Perhaps Sadiq Khan should have a chat with Trevor Phillips?
Sadiq Khan wants to know why BAME folk are being hit by the coronavirus rather worse than non-BAME in our fair and pleasant land. We’d offer the simple observation that pandemics tend to hit concentrations of population, the BAME population is largely in the big cities and that’s at least a reasonable start to the answer:
It’s by no means a revelation that there’s a link between health and socioeconomic inequalities – certainly not for those who live these lives, or for all the charities, campaigners and organisations, including City Hall, that have been fighting these injustices for years. But one of the unexpected consequences of this crisis is that the depth of these inequalities is being laid bare in such a stark fashion.
Mr. Khan is a politician on the stump and so we get structural problems, inequality, racism - Vote For Meee!
As it happens, Trevor Phillips, who is not a politician with an election all too soon, has also been looking into the same matter:
Concern about this known unknown was etched on the face of the chief medical officer as he addressed the issue at the weekend; factors like genetics, culture, language and religion could be quietly undermining scientists’ attempt to predict the spread of infection. Public Health England has rightly begun an inquiry. But however hard they try, scientists can’t keep pace with the rumour mill and must ensure the emerging conspiracy theories and knee-jerk victimhood do not go unchallenged.
That seems a reasonable point to us.
The pattern isn’t easy to explain. Assumptions about racial biology are unlikely to hold good across a range of non-white groups who are in most ways more unlike each other than they are different from whites. As for poverty, the list of the seventeen most afflicted local authorities includes low-income Brent, but also features multi-ethnic Wandsworth, where median weekly earnings, at £720, are 50 per cent above the national average. And of the virus hotspots, only two appear in the list of England’s ten most overcrowded boroughs. The most significant hotspots outside the capital, Liverpool and Sheffield, are 35th and 107th respectively out of 126 boroughs in order of population density.
That would be both Mr. Khan’s and our own suggestion dealt with then.
One puzzling finding in our report concerns not who is being infected, but is who is not. Were poverty the key determinant, we would expect the virus to be running rampant among Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities. Yet they are conspicuous by their absence in the list of hotspots — no Blackburn or Bradford, no Rotherham, Rochdale or Luton. The London borough of Tower Hamlets is more than a third Muslim — the highest density of any in England — and is sandwiched between two Covid-19 hotspots, Newham and Southwark, both home to substantial non-Muslim minority communities. Yet Tower Hamlets lies in the bottom third of the capital’s infection list: 22nd out of the 32 boroughs.
The surmise that the religious ritual of washing immediately before the five times a day prayers might have something to do with it seems reasonable to us.
The surface point here being that perhaps Mr. Khan would like to have a word with Mr. Phillips - the latter does seem to be doing the research that the former desires, even if the results aren’t quite the electoral gold dust first thought of. This does presuppose that Mr. Phillips could bring himself to converse with Mr. Khan of course but where there is hope and all that.
The deeper point is that a politician on the stump doesn’t appear to be all that good a place to go looking for solutions or even reasoned analysis. Which does rather mean that politics itself isn’t, doesn’t it?