BAME Communities and Coronavirus:
We Need Action and No More Investigation
Dr. Mozammel Haque
“I echo the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for
Slough (Mr Dhesi) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)
about the need for action now. We know a lot of these problems. We have raised
them repeatedly. We need to see action,” Meg Hillier, the MP for Hackney South and
Shoreditch said in the debate on Covid-19: BAME Communities in the House of
Commons on Thursday, 18th of June 2020. Labour MP for Slough Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi
also said, “Does my hon. Friend not agree that with more than 200
recommendations from previous reviews already gathering dust, the reason why so
many of us are pointing out, again and again, that we need action and not more
reviews and investigations is that we have not even implemented a single
recommendation from the previous reviews?”
Debate on Covid-19: BAME Communities
Dawn Petula Butler, Member of Parliament for Brent Central tabled
a debate on Covid-19: BAME Communities in the House of Commons on Thursday, 18th
of June 2020. Many Parliamentarians from cross-party lines participated in the
debate, expressed their viewpoints and made important contributions. Among
them, the following parliamentarians expressed their concerns and asked
questions on risk assessment, no recourse to public funds, incompetence and
systematic racism.
Risk Assessment
Labour Party MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, Rushanara Ali,
asked, “ Does my hon. Friend agree that at the heart of Government there is
huge ignorance about this agenda, and we need the Government to learn from what
has happened? As we ease lockdown, the Government urgently need to do the risk
assessments so that families who are at risk through inter-generational living
and all those issues are taken into account and action is taken to protect people
from further risks of dying.”
No Recourse to Public Funds
Labour MP for East Ham said,
“There is no safety net for people with no recourse to public funds.”
Labour Party MP for East Ham said,” I want to focus on one
point. The Public Health England review says: “People of BAME groups are also
more likely than people of white British ethnicity to be born abroad, which
means they may face additional barriers in accessing services”.
East Ham MP said, “I want to highlight one barrier in
particular, and that is the “no recourse to public funds” restrictions on leave
to remain, which has already been touched on this debate. We are talking about
families who have leave to remain in the UK, who are law-abiding and
hard-working, often with children born in the UK and who may well be British
nationals and have British passports. Typically, they are on a 10-year route to
securing indefinite leave to remain, and in the meantime they have to apply
four times, getting two and a half years to remain each time. Throughout that
10-year period, when they are working here, typically very hard, doing exactly the
kinds of jobs we have been talking about, they have no recourse to public
funds.”
Stephen Timms mentioned, “That is a formidable barrier that
those people face. It is exactly the kind of barrier that the Public Health
England report refers to. I asked the Prime Minister yesterday about this, and
I asked him about it at the Liaison Committee three weeks ago. His answer then
was that hard-working families in that position should have help of one kind or
another. I absolutely agree. Unfortunately, he did not say that when I asked
him about it yesterday, but it is what he said to me at the Liaison Committee,
and he was right on that occasion. The problem is that those families are not
getting that help.”
“It comes as a shock to a lot of people to learn that the
parents of children who have been born in the UK and might well be British
nationals cannot claim child benefit for them, because no recourse to public
funds excludes that. The families cannot apply for universal credit either, or
access the safety net that so many people have had to depend on during this
crisis—2 million additional people have been claiming universal credit since
the beginning of the crisis,” said Stephen Timms MP
He mentioned, “That safety net is not there for people with
no recourse to public funds. That has created a very serious problem of
destitution, a huge increase in food bank demand in many parts of the country
and, in my area, the return of something I never thought we would see again:
soup kitchens, where people are handing out free cooked food just to keep
others alive.
BAME are under-represented
in clinical trials. Why? It is incompetence
Labour MP for West Ham, Ms Lyn Brown said, “We know that it
goes further than vitamin D. Staggeringly, despite the fact that black and
minority ethnic communities are at greater risk of death, they are
under-represented in clinical trials. Why? What possible excuse is there for
that? In my humble opinion, it is incompetence, at the very best.”
She also said, “If we have a second wave, as I fear, and
black and minority ethnic communities die in numbers out of all proportion again,
we will be holding the Government to account for those excess deaths.”
Earlier, Ms Lyn Brown MP mentioned, “Some 73% of us in
Newham are from an ethnic minority, so we need this Government to act before we
see a second wave. We need action so desperately that I have broken shielding
to be here today so that I can demand it. The fact that I had to do so is
wrong, but that is not nearly as wrong as the denial of equal protection for my
constituents from this terrible virus.”
Ms Lyn Brown MP also said, “Those from our Bangladeshi
community have twice the risk of death, and that is more than 12% of my
constituents. Those from the Pakistani community have a 44% higher risk, which
is 10% of us in Newham. Those from the Indian community have a 22% higher risk,
which is 15% of us in Newham.”
Earlier, Labour MP for West Ham, Ms Lyn Brown started
mourning sadly all those she lost during the Covid19 Pandemic. She mentioned
their names, “In Newham, we have statistically the second highest mortality
rate from covid in the country. We have lost Ramesh Gunamal, who worked on the
front desk at Forest Gate police station. We have lost Dr Louisa Rajakumari,
who taught English at Kingsford Community School. We have lost Dr Yusuf Patel,
a much missed GP from Forest Gate, and Abdul Karim Sheikh—sometimes a political
opponent, mostly a friend, and a man always dedicated to the best for our
communities. Those are just a few of the people who Newham and West Ham mourn
deeply.”
This needs to be urgently
addressed,
With workplace risk assessment,
PPE and test
For everyone who needs them.
After describing the two anniversaries, Grenfell Tower fire
and HMS Windrush, the Labour MP for
Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, said, “Systemic racism is causing black and
brown people to disproportionately die from coronavirus. This needs to be
urgently addressed, with workplace risk assessments, PPE and tests for everyone
who needs them, but it needs deeper change, too. We need to tackle the system
that drives these inequalities and empowers people in this Chamber and in
Parliament and the billionaire press barons who whip up fear and exploit and
discard working-class people, black, brown and white alike. We need to tackle
this system, and in its place, build a society that has equality and freedom at
its heart. That is the call of socialism and it is more timely than ever.”
She said, “These are neither discrete incidents nor
aberrations from the norm. They are reminders of what is painfully clear to
many people outside this Chamber: that race and class are the dividing lines between two very
different Britains. The people of Grenfell Tower lived and died in the shadow
of immense wealth in Kensington and Chelsea. The Windrush scandal exposed the
second-class citizenship for black and brown people in Britain today and the
contempt with which migrants are treated. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed
the fatal inequities that are rife within our society and are truly a matter of
life and death.”
Zarah Sultana also said, “This systemic racism is not
incidental. It has a history, and thanks to the action of Black Lives Matter
campaigners, light is being shed on this history. It is a history of
colonialism and conquest, empire and enslavement, and inequality and
exploitation. It is a history of the rich and powerful using their influence to
maintain control and spread hate. Today, their newspapers run stories spreading
fear about migrants arriving on our shores. Tomorrow, it might be about Muslims
or young black men or Gypsies or Roma, and it is done with the same purpose: to
divide the people, deflect blame and protect their rotten system. That is why
they target minorities, and we see it with the threat to the trans community at
the moment.”
Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, said, “Systemic
racism is causing black and brown people to disproportionately die from
coronavirus. This needs to be urgently addressed, with workplace risk
assessments, PPE and tests for everyone who needs them, but it needs deeper
change, too. We need to tackle the system that drives these inequalities and
empowers people in this Chamber and in Parliament and the billionaire press
barons who whip up fear and exploit and discard working-class people, black,
brown and white alike. We need to tackle this system, and in its place, build a
society that has equality and freedom at its heart. That is the call of socialism
and it is more timely than ever.”
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