Britain, apparently, does not have a problem with racism. The millions of Britons who experience racial slurs; discrimination at school; unequal access to jobs, housing and public services; and who are made to feel unwelcome in their own neighbourhoods will have been relieved to read in Tony Sewell’s report, commissioned by Boris Johnson last summer and published in March 2021, that the “UK has fundamentally shifted since those periods in the past and has become a more open society.”
As we continue to process the implications of the Sewell Report, it is helpful to remember other societies that apparently also did not have problems with racism.
Denying that one’s country is racist was particularly common in Europe between the wars. In East and Central Europe, one government after another insisted that they were looking after their minorities even while they were introducing discriminatory social structures and policies explicitly designed to benefit the majority populations. Doing so fuelled the growth of radical-Right parties and encouraged vigilante violence against minorities, and in some instances allowed fascists or right-wing authoritarians to overthrow the very governments that introduced these policies in the first place.
