𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Lord Sewell knows what it is like to stand in the centre of a firestorm. Boris Johnson handed him the task of investigating race and ethnic disparities in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter protests. His commission’s findings landed with a thunderclap. The report described a Britain where the system is no longer “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities” but sounded the alarm about the plight of white working class children.

It found the “largest disadvantaged group” were white boys from low income homes, particularly those from coastal towns and former industrial communities. They were “failing” at secondary school and the “least likely to go to university”. The report was condemned by the BMA. A professor of postcolonial studies who had questioned Lord Sewell’s academic credentials Tweeted that “even Dr Goebbels had a research PhD”.

Half a decade on, the challenges his team identified are now widely acknowledged. A Labour Government proudly issues press releases about initiatives to help “white working-class children and think tanks opine on the subject.

“Let me tell you,” he says. “Five or six years ago, if [the Education Secretary] had mentioned a specific policy for white working class people, she would have been called a fascist.”

Looking back on the storm that greeted his commission’s report, he says: “This was the data in front of us. All we did was just declare that.”

Its conclusions ignited such controversy, he says, because it was expected to be just “another report” that “slams the country as being institutionally racist”.

“They weren’t expecting us to be so forensic and so nuanced about it,” he says.

He had a ready response to questions as to why a report on race paid such attention to the experiences of the white population: “Well, they just happen to be the majority in the country, and they are human beings after all, so let’s include them.”

He remains concerned about the state of education across the nation and has stern advice for parents: Stop “colluding” in your children “bunking off school”. The equivalent of 89 million school days were lost through absences last year, according to an estimate by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) – 29 million more days than in 2018-19.

His message to dads who want to see their children succeed is simple: “Do not collude with them, sitting at home playing video games when they should be in school… Basically, children are children, they’ve just got to get their backsides to school, right?”

Allowing a child to miss out on schooling, he says, is akin to “low-level abuse”. He argues parents should not allow their children to play video games in their bedrooms, saying instead that kids should have “books, books and more books”.

The CSJ found 176,361 pupils were “severely absent” in 2024-25 – up 193% since before the pandemic. It also discovered the problems highlighted in the 2021 report remain glaring, with just 36% of white British boys on free school meals hitting the expected standard in GCSE maths and English last year. This compared with 65% of all pupils and 82% of Chinese boys on free school meals.

Lord Sewell, whose parents came to Britain from Jamaica, talks about the powerful role of “immigrant optimism” in driving up results in ethnic minority groups. Even if a child has no memory of a life outside the UK, he argues, they grow up with the “mindset that England is a great opportunity”.

He also prizes the “key” contribution of dads in the home.

Both Conservatives and Labour “have a kind of nervousness about talking about fathers and two parents”, he comments, adding: “Look, the father has a role, I’m sorry.”

When dads are not around, he warns, “things collapse”.

“Our tax regime has got to be one that is in favour of two parents,” he says. “At the moment it just seems like it’s gone the other way.”

Cleveland Anthony Sewell was born in Brixton in 1959 and his mother worked in a “small electronics factory” while his dad was a bus driver and then a car mechanic. They moved out to Penge in southeast London and his life was shaped by the local Sunday school and Cub Scout group.

“The institutions that we’re now getting cynical about were the ones that helped me,” he says, describing how he and his siblings grew in confidence and were “institutionalised to become middle class” as they picked up the aspirations of their friends.

He remembers thinking: “We’ve got to go to university, because that’s what everyone else was doing.”

Britain today is a “different country” to the one he in which he grew up, he claims.

Comparing his daughter’s childhood to his own, he says: “Her experience is like night and day between the two of us. I think she has zero experience of racism… I can’t hand on heart say that Britain has not improved.”

After training to be a teacher at Sussex University he taught in London schools and was at the heart of efforts to transform education in Hackney. Then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson commissioned him to lead an inquiry into London schools which led to the creation of an “excellence fund” to push up top standards. He yearns to see techniques pioneered in London put into practice in communities far from the capital and regrets that the recommendations of 2021 report were not taken forward with greater vigour.

Lord Sewell sits as a Conservative peer but believes the neglect of “left behind people” by the traditional parties of power meant it was “open season for Reform”.

He says: “[We] simply left the majority group of poor people with nowhere else to go… Nigel Farage, give him his due, he sang the right tune.”

Describing how he gravitated towards Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, he says: “Everybody has their weaknesses but I saw somebody who at least had courage, integrity, virtue. She stuck to what she believed in… You couldn’t say she was dishonest. She had virtue, she had a character. I liked that in a politician and I thought that was the kind of person I wanted to latch onto.”

He has clear advice for Kemi Badenoch if she wants to win the former industrial Red Wall seats which could decide the outcome of the next election. Legions of these voters swung behind Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019 before reverting to Labour in 2024 and now they have backed Nigel Farage’s Reform in the council elections.

People want to see a “future for their children” with a “great education”, he argues. “If you give those kind of opportunities back to those communities, then you’ll win.