Things that are not quite as they are said to be

Apparently there’s an ethnicity bias in the way car insurance is charged for:

Hundreds of thousands of people of colour may be paying an “ethnicity penalty” of at least £280 a year each in higher car insurance costs, an investigation by Citizens Advice has claimed.

The national charity said its year-long investigation had uncovered a “shocking trend” of people of colour paying a lot more for motor cover than white people, and that the penalty was up to £950 in some locations.

Except that’s not in fact what was found:

For the “customers” the researchers picked names often associated with certain ethnic groups, though Citizens Advice said these ended up not having much impact on the prices being quoted. “This suggests this penalty is paid by everyone who lives in an area, regardless of their ethnicity.

So it is in fact not an ethnicity bias. That being the standard way that such ethnicity bias is measured in such surveys - send out equal CVS but with ethnically identifiable names and see who gets the callbacks for interview as one example - and by that standard measure there is no such bias found.

What Citizens Advice has actually found is that insurance rates differ by geographic area. Which most of us would grasp as they do ask us for our postcode before giving us a quote.

But those first paragraphs will still do their work, be referred to again and again in the future as a brick in that wall of evidence insisting society is structurally racist. The study which shows there is no ethnicity bias will be quoted as proof that there is.