BBC Panel Debate on Whether Jews Are an Ethnic Minority Draws Outrage From British Jews algemeiner.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from algemeiner.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Debating whether Jews are an ethnic minority is a familiar mistake by BBC Politics Live The programme’s handling of issues of race and diversity, as well as matters of simple fact, is consistently poor. “Are Jews an ethnic minority?” is not a difficult question. As far as British law is concerned, the answer is open-and-shut: we count as both an ethnic and a religious grouping for the purpose of equalities and employment law. From a purely mathematical perspective, the number of people entering some variation of “Jewish” under one of the five “high-level” ethnic categories (White, Black/Black British, Asian/Asian British, Mixed, and Other) is a minority within the United Kingdom.
That united Starmer’s two groups of internal critics: those who worry that he is too centrist, and those who broadly back his politics but would like him to be bolder in setting out his stall.
Starmer wants to make tackling social and economic inequalities a central theme of his leadership, as he set out in a speech last week. A more progressive tax system will inevitably have to be part of that, and it is highly likely to involve increasing the UK’s internationally low corporation tax rates, a policy that Labour supported both in 2015 and 2019.
During his leadership campaign, as fellow Labour MPs were quick to point out, Starmer said he would “reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax”. But for now, Starmer’s team are wary of being saddled with the old caricature of Labour being the party of tax and spend, spend, spend – and keen not to say too much about policy at all, so far away from a general election.