics live | Politics
Badenoch claims police who arrested Henry Nowak influenced by guidance saying hate crimes should be treated as priority
Kemi Badenoch starts by talking about the video filmed by the police as they arrested Henry Nowak.
She says it was hard to watch because she “found myself willing the police to stop, to at least consider Henry’s story and check if he had been stabbed”.
She says she met Nowak’s family last week. They do not want this case to be used to divide people.
She goes on:
They want the police to become an institution that we can trust again.
And if we want to honour that wish to honour Henry’s memory, we need to ask the right question.
I believe that question is why did the police take an accusation of racism more seriously than the claim that Henry had been stabbed?
This question goes beyond policing.
Why are public bodies so unable to act with common sense when race or identity is involved?
Why are they so distracted, busying themselves with things that have nothing to do with their core function?
Badenoch says the speech she is giving today is the basis of work she has been doing for months on equality law. Some of what she says will be “very uncomfortable” for some people.
She goes on:
In some ways I feel for those police officers because they were following guidance. They have been trained on guidance which does not apply equality under the law. Guidance which says hate crimes should be treated as a priority. Many people don’t know what is in this guidance and that is why it needs to be exposed.
UPDATE: As explained earlier (see 9.20am), the judge who presided over the trial of Nowak’s killer did not endorse this theory in his summing up.
Key events
Q: Do you think people who run staff networks in the civil service, like groups for minority ethnic staff (see 12pm), should be allowed time off for those activities, or access to facilities?
Badenoch said her experience of staff networks in the civil service was that they were run by people “furthering their own personal careers at the expense of other civil servants”.
They should not be supported with taxpayers’ money, she said.
Q: Does the entire Conservative party agree with you on this?
Badenoch said she had been very clear about the direction the Tory party was going in. She went on:
I said that we’re signing a contract about the agenda we’re taking into government, because I want everybody to understand what it is we’re going to deliver.
If there is a Conservative, MP who does not believe in equality under the law or wants different treatments for different groups on the basis of skin colour or protected characteristics, then they are probably are not a Conservative MP.
Q; What is your response to the Telegraph story today about a secret report saying the last government wasted £28bn?
The report, by Rozina Sabur, says:
Terrorists, hostile states and gangsters have been given more than £28bn of taxpayers’ money, including through aid payments, according to a secret government report.
The Telegraph can reveal details of a dossier showing that billions of pounds went to organised crime, with millions going to Russia and Islamic State.
It demonstrates that foreign aid and Covid relief loans were appropriated on a vast scale by Britain’s enemies, with the money beyond reach and those who took it unpunished.
More than £28bn ended up in the hands of those wishing to harm Britain between 2015 and 2021, according to the report, which was commissioned and produced by the Cabinet Office but was buried during the previous government.
Badenoch said she thought the government should always be wary of giving away large amounts of money in grants.
But she claimed this story was related to the topic of her press conference. She said she was a Treasury minister at the time of Covid. And the Treasury was under a lot of pressure to ensure that ethnic minority businesses were getting full access to Covid bounceback loans, she said.
Badenoch says she agrees with Idris Elba having ‘woke James Bond would ‘ruin entire franchise’
Q: Idris Elba says audiences do not want to see a black actor playing James Bond. Would you like to see someone from a different background playing 007?
Badenoch replied:
I agree with Idris Elba that we should not make James Bond woke because that will ruin the entire franchise.
But Badenoch said that was a decision for the people who make the films. And audiences would deliver their verdict. She believed in capitalism, she said, and that was how it worked.
Q: It is almost 10 years since Theresa May gave her ‘burning injustices’ speech when she became PM. She said: “If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white.” Do you think those injustices have been tackled?
Badenoch said she wishes May had spoken to her before the speech, because she would have encouraged her to frame it differently.
I do believe that everyone suffers injustice; it doesn’t matter the colour of your skin.
I do think that if you are an ethnic minority, or any kind of minority, it is the fact of being in a minority that means that you are probably more likely to experience something that the majority group does not, whatever minority you are. That is a fact.
That is why we have an Equality Act. That is why those laws are there to prevent discrimination.
But when you have public bodies then going beyond preventing discrimination to achieve outcomes, try and do something different, and accept any mention of racism as true without examining the facts, that is a problem.
Badenoch says identity-based staff networks in police, and public organisations, should not have say over policy
Q: Are you opposed to the police and other public sector organisations allowing staff to set up and run groups for staff members from different minority ethnic groups?
Badenoch said she did not like groups like this. But she believed in freedom of association. She went on:
If you are black police officers and you want to hang out together and go to the pub, or play tennis, that’s fine.
But should you organise within the police and start changing policy on the basis of your race? No.
And the way I know that that is not the right answer is because if you swap the races and if you had the White Police Officers Association and said that they should start making policy for white people in the police, I think everyone would be up in arms ..
I don’t think those identity networks in the civil service, or the police, should have any say in public policy or how those organisations are run.
Q: Do you think Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, was right to stop the Met police signing a contract with Palantir? What do you think of that?
Badenoch agreed that was an example of Khan putting ideology ahead of the need to focus on getting results.
Q: Do you think subjecting more black boys to stop and search could inflame tensions?
Badenoch dismissed this concern. She said:
Some people who will feel uncomfortable. But the truth is that, when black boys are searched, more knives are found. The incidence of knife carrying is higher.
So we can’t leave people to carry knives because we think that we’ve we searched enough people for today because that means someone else’s life gets lost.
And the people who tell me more than anyone that they want to stop and search are the mothers of young black boys who have been killed by their peers …
I’m not going to run away from an outcry and allow other people’s children to be killed, just so I can have a quiet life. That is not fair.
Q: Have you got plans to go further in changing equality law, or is it just this?
Badenoch said she had been looking at this for years and there was “a lot that needs to be done”. She said her party was also looking at how this applied in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because those countries were all run by parties that want to break up the UK.
She said she wanted to stop “lawfare” in a range of areas.
Badenoch accuses police leaders of wrongly accepted their officers institutionally racist
Q: Do you think the police can be trusted to deal with racially-charged outcomes?
Badenoch replied:
I do think that most frontline police officers are good people.
I think a lot of the issues have actually been with the senior police chiefs.
They were the ones who I spoke to, and they were the ones who told me, ‘Come on, you don’t understand. We really are institutionally racist’, and then could not explain exactly how they were.
Badenoch said this was not an anti-police speech.
This is not an anti-police speech. It’s actually pro-police because I want to free them to be able to do their jobs without worrying about box ticking or compliance on issues that are not core to the function of saving lives and catching criminals.
Badenoch claims public sector equality duty ‘creating inequality of outcomes’
Q; Are you giving up on trying to reduce inequality of outcomes?
Badenoch claimed that the public sector equality duty was “creating inequality of outcomes”. And it was destroying trust in institutions, she said.