British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday that a race inequality review commissioned by his government which concluded there was no longer institutional racism in Britain was stimulating but more needed to be done to tackle the issue.
Mr Johnson's remarks came as his most senior race adviser Samuel Kasumu left his job on Thursday, although Downing Street denied any link between his resignation and the controversial report.
The report on Wednesday by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, ordered after Black Lives Matter protests last summer, said geography, family and socio-economic factors played a greater role on people's life chances than race.
However, its conclusions were condemned by campaigners who described the report as a whitewash.
"I don't want to say that the government is going to agree with absolutely everything in it, but it has some original and stimulating work in it that I think people need to read and to consider," Mr Johnson said.
"There are very serious issues that our society faces to do with racism that we need to address … we've got to do more to fix it and we need to understand the severity of the problem."
The prime minister’s office said Mr Kasumu would leave his job as a special adviser for civil society and communities in May, as had “been his plan for several months”.
Mr Johnson said he thanked Mr Kasumu for his work and praised his work encouraging ethnic minority groups to have a Covid-19 vaccine.
But Simon Woolley, a former government equalities adviser and a member of the House of Lords, said Mr Kasumu’s exit was connected to the “grubby and divisive” report.
“There is a crisis at Number 10 when it comes to acknowledging and dealing with persistent race inequality,” Mr Woolley said.
The report said most of the disparities in UK society “often do not have their origins in racism”.
It noted that some communities continue to be haunted by historical racism, which created a “deep distrust” that could be a barrier to success.
The commission said “overt racism”, particularly online, still existed.
The report said that while the UK was not yet a "post-racial country", it was successful in removing inequalities in education and, to a lesser extent, the economy, making it "a model for other white-majority countries".
The report’s authors questioned whether the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK alienated certain sections of society.
"We understand the idealism of those well-intentioned young people who have held on to, and amplified, this intergenerational mistrust," it said.
"However, we also have to ask whether a narrative that claims nothing has changed for the better, and that the dominant feature of our society is institutional racism and white privilege, will achieve anything beyond alienating the decent centre ground – a centre ground which is occupied by people of all races and ethnicities."
