A pause for some statistics: In 2010, a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission showed that the proportion of black people in jail in the UK was almost seven times their share of the population—in the United States, by comparison, the proportion of black prisoners was four times greater than their population share. In 2017, according to government statistics, people of non-white ethnicities make up 26 percent of the prison population compared with 13 percent of the general population. In 2011, the police were 28 times more likely to stop and search black rather than white people. If you were black, you were also three times more likely to have a stun gun used against you. The “use of force” by police officers might also involve firearms, tear gas, and long-handed batons, along with physical restraint and restraint equipment. Data disclosed by the Metropolitan Police in August 2017 found that people of African descent and of ethnic minority background, in particular young African and Caribbean men, were twice as likely to die as white Britons after the use of force by police officers and the subsequent lack or insufficiency of access to appropriate healthcare. According to the Race Disparity Audit in 2016, black and Asian households are twice as likely to be in persistent poverty as white households. Afro-Caribbean children are over three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than white British pupils. E. Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, said in 2018 that “in some instances, schools refuse to implement appeal decisions calling for the readmission of wrongly excluded racial and ethnic minority children.” The Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that by the 2021/2022 tax year, the racially disparate impact of austerity measures adopted by the government between 2010 and 2017 will result in a 5 percent loss of income for black households, which is double the loss for white households. The Home Office reports that the number of hate crimes recorded by the police has more than doubled since 2012/2013, with 94,098 hate crime offenses recorded in 2017/18. The NatCen’s British Social Attitudes Survey, running since 1983, shows that attitudes to sex outside of marriage, same sex marriage, and abortion have softened over the years, whereas the percentage of the population describing themselves as racially prejudiced, though it has varied slightly, has never fallen below 25 percent. Almost 70 percent describe themselves as “very or a little prejudiced.”¹¹⁸