Southall's legendary anti-racism campaigner slams Government claims that institutional racism is over
| Published date | 06 April 2021 |
Mr Grover's family came to the UK from Kenya in 1966 for a better life and a British education. But what he saw and heard growing up in the 1970s changed him.
Chaggar was just 18 years old when he was brutally stabbed to death in Southall, West London on the night of Friday, June 4, 1976. This unprovoked murder of a Sikh engineering student, targeted during a quiet night out with friends by a gang of white youths, had an immediate impact. Over the following weekend hundreds of local Asians took to the streets to express their anger over Chaggar’s death.
The incident pushed Asian youth to challenge violent racism and police response throughout the UK.
After a school teacher called Blair Peach was killed during anti-racist demonstration in Southall in 1979, and hundreds of locals were charged with causing disturbances, Mr Grover was one of key activists who established legal defence for those charged.
He documented the social impact of the event and galvanised local national and international support, for over a decade, to name those responsible for the killing.
The Met police later released a report indicating that Peach was most likely killed by a police officer.
Mr Grover later set up the Southall Monitoring Group which investigates cases of racism across London and the UK and he has remained an active campaigner ever since.
Now he has been joined by West London groups in hitting out at the recent government-commissioned review into racial disparities.
The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published its report on March 31 which found there is “no longer” a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities, but that other factors such as family, religion and socio-economic background have a more significant impact on life chances than racism.
The report also accepts the UK is not yet a “post-racial society” and that outright racism exists which has “no place in any civilised society”.
It adds: “But we have ensured our analysis has gone beyond these individual instances, to carefully examine the evidence and data, and the evidence reveals that ours is nevertheless a relatively open society.
“The country has come a long way in 50 years and the success of much of the ethnic minority population in education and, to a lesser extent, the...
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