SIXTY years after Britain’s first Race Relations Act, October’s Black History Month’s theme was “Standing Firm in Power and Pride.” But today, pride is not our privilege — it is our weapon.

Despite decades of progress and promises, Britain’s race and class divides are deepening at a time when Black History Month should mark forward strides — not scandalous retreats.

Black History Month 2025 shone a harsh light on a nation regressing.

Police recorded 137,550 hate crimes in England and Wales in the past year — a record high. Over 71 per cent were racially motivated. Race hate crimes rose sharply, and religious hate crimes targeting Muslims increased 19 per cent after far-right orchestrated violence. Anti-immigrant riots scarred communities nationwide, with perpetrators named and jailed — yet their ideology metastasises.

UK society in 2025: 21 per cent live in poverty, with rates climbing sharply among black and minoritised communities. In Tower Hamlets, nearly half of children are trapped in poverty, worsened by the government’s two-child welfare limit. Across England, 49 per cent of children in black or black British (African or Caribbean heritage) families experience poverty — more than double the rate seen among white families (24 per cent). The highest levels are found in inner cities, northern regions, and parts of the West Midlands.

Class brutality persists: disposable income inequality remains rooted, with the poorest fifth losing 4 per cent of their income in a year, while the richest fifth barely felt a dent. The richest 1 per cent control over 14 per cent of UK income — worse than most of Europe.

The school gates reflect a bleak inheritance: for 15 years, poor children (significant among which are black children) remain 27-28 per cent less likely to achieve GCSE benchmarks. The educational disadvantage gap is “entrenched,” and children eligible for free school meals are failed at every stage — showing equality is not just delayed but denied.

Official surveys reveal 37 per cent of Britons believe racism is “a great deal” present today, with nearly half saying it is “somewhat prevalent.” Research shows systemic bias runs rampant across policing, judicial ranks and education, embedded in every layer of society.

Racism is institutional. Every wound is deliberate. We don’t have to look far to examine this truth: the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist and unaccountable.

Just a few weeks ago, a damning internal review of anti-black racism within the Metropolitan Police was uncovered — buried by senior leadership after it exposed what communities have known for decades. The report, titled 30 Patterns of Harm: A Structural Review of Systemic Racism within the London Metropolitan Police Service, was conducted by HR Rewired and completed in July 2025.

It found that anti-black racism is “baked into the institutional design” of the Met, permeating recruitment, promotions and grievance procedures.

Black officers and staff face discriminatory scrutiny at every stage — rejected in recruitment, passed over in promotions with coded feedback like “not quite ready” or told to “be a bit friendlier.” Those who speak out about racism are labelled “reputational risks,” gaslit, or penalised. Complaints are dismissed as “banter” or personality clashes, and whistleblowers are accused of “playing the race card.”

The report was never published. It was suppressed. Buried by the same force that claims to be reforming.

This follows the 2023 Casey Review, which found the Met institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic after the murder of Sarah Everard by serving officer Wayne Couzens. Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley accepted the findings but rejected the label “institutional” — a refusal that rings hollow when discrimination is embedded in every system.

In October 2025, a BBC Panorama investigation exposed fresh evidence of racism, misogyny and anti-Muslim hatred among serving officers — proof that toxic behaviour has not been eliminated but driven underground.

Black Londoners are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched. The use of force against them remains disproportionately violent. Strip searches of black children continue unchecked. This is not policing by consent — it is state-sanctioned intimidation.

The Windrush generation rebuilt Britain after war. They were invited, they worked, they contributed — and then they were betrayed.

The Windrush scandal saw British citizens detained, denied healthcare, threatened with deportation and stripped of dignity. Some died waiting for justice. 

The Windrush Compensation Scheme has paid out over £122 million, but two-thirds of claimants have been denied due to impossible proof requirements. One claimant’s award jumped from £300 to £170,000 only after securing legal representation — evidence the system was designed to exhaust, not deliver justice.

Five years on, the Home Office still controls the scheme. Its refusal to hand it over to an independent body is a deliberate act of cruelty — a continuation of the hostile environment that created the scandal in the first place.

Are we going backwards as a country?

It seems so, and not just in terms of racist language by politicians and media. Despite the efforts of advocacy groups to promote awareness of black people’s achievements and contribution to Britain and of the issues they face, in 2023 53 per cent of Britons could not name a single black British historical figure — half of Britons overall, so almost certainly a much higher percentage of the white population. The same percentage displayed extreme ignorance about the slave trade and Britain’s abduction and enslavement of more than three million people from Africa.

This ignorance is not incidental. The St Andrew’s University Africa Summit (SAASUM) has found what it calls the “erasure of black history in the British National Curriculum” and noted that the role of black Britons is even ignored in Britain’s abolition of slavery: “While the British curriculum facilitates the hero-worship of European abolitionists like William Wilberforce and John Newton, the latter of whom was a former slave owner, it does not acknowledge the Africans that fought against the Atlantic slave trade from the outset (Akomolafe 2017).”

Black Girl Festival founder Paula Akpan wrote for Al Jazeera that “Growing up in the UK as a black person means that you’re living an existence that is constantly erased, particularly in school” and described black British history as a “study in erasure.”

Durham University sociology professor Jason Arday agrees and concludes that much of the white nationalism and the hostile environment burgeoning today are fuelled by the removal of black people from what is taught.

He writes that “the positive contribution of black people is largely ignored, presenting them as oppressed subjects, rather than agents of change contributing to the development of modern Britain. [The] British history of events … centres the white British experience, and this implicit hierarchy determines what narratives and bodies of knowledge come to be seen as ‘authentically’ British. The proliferation of discourses saturated in nostalgia and nationalism have been a central tenet in the mobilisation of today’s hostile environments.”

This systemic discrimination continues to university level. Leading academics warned last year that black scholarship is being “wiped out due to redundancies and course closures” and that the impact of course closures is predominantly “falling on lecturers and courses that played a leading role in addressing racial disparities in higher education.”

The effects of this ingrained contempt for black people, their history and their value are widespread and often deadly.

Black Britons are 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty, four times more likely to be homeless and 15 times more likely to be hospitalised by environmentally linked diseases such as tuberculosis. They have a third less access to primary healthcare than white Britons. Black women are 3.7 times more likely to die in childbirth, 1.5 times more likely to develop post-birth complications and more likely to have cancer for longer before diagnosis. Black Britons receive treatment significantly later after a cancer diagnosis than their white counterparts.

The discrimination is not only against patients. Half of black and ethnic minority health workers feel they face disrespect and exclusion at work because of their skin colour or religion, while statistics show a large difference in career prospects compared to white doctors — and of course, in the pandemic a massive 85 per cent of medical staff who died from the coronavirus were from black and other minority backgrounds.

Racism contributes to poor mental health, yet black Britons are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act yet face greater barriers to accessing elective mental healthcare.

These and all the other disadvantages inflicted on black Britons and other racialised groups have never truly been addressed by those in power. This is hardly surprising given the intimate link between power and race, or more precisely the use of race as a tool of oppression.

The issue of reparations for the centuries of exploitation and abuse continues to be functionally ignored by an Establishment that might at most give lip service to the fact that much of the wealth of Britain and particularly of its elites, who continued to be paid reparations for the loss of their slave workforce two hundred years after abolition, derives from slavery.

Reparations are not charity — they are restitution. Britain’s wealth was built on slavery, colonialism and exploitation. The railways, ports, banks and global institutions that define British power were constructed on theft, bondage and human suffering.

Our British government refuses to apologise let alone pay reparations. Globally, movements from the Caribbean to Africa demand what is rightfully owed: cancellation of debts imposed by former colonisers, funding for education and infrastructure, and the return of stolen resources and sovereignty.

The refusal to address reparations is a continuation of the same logic that allowed Windrush, that buries reports on police racism, that watches hate crimes rise and does nothing. It is the denial of black humanity in policy, law and economy.

And more than ever in recent history, race is being used to other and marginalise — more even than during the Tories’ hostile environment and the Windrush scandal, as Keir Starmer’s Labour government perversely tries to tackle the electoral threat posed by the racist Reform UK by using racist dog-whistles, targeting migrants and boasting of how many people it is deporting, with the supposed Tory opposition condemning Labour for not going further and for being too weak in targeting minorities.

The government, Reform UK, and far-right actors stand as architects of this backward march. Black History Month 2025 is a warning: either this nation stands firm in power and pride, or it will fall, indicted by the cruelty it tried to hide.

As socialists we must demand and organise for far more, from the top of politics right down to the earliest years of education; to make black, African and working-class histories a core curriculum, not a one-month apology.

From the streets to boardrooms to Westminster we must exercise the power of the many to force change, because it will not be granted willingly by those who hold power and are determined not to lose it.

Black history, class history and the history of all our communities must be far more than just a month’s event. Black history is British history; it must be woven into the fabric of our society at every level if we are to turn Britain away from the treacherous path along which those in power are dragging it.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.