We Are Black Britain

A discussion with Lord Sewell on The Rasheed Griffith Show

Dec 31, 2024

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Show notes

In this episode, Rasheed is joined by Lord Sewell of the British House of Lords, for an insightful discussion on education, race, and the socio-political dynamics in the UK and the Caribbean. They explore the myths of systemic discrimination, and the evolving narratives surrounding immigration, colonialism, and identity.

Mind the Gap
Lord Sewell highlights the challenges Afro-Caribbean students face in the UK, emphasizing the impact of family structure and socioeconomic conditions on academic performance. His program, Generating Genius, seeks to address gaps in STEM education by providing long-term mentorship to nurture talent.

It’s Complicated
We critique broad racial generalizations, emphasizing intra-group differences. Lord Sewell draws comparisons between Caribbean and African diasporas in the UK and the U.S., attributing disparities in performance to cultural and structural factors rather than race alone.

Legacy
Here we examine the persistence of colonial narratives in the Caribbean and the UK. Lord Sewell surmises most anti-colonial movements and discussions are performative, and calls for embracing the positive aspects of British influence while addressing present challenges more pragmatically.

Lord Sewell - UK.Gov

Lord Sewell - UK Parliament

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.

Rasheed: Thank you so much, Lord Sewell, for joining me on the podcast today.

Lord Sewell: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Rasheed: I'd love to talk first about your program, Generating Genius, because there is actually a similarity between us in that sense. So, I run a program at the Mercatus Center, called Emergent Ventures, Africa and the Caribbean, where we provide grants to persons primarily in Africa and the Caribbean doing different innovative projects, mostly science, and policy. It could also be artistic works and so on. So we have a very particular interest in essentially generating genius or finding talent, funding talent.

And I was very curious about what led you to start this particular organization in the UK.

Lord Sewell: There were two things that drove this really. One was programs that maybe were kind of targeting for example black young people in particular who tended to avoid the sciences or that didn't really come up in their thinking.

Most of the programs are in sports, a lot of art stuff, and development of leadership, but not science itself and technology, and how that works and how you can link to science industries and STEM careers and develop yourself as a scientist.

So that was one strand. I saw there was a gap. The second was, that the existing programs out there in the UK tended to be one-off things. So they tended to be things that were just done in the summer with a group and then that was it, it's done or a week or whatever. What I was interested in doing was doing a program that was about nurturing the same individuals over a long period of time.

And for me, a long period of time would have been six or seven years. I'm just staying with those same students and actually watching them grow. These programs seem to be called pipeline programs. And I saw these operating in America. What happened was the same group would keep coming back to the university or to the college every year.

And that cohort then grew in the program. And I thought that was a very attractive way of working because you could then monitor change and really be effective. It had issues in terms of scale, but I thought I would do that. So that was the key motivator for doing that program.

And in the background to that, I'll tell you why Generating Genius has changed. Now at the time, and we're talking about back now, 2002, something like that, the numbers were still quite significant around African Caribbean boys being the key issue in the country in terms of achievement.

So that was again, another reason to respond to that group specifically, the numbers showed that. So those are the key reasons for the program.

Rasheed: I hear frequently from UK commentators that Afro-Caribbean males tend to underperform in the UK, but I remember a similar statistic in the U. S. where Afro Caribbean as a group tends to outperform other groups in the U. S. Why do you think there's that disparity?

Lord Sewell: Yes, it's really strange. I mean, when you start trying to unravel this whole thing with these labels to say an American audience, particularly a black American audience, you have to do a lot of explaining and unpicking as to the complexity of the issue.

I would say the easiest way to look at this is to look at the situation of those children who are of Caribbean origin. i. e. those children whose parents came here in the 1950s or whose grandparents came here in the 1950s to Britain and a persistence of that group doing poorly in school. That seems to be comparable with African Americans, in the sense, not all African Americans, but a cohort, that sort of similar kind of framework.

What tends to happen then is that the Caribbean group that migrates to America, tends to be not always middle class, and maybe in that sense that helps. But they've had a history really of outperforming the African Americans in America. Yeah.

Rasheed: Mhm.

Lord Sewell: What I would say is that the group then in England becomes a kind of poorer group from the Caribbean, and they link into that poverty strata that's in Britain, and never really break out from that.

And so In a sense, they have more allegiance really with the white working class in terms of what happens here. And so you then have the two kinds of groups coming out of the Caribbean but with different trajectories. One is almost a model black group migrant mentality, and another more indigenous group, if you like, doing poorly in society. I do think there are, there's a sort of strange issue there where it does seem that the more indigenized you are in the society, the worse you are really. And it's the ones that actually have what I call this distant migrant kind of aspirational drive that do well.

So for example, the Nigerian group, the African group would be the parallel of the Caribbean group in America. Whereas the Caribbean group in Britain would be the parallel of your poor achieving African American group, you see? So what this all shows us is that we can't use these very simple generalizations about black or whatever we want to call it. Because black groups in many cases are operating at different levels.

Some are at an elite level, some are low level. So the inter-groupings are much more kind of interesting in a sense than the idea of say, black versus white, which probably is a generalization that doesn't make any sense.

Rasheed: So, on that point of the, let's say, the indigenization of underperformance... In the U.S. for example, again, you have different groups. You have also the Asian Americans, who were there for a pretty long time, third, fourth, and fifth generation, and they still tend to outperform in terms of education in this particular case. Why do you think especially in the UK still, you have this persistent underperformance of the black population, even, especially Afro-Caribbean as a kind of inculcation of culture in the UK?

Lord Sewell: Remember, the group that we're talking about is specifically Caribbean. We know it by the data. It's very easy to show. It's illuminated better once you see the African group, particularly the West African group, Nigerian, and Ghanaian groups, doing so well. They're on the parallels with the Indian and Chinese groups in Britain.

And what it does is it exposes, I think, a number of things. You look at the family patterns of that Caribbean group. And I'll give you some numbers here. The Caribbean parent, single parenthood frameworks, and family structure are running at around 67, 68, and 69 percent of the population. Compare that to the Nigerian, Ghanaian group that's running about 30 percent.

And then the white group somewhere in the middle. And then the Indian group, something like kind of about 10 percent and Chinese 8%.

So there are clear parallels between strong two-parent family structures and educational achievement. And I would say for me, that is the key driver of this disparity.

Rasheed: That is not a very widely held view, I assume. I know there's a similar argument often made in the U. S. as well, with the family structure comment. Why do you think people tend to try to disregard that particular view of performance?

Lord Sewell: Because politically, there's almost like an ideological drive to look at the school. I'm not saying that this isn't important, schools are important. But to look at the school, to look at wider racism, to look at systems.

And what that political ideology then does, that's probably of the left, is that it sees any kind of analysis that looks either at the family or the culture as blaming the victim.

They don't really then see the more important issue that your family nurturing is going to be the determinant.

The other thing that interests me is that it also links to wider issues like crime, and mental health. These are all key. So when health practitioners are trying to outstrip, why disproportionate groups are in their systems? They keep going back to levels of structural or systemic racism.

Now, to me, I do think people experience racism, of course. You have this problem of the African group experiencing that as well and the Indian group to a certain extent. And yet they're the ones who are flying off the charts in terms of achievement.

So I do think that argument is only put out because people don't want to go down or, or ask the harder question for whatever reasons, of really an agency that is needed in terms of people and their families and groups and their families. And until you deal with that I think these things will persist.

Rasheed: So, expanding that now to the wider conversations you've raised of racism, structural or perceived structural in different societies. When you were Chair of the Commission in the UK, trying to examine these issues, the resulting report caused quite a big stir, to put it mildly, in the UK. Which, to me as an outsider, of course, I was very surprised by.

I figured, okay, this is actually a very good result. Why are people so angry at this result? Where it made the point that the idea of structural racism really isn't valid as the critique of modern UK society. Could you walk us through what the report really went into detail on, and why was there such a very harsh reaction to it? I would think this would be a good result.

Lord Sewell: I think somebody said to me that it was all about the timing. Probably had we done the report a lot further away from the George Floyd thing, which was really running around the world in terms of what is now really, I think, a completely disproportionate and ridiculous reaction, you know, that people had to this incident.

But because people were in their passion, and then of course the other thing was we had structures of, say, institutions in Britain reacting from BBC to everybody just said, "Find me something black." The performative thing was just going crazy. It was almost like a witch hunt.

Everybody was saying, "What black thing are you doing?" And a performative theme of Black Lives Matter came along. So here then arrives on the scene for the first time in Britain, a report on racial disparity that was headed by a black man. And also the team was predominantly black and Asian in terms of representation. And so immediately just the optics of that was important because usually in England for a long time, a lot of our government reports were not really written or shared by black people, Asian people.

So it, it's really interesting. So you imagine now that comes out, and in the heat of the moment taking the elixir of all that kind of passion, and then we come along with an antidote that says, wait a minute, this is more complex. It is more complex because the disparities are driven more by geography, family structure, socioeconomic situations, or these other multiples than it is by race and racism. And also we included the white group in our analysis as well. So a lot of time people would look at these things, and exclude the white group. And then, of course, it was very positive because it emphasized agency in there and saying here are the enabling factors or disabling factors. Particularly in health, these were linked to your own behavior, rather than somebody who was the subject of racism.

Rasheed: Given the results of that, people would obviously say, "Okay, well if the point to make of this is there's no overall meta point of racism, then how do you get the underperforming groups, which are minority groups to perform better?" What kind of specific policies would need to be enacted for those people?

Lord Sewell: I think you're asking the wrong question here, because could it be that in fact, and if we look at the numbers, that Caribbean group is so small now, tiny, that really the achievement issues are basically around the white poor majority.

First of all, the starting point isn't even about race anymore. The starting point should be about this big group that's underachieving. That's where you want to pick your resources and your emphasis. And that in fact, their underachievement has to do primarily with aspiration. Yes, family structure as well, but also, a kind of attention and a kind of resource that London children have, and those children who live in the north of England and the south coast just do not have that access. That's really where the problem lies. England's a funny place because London is a small country and yet London dominates everything. So you imagine now as a magnet, all the best teachers across the country, particularly young teachers get qualified and they don't want to go into a small town or the North or to the South.

They're all piled into London. London is where the action is. Best restaurants, that kind of thing. And so we have a problem in the sense of attracting, enough teachers into these needy areas.

Rasheed: And what's the corrective mechanism for that?

Lord Sewell: Well, I think... what's got to happen is we've got to do what we did because London wasn't always as good as it is now.

And I think what you've got to do is ruthlessly go into these schools and put together a program of high achievement, aspiration. It's not complicated, but then you've got to also look at the leadership of these schools and come up with a framework that gets rid of them and puts in teachers that can do the job.

And so there's got to be a movement, county by county, area, town by town, where you go in, you look at the results, and you say, "Right, okay, we're gonna do a transformation here, via looking at your leadership, looking at your action plans to make your school better."

And I think that so far, both parties have been reluctant to undertake that. And my sense is that one of the reasons why they don't want to do it is that, those areas in themselves. Haven't got the kind of social capital and people who could lobby for them. So for example, what's ironic is that in London, why things went well, why our resources came to London was that politicians lived there, and parliament was there. So in effect, there was enough will and drive in those areas. Now, what I find is that those poorer areas outside, predominantly white, of course, outside the backbone, don't have any of those sorts of things going for them. And so they're left to wither on the vine. And I think there's got to be a different way of working with those communities, those schools, those academy chains that are in that area to up their game and really follow a model of saying, "You know, these poor children, even though they're poor, they can get to Oxford or Cambridge or whatever job they need, skill base they need to have."

And I don't know. I just don't think that those areas have the ambassadors to be able to go in and really help those communities. So that would be my plan. My program Generating Genius is something that almost lays on the side of those schools because it's a kind of career advice and aspiration program. And funny enough, we now target predominantly white schools. We've shifted the whole thing. So my sense is that it's almost like doing a missionary kind of job. London is coming out to those equivalent of your Rust Belt areas.

Not just the kids, but the modeling of the schools and how they work. And twinning and or sharing best practices with those schools, predominantly white to help them. So this is a world away from when I went to school, where we had all the hardship, the schools were really difficult, and predominantly black kids failed. I think we've reached a point now where it's almost the other way around where we've got a lot of high-achieving Black and Asian children and then their parents.

And I always wonder, one of the things that could be done is just almost as it were that cohort, those schools now saying, "Well, we've got to save the rest of the country" and going out to the country. It puts a completely different dynamic or power dynamic on race. Because in the end, what you've got is predominantly Indian and African, parents, groups and teachers and great schools going in and helping and supporting predominantly poor white schools. It almost is as if we've come to a counterintuitive way of looking at social justice. The power brokers in education for social justice are Black groups. They're not the victims.

The country needs to call on them to go and help the rest of the nation because the discourse in the past has always been that the Black group is in need, the Asian group is in need of the rest of the country to come to it. They do well. But this is saying, no, the numbers, the data show that particularly, as I said, in the African corner of the space and the Indian corner, there is this sense of high achievement and success.

The calling is then, and it's quite a, I think it's quite exciting to say, this school with these children and these teachers need to go and help these children in predominantly white areas.

Rasheed: Wow. Yes, very counterintuitive indeed. When it comes to broader politics in the UK, so shifting a bit away from education, there is now a very fervent race-based discussion yet again in the UK surrounding reparation policy between the UK and the Caribbean.

And honestly, to me, this is not a surprise, based on what I read and write on the Caribbean side of reparation policy. But I am honestly very surprised the traction it has gotten in the UK itself, again, as an outsider. Before we get to the core reparations policy in the UK, why do you think this topic has now become so widely discussed in the UK?

I understand why the Caribbean discusses it, but why in the UK?

Lord Sewell: It comes out of a lot of that stuff that happened after the Black Lives Matter movement. Where there was a sense now that institutions, individuals, were looking inwardly and particularly the Church of England, the BBC, even the Guardian newspaper itself, and finding these, problems that were hidden or not, in their own institutions.

And that problem for them was the notion of slavery and how to then deal with that. So I think that that's been the examination that the reason why it's now driving upwards as an issue for me is, I think, to do with the fact that, we have had for a long time, a narrative in Britain that's about self-hate and the fact that you don't like your country. Britain is a place where you don't sing a national anthem. You don't have any pride in it because it's done wrong. It is associated with that inside England. And so it's almost like this kind of strange kind of contract people have with the nation and it's similar with the royal family.

It can be seen that it's very attractive to the wider world and to individuals, people who come here. At the same time, it indulges itself, but especially by the media, into some self-loathing, that says it's not really that great. And I think that's part of the Trojan horse, the way in really for this kind of idea.

It's weakened and then it comes in. And I think the third thing is to do with the lobby groups themselves that perpetuate this. Many of them are desperately trying to find some reason for their existence. And I think that's probably been the major reason why the reparations thing has taken off.

There's been a popular kind of movement amongst academics, not about the real people, at UWI, the University of West Indies. And again these people are new, born back in the seventies and eighties. And now waving the flag.

So I do think that's part of the reason why.

Rasheed: And now that it is a popular, generally popular conversation in the UK, do you think there's a way to essentially step back from it? Or do you think the only way to dissipate the conversation is some kind of symbolic or some kind of active policy from the current government?

Because oftentimes in these situations, stepping back is quite difficult.

Lord Sewell: I think that to step back is hard in the sense that if you take the Commonwealth, for example, Britain is still linked to institutions that if they step back, they step back at their peril because it's all driven by the monarchy and things British.

And if suddenly you decide that you don't wanna do it anymore, then the whole thing collapses.

In my view, I think that there should be a sense of focus on schools, universities, those two big issues, those big spaces, and allowing a more polarity of voices in there than the single one we've got at the moment.

Rasheed: How realistic is that? Because, at least from what I've been told, especially from friends who are in these particularly more influential universities, there doesn't seem to be much space for even a plurality of views at this point.

Lord Sewell: You know, it's quite interesting. I was thinking about this the other day that the left talk about post-modernism and intersectionality, and uses these terms. Obviously what they're trying to do is say that, the world is driven by white privilege, but essentially that's no different than what we're saying. Because they're saying that what you should not do is hold on to analysis of the world and say, it's a fixed immutable kind of way of looking at life.

And that what you need to do is to take on different perspectives, except in their case, taking on the different perspectives means for them their own, and not anyone else's. So even though it's got a sense of fairness and it's quite attractive., I'm talking about, some of the postmodern progressive stuff, it doesn't take us anywhere because they refuse to see how it's relevant when it comes to disrupting completely reparations or any other argument. They're not going to turn up to class that day. I think that's what you've got. I think the other thing is, I do think that Britain itself needs to build back its confidence that it can go in and speak to people and not worry about saying the wrong thing or whatever.

I do think that that's slowly happening, but I wish it happened at a greater pace.

Rasheed: Do you think there's something that needs to be somehow transformed in a similar way to the Caribbean? It was Caribbean academics, Caribbean politicians, and the Caribbean different groups that really ignited this conversation over many, many years.

It didn't start functionally in the UK itself, it's really of Caribbean origin. Now, you are currently in the Caribbean, but do you think there's something that has to fundamentally change on the Caribbean side in parallel to changes on the UK side?

Lord Sewell: You're talking about reparations here, are you?

Rasheed: Yes, but also in general, yes.

Lord Sewell: I do think that often the reparations argument when it's run inside the Caribbean and especially in Jamaica, it's run as a decoy so that people can't focus on the real problem of roads and water, which is the backbone of your life here. I do think that a conversation or an image or a post that keeps you focused on this idea that you like the children of Israel, will go to this Zion. I think that's great as an image, but it's not going to work in the Caribbean. We need more pragmatic leadership.

Rasheed: And in terms of leadership in the UK...

There's a lot of excitement around Kemi Badenoch as the new leader of the Conservative Party, from her own idea of renewal and progress. Are you optimistic?

Lord Sewell: I'll declare my colors here. Kemi and I are friends and she was very supportive of us when we did the report, came out as almost like a one-woman army, and fought all the kind of nasty things that was said and how it got personalized and things like that.

She went in, stamped the authority, and created the government response Inclusive Britain. I wish, and I hope that Kemi doesn't get bogged down in race anymore. She needs to meet the needs of everybody, and believe it or not, everybody isn't necessarily interested no matter what about race.

And so I'm hoping that she does lay a vision about how government can effectively do things because what was clear about previous governments was that they were hampered by their environment or by land or land choices, things like that. So what I think she could do, which would be great is to, allegedly say throw them in jail.

Now, I don't think you get in trouble with doing that, but certainly pruned back heavily, some of the wastage already in the home offices. And I think she'll be able to do it. She's got time to do it and she'll be able to do it.

Rasheed: Okay. Sounds quite good. So final question.

Why is it important to you to frequently travel to Jamaica?

Lord Sewell: For me, there's a connectivity here. And what I first thought was great about Jamaica, and it's very interesting, that once we had the trauma in the 60s and 70s, of being the first generation of Black kids born there and having the racism, Jamaica almost became an outlet, a kind of a place of refuge and I feel that you could look towards it.

It's really funny. People even became fake Jamaicans, in order to survive the hostility. I wasn't a fake person, but I did look to Jamaica as a place that had that strength. Mainly, of course, driven by its music and its culture, which is very attractive. I think I came here then and it's interesting cause I'm writing a film at the moment called "Britain, the Making of the Jamaican Mind"

What it does is assert this notion that black people in Jamaica, as it were, are really black British. They're goldfish in a British pond. And they're surrounded. And so when I came here it wasn't necessarily, "Oh, I'm going to discover all my African roots and all that." What happened, and I look back now as an older person, found the positive elements of Britain inside the region; the education system, the parliamentary system, the legal system, keep going, the football teams that they support, the side of the road that they drive on, just keep going.

Even the language. It wasn't necessarily, here was a country now that in a sense was hating England. They had redefined who they are, who they were, but via a British and you could say an African, but essentially the British thread was there. They were just redefining it so that it makes sense for them.

But the only thing they had really to use., the structural big tools, the the water in the goldfish tank, was British. In a sense, I may have escaped home only to return home again. I'm now sitting talking to you, looking at Golden Eye on the North Coast of America.

And that was the place where Ian Fleming wrote all the Bond novels. I suppose Chris Blackwell takes it up and does similar. He would come here six months of the year and get inspired by Jamaica to create those things.

So the place couldn't be that alien, that he could find it to be a nurturing environment. So he settles in here and finds another home. And even though the Bond films, there's only a couple of them, are really about Jamaica itself, it doesn't matter. What matters is that it provides the creative kind of seeds and context and nurture for him to go on and write those stories. For me the surprising truth about Jamaica it's not its contrast to Britain, but just how similar it is, how it's taken the best of Britain, rather than something that it has to escape from. Barbados is another interesting thing. I don't want to talk about Barbados. I know it didn't like the tag "Little England", and it tried to fight against and some of this stuff that's going on now is really a fight against that label in a way, trying to become now, I don't know, an Africanist sort of thing. And a lot of that stuff's performative because essentially Barbados did its best on the world stage when it was Little England.

It had a fantastic education system. I'll be honest, people won't like this, but really that West Indies cricket team, you could put a Barbados one in and it would still win. For a country so small, and of course, on the economy, they did really well and everything was framed around Britain.

The lie about that Little England thing was that Bajans weren't doing this because they felt like they were sort of submissive, or they weren't as aggressive as the Jamaicans were, it wasn't, I don't think it was about that. I think the Bajans I've known over the years are very proud. What they found was that they could be proud of the best that the British left.

And that's the key to this. And so that reparations, that anti-colonial thing that goes on tends to miss that point that what we're finding here and what we should preserve is the best. I mean, there's some real ironies. All of those big Caribbean anti-colonial figures, CLR James, Marcus Garvey, Michael Manley, and Forbes Burnham, are Englishmen to the core. And they have a great affection for things British. This is the irony of it all. They appear on the one level to believe this, "Oh, we're going to give the colonial master a big kick-in". At the same time, they're lovers. of that culture that makes them who they are. You see, the problem with the anti-colonial project is it doesn't share that part of it. It's around the corner, it's hidden around the corner. But I can. As a Black British, I could see through that. So when I read Garvey, when I listen to Michael Manley, when I look at Forbes Burnham, I have a special insight because I can see the two things operate at the same time as only a Black Brit really who's up for it can see that contradiction going on.

It's all laid out then. So what is this thing about? What are we fighting in the end? So the battle then becomes, I think, performative. It's all about, well today we're going to look like " We're anti-monarchy, we're anti this. But yet we're so British". And I think that story needs to be told.

And for me, I think what people are frightened of is that they think that by opening up themselves to their British half, as it were, that somehow they're going to be swamped by an anti-colonial British kind of thing. But in fact, far from it, it's actually the seeds of your creativity.

I'll give you one example. I did some great projects in Jamaica about Shakespeare. I did plays and we had a Shakespeare competition. And the kids loved the plays because of what Shakespeare is particularly if you look at those plays, they resonate straight into the Jamaican context. And the kids relate to that.

Chaucer is a similar thing. The wife of Bath to me, she's like a dance hall queen. The medieval stuff that's going on is similar to what you would see in downtown Kingston. The raw openness of that culture is very similar. So once you start stacking it up, people have got stereotypes of what is British, which is stiff upper lip, racist, I don't know, kind of aloof elite, yeah?

And that isn't Britain. That's just a kind of a stereotype of Britain. The Britain of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, is I think, closer to the real Britain that you get, you know. And that is even closer to what you see in the Caribbean. And Derek Walcott and CLR James will tell you about this.

Walcott has a lovely phrase where he says "In the morning I've got a heartbeat of a shanty and Warwickshire at the same time". I'm up for a kind of completely new, evaluation from Britain to stop running itself down by telling itself and also the Caribbean that somehow it either owes them something or it should be ashamed of its culture. The opposite should be happening. And I think that that's the radical step that we need from intellectuals.

And that is going to enhance the Caribbean and also make people in Britain from all cultures feel that not that they're going to forget the negative things that happened, but see the complexities of that interaction.

Rasheed: I'm from Barbados, and that reminds me of a point that Errol Barrow, the father of Barbadian independence, frequently argued when he was pushing for independence. Strangely, they wanted independence because they were British. He used the point that the Parliament of Barbados is the third oldest continuous Parliament in the Western Hemisphere.

This Parliament in the 1500s, pushed against Cromwell. And became a lot more independent from the Cromwellian court, and that was a continuous thing. So he said, we are the heirs of that parliament. So he used this idea of being anti-Cromwell, to say that because we have that inculcation of that particular element of British culture, of politics, and of astute global relations, we should actually be pushing ourselves forward.

And that is not nearly what the current sentiment is as you discussed quite clearly, when you think about the relation between Caribbean and British culture. It's something like anti-Napoleon sentiment, where we don't, we no longer need the universal civilization.

Lord Sewell: It's quite interesting. When I listen to Mia Mottley speak, I look at her through my Black British lens.

And I'm listening and though she's coming up with all the rhetoric around what small states need to be, she sounds like a hustler trying to get money out, and I don't mind that. But what she is essentially is and, the product of what she is, her schooling, her education, the language in particular, the rhetoric, the whole thing comes out of an English private school.

Rasheed: Right from LSE, exactly.

Lord Sewell: That's what she is. She can actually come in here now and say, "Yes, I do agree that I have a will of that, but I now want to do something politically around climate change and things like that." But you see, I actually think that's the decoy because what she doesn't do, Is tell us about that stuff that's made her, is her identity, as it were. Because you can wrap yourself up in whatever.

She's a British woman.

Rasheed: Yes.

Lord Sewell: She would hate that if you said so. All I can see is that you are British, just face that. You're nothing else but British. Don't give me all that performative stuff because that's all well and good. But all I can see in front of you is a very articulate British woman.

Rasheed: I made the same remark about Hilary Beckles as well, even when I write about him. Just his posture, his speech, his way of looking at the world, its upper-middle-class aristocratic British conversation.

And they never point that out.

Lord Sewell: And she would never be able to relate. She would argue that she perhaps could relate to the poorer Bajan in Barbados, well to a certain extent. But she's certainly not gonna be chums with the poorer class in Britain.

She's at home with that British middle-class upper class, Beckles himself, that's where they fit.

Rasheed: That's right.

Lord Sewell: And you see, I think what happened with Barbados was that it's this thing about what happens is-, and it comes back to Kemi as well- is a term that Cygnetia Fordham, the American anthropologist used called "kinship culture". Yeah. And what happens in kinship culture is that it's the family. Me and you are black men, so we've got to stick together, come what may. We put all our differences together.

I see you in the street, as far as I'm concerned, you're kin. I've got the completely wrong term. So it's not kinship culture. It's "fictive kinship". But it is kinship culture. It's called fictive kinship.

Fictive kinship is what it is. The fiction bit of it, that's the beauty of it, the fact that it's all made up. It's a fiction. I haven't got really anything in common with you, but the color of our skin. But we, but we pretend that we've got this kinship together. So what Mia Mottley has to do in a sense is find a Pan-African kind of fictive kinship around blackness around the world or whatever it is.

And it doesn't make any sense. In the end, the only thing she can do is back to a kind of power relationship thing between the horrible colonial and the anti-colonial.

And here's where the contradictions keep accumulating. That fictive kinship is not real. So it's made up and she buys into something that's made up. But also there's a sort of sense of agency. So here is an incredibly independent woman, probably the most independent woman on the planet.

But when she starts talking about race and all these other things, she might as well be on the plantation because she assumes this victimhood that gives her no agency at all. She is the most powerful thing and yet she's nothing, what's going on here? So it's all performative, it's all staged, and not real because she doesn't believe that, because she's not that. Hilary himself, is a very proud man. He goes around as if he's the king of the universe, but then when he's trying to hustle his reparations, he has to do this almost sort of barefoot boy on the plantation. So what are you then? So I think people need to be more courageous in exposing the deep contradictions inside. But they're not. They're only contradictions because they make them contradictions and the lack of acceptance that basically Barbados and Jamaica are really Black Britain.

Rasheed: I like that phrase, yes, I like that phrase.

So thank you so much, Lord Sewell. This has been a delightful and entertaining conversation.

Lord Sewell: Thank you. Thanks a lot. All right. Bye bye.