THE PRIME MINISTER announced a new commission on race and ethnic disparities in June, saying it was inspired by “the many thousands of people who have joined the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In July Johnson announced the commissioners who, he said, would “examine inequality in the UK, across the whole population.”

But one of the 10 commissioners, businessman Aftab Chughtai, had been publicly attacked by the government for failing to pay the minimum wage.

In 2017, when the Department of Business published a name-and-shame list of firms caught underpaying the minimum wage, Chughtai and his family firm, Birmingham baby-ware shop Aftabs, were singled out for failing to pay one worker the £14,142 they were due.

The business minister, naming Chughtai, said it was “against the law to pay workers less than legal minimum wage rates.”

Chughtai told the Birmingham Mail that a “misunderstanding” meant a worker was paid “apprentice” rates instead of the minimum wage.

Putting a businessman who had not followed minimum-wage laws onto a commission to look at “inequality” looks like a perverse decision, but it may show how highly the government values political loyalty.

Chughtai founded Muslims for Britain — a campaign group trying to mobilise Muslims to back Brexit.

An estimated 70 per cent of British Muslims backed Remain, so Chughtai was not fully successful, but every little helps.

The organisation seems Tory-oriented as well as Brexit-backing. This May, Muslims for Britain held an online meeting with a host of Tory speakers, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tory ex-MEP Dan Hannan and Tory MP Saqib Bhatti.

Chughtai is not the only person with strong Tory links who was appointed to the commission on race and ethnic disparities.

Mercy Muroki was also picked as a commissioner. The Cabinet Office describes her as a “senior policy researcher, commentator and columnist” but “Tory” might have been more to the point: Muroki was a platform speaker at the 2019 Tory conference, introducing then-chancellor Sajid Javid.

Her published comment is similarly partisan. Last December Muroki complained in a Times column that she told a student meeting that “the only way to heal the country was to elect a Conservative government” but “was met with laughter and disgust.”

Muroki argued “young Conservatives have been mocked, maligned and marginalised for long enough” by the “unashamedly” Labour majority of young people and dreamed “there must be some small island somewhere where we can send them” — meaning the majority of her generation — “to try out their socialist utopia.”

In another Times column last July, Muroki claimed: “The left have, for too long, endorsed a systematic campaign of intimidation on ethnic-minority Tories.”

Her intimidation and marginalisation for being a Tory includes a semi-regular column in the Times and now a top government appointment, which isn’t bad for somebody who only graduated from university in 2018.

Johnson’s choice of commission chair, educational charity boss Tony Sewell, has already faced criticism for questioning the importance of “institutional racism” and for very old (1990) but very nasty anti-gay comments about footballer Justin Fashanu, a ground-breaking top black player who was hounded over his sexuality.

The commission appears to have both a small and big-C “Conservative” skew — another commissioner, economist and former Goldman Sachs banker Dr Dambisa Moyo published a book in 2020 arguing that voting should not be a “right” and instead people should have to “earn” the chance to vote by passing some kind of quiz.

Dr Moyo wrote: “Why not give all voters a test of their knowledge? This would ensure minimum standards that should lead to higher-quality decision-making by the electorate. The message this would send is that voting is not just a right, but one that has to be earned.”

Voting “tests” like this were historically a key part of removing the votes from African-Americans in the 19th century.

None of the appointed commissioners appear to have any equivalent links to the Labour party or trade unions.