A charity has been accused of “pursuing an aggressive political agenda” after it emerged that it had solicited a critical response to the Sewell report on racism before it was published.
In an email to supporters of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, Halima Begum, its director, asked them to make short videos “outlining either a racist experience you personally have had, a family member/friend has had, or a statistic outlining the prevalence of racism in the UK”.
More than a week before the report’s release, the charity said that it was expected to “downplay the role of structural and institutional racism”.
The report said that racism was a problem, but played a relatively marginal role in disparities of outcome among racial groups when compared with other economic and social forces.
Tony Sewell, who led the report, later claimed in an interview that Britain was not an institutionally racist country.
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David Jones, a Conservative MP, said: “This solicitation of criticism ahead of publication tends to bear out the fact that what they’re doing is pursuing an aggressive political agenda which paid no attention to the actual factual content of the report.”
The charity said: “Given the national and potentially historical importance of the report it would not seem unreasonable for a racial equality organisation to prepare for the findings that were expected, and were indeed borne out on publication.”
Today a campaign group supporting the report will send a letter with more than 600 signatories to the prime minister calling on him to back it. The letter, by Don’t Divide Us, has the support of the England rugby player Courtney Lawes, and says: “It is regrettable that sensitive recommendations, from tackling online racism to investing in our schools to improve the education of all pupils, seem to have been drowned out by an online campaign to vilify the report and those that worked on it.”