I cannot think of a country where colour matters less

AT A DINNER hosted by Durham University last month, a speaker said there was no evidence of discrimination being a factor in under achievement by British students of colour, provoking a walkout by a small number of student attendees.

- Dinesh Dhamija

He also referred – perhaps unwisely – to the sex-worker training sessions recently announced by the university, but that was not his key offence.

His offence was to challenge a “victim narrative” on the part of British ethnic minorities and people who perhaps wish them well.

There is in my view nowhere where the rights and talents of our minority groups are better protected. That message seems to have reached the desperate Afghan and Syrian refugees as they risk their lives to get here even from France.

As a first generation immigrant myself, never have I been more conscious of how misguided are the views of woke and lobbying groups like Black Lives Matter.

In my half century of learning, working and building businesses here, I cannot think of a country in the world where your colour matters less, and your freedom to live your chosen life is greater.

And I certainly include the US in that comparison, where I have seen the legacy of slavery and its ugly sister segregation as recently as the 1970s cast a terrible pall over that country’s race relations.

In my new book – Book It! – I tell the story of my arrival and life journey in the UK within a decade or so of the Windrush Generation, whose experience has rightly been looked at so carefully.