Complacency means scandals involving Yorkshire cricket, the Home Office, and the police are dismissed as anomalies
Britain’s racism crises now come around as regularly as the seasons. As certain as Wimbledon heralds the summer, the next scandal is sure to appear on the horizon, and with it a storm that darkens Britain’s sunny view of its racial progress.
But like all storms, it will pass, leaving little but a sort of atmospheric discomfort, and even that eventually dissipates. Because it seems to have been decided, at some meeting to which an awful lot of people weren’t invited, that Britain has been cured of its racism ills. The occasional flare-up is something to be extinguished, rather than an indication that there is a larger undiagnosed issue underneath.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
