Let’s talk to our political correspondent Darren McCaffery who is in Westminster. It’s a very strong oratory from the Prime Minister. It seems he’s determined to act on this.

 

A strong language indeed, Steven. Ingrained institutionalized and insidious, he says of the attitude toward black people in the U.K. 14% of the population across Britain is either black or minority ethnic. And as he says, they are massively under representative. In many of our big institutions, well, 27 people, black people only admitted to Oxford University last year, 1 of 2500. He looks at business. He looks at the armed forces. In fact, he says the only institutions in which ethnic minorities are over represented is actually in the prison system subtly that he needs to attack on. This is all part of an effort by David Cameron to trying to tackle what he sees as opportunity and equality, you know, X back to that conference speech where he set out on his agenda for his second term as Prime Minister. And in doing so, he’s gonna launch some new laws, as Steven has said in the introduction, of a new law which is gonna force universities to publish much more data about who is allowed into the universities, particularly the elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge. And indeed, when that information is published, people will have access X to it. 

 

And bring on board, that man, David Lamy, a former labor minister, who’s gonna review the treatment of non-white defendants, the criminal justice system, because between 2008 and 2013, black defendants were more likely to go to prison than the white counterparts, though the Prime Minister has ruled out this idea somehow introducing quotas. 

 

It has provoked a major rout with the universities this morning. Oxford University issued a statement which has said it’s wrong to suggest there’s any sense of institutionalized racism, that they are tackling the problem. But ultimately, they have got a representative number of black and ethnic minority students across the board. So this is likely to provoke a rout, but the Prime Minister very much sees this as part of his remit as a second-term Prime Minister to trying tackle what he sees as racism and lack of equality for black and ethnic minorities across the U.K.