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Covid Inquiry: Kemi Badenoch says help for ethnic minorities ‘would’ve been wrong’ [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The former equalities minister has defended not offering additional support to ethnic groups who were more at risk of Covid, claiming that the national vaccine rollout was more important.
Kemi Badenoch told today’s UK Covid inquiry hearing that it “would have been wrong” to offer ethnic minorities, who were more likely to die from the virus, help such as priority status for testing or vaccines.
She said: “What people were suggesting was racial segregation – let’s treat Black people differently because they are disproportionately impacted.”
Black and Asian people had the highest death rates from Covid-19 in the UK in the early stages of the pandemic, according to a Public Health England report published in June 2020. People of Bangladeshi ethnicity were most at risk, being twice as likely to die than white British people.
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Asked why the government did not do more to help these groups when she was equalities minister, Badenoch said: “To spend time away from what we knew worked [vaccines] to do things which were less viable, less effective, in order to deal with the emotional feelings of people who didn’t like vaccines or wanted other levels of support, I think would have been wrong.”
Covid disproportionately affected Black people and other ethnic minority groups in non-health-related ways, too. They were around a third more likely than the white British population to say their finances had suffered because of Covid, according to a YouGov poll from November 2020.
At the time, there were calls from academics and think tanks for greater government support for businesses owned by Black people and other ethnic minority backgrounds, as well as strengthened social security measures and statutory sick pay to support these groups.
Badenoch said such targeted support packages were championed by “well-meaning people” but would have had unintended consequences. These included, she claimed, fuelling misconceptions that certain groups were responsible for spreading the virus.
“Treat ethnic minorities in a colourblind way,” she said. “Look at the individual, not the skin colour and start to make decisions based on that.”
Dealing with misinformation
Badenoch also told the inquiry that some communities were scared by the information the government was publishing on the disproportionate effect of Covid on ethnic minorities.
“There was a fear that a lot of the communication about disproportionate impacts was a secret conspiracy to scare ethnic populations into taking vaccines, which was a way of the government culling the population,” she said.
The minister added that she does not believe the government has a handle on dealing with misinformation.
“I don’t think we have adapted to this age of social media carrying information at lightning speed across the world,” Badenoch said. “I don’t think we know how to solve it.”
Economic impacts
Elsewhere in today’s hearing, Badenoch, who is now secretary of state for business and trade, claimed the government has no means to prevent poverty.
Leslie Thomas, the lawyer for the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations, asked the minister if she would agree that structural inequalities contributed to certain groups being disproportionately affected by Covid.
“I'm not sure that I do agree because it depends on what you mean by structural inequality,” answered Badenoch.
“Poverty,” said Thomas, before Badenoch interrupted: “Yes, but we don’t have a cure for poverty. If we did, we would have done it.”
She continued: “In terms of the issues around deprivation, poverty, health comorbidities, a lot of work was done to look at things that we could do to tackle that, but we can't cure diabetes, we can't remove poverty.”
“So saying that structural inequalities have an impact on incidence [of Covid-19], yes, that is true, but that doesn't mean that there is a silver bullet to resolve them.”
Badenoch, who was also a treasury minister between February 2020 and September 2021, told the inquiry that more should have been done at the time to assess the economic impacts of the pandemic, such as opportunity cost analysis.
The government was very focused on the health impacts, she said, adding that this was hindsight analysis: “You are now seeing many outcomes related to economic impacts that might have triggered even more inequality further down [the line].”
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-kemi-badenoch-help-for-ethnic-minorities-would-have-been-wrong-equalities-minister/
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