I was a bit disappointed, because I thought from the way he started he was going to make much more nuanced comments about individual prejudice vs structural racism.

I think, we could have a completely colour-blind country, without the merest hint of individual prejudice, for 100 years, and there would still be structural disadvantage in being born black. That disadvantage can continue to occur purely because social mobility is low, and black people have overwhelmingly started in society from poor backgrounds. If you put a hereditary tattoo onto poor white people in this country, and relabeled them as a new ethnic group, they would be in the same situation.

So this is the strange thing about the debate, and something which has previously been completely missing - there is a difference between a society which is colour-blind in terms of individual judgement, and a society which is colour-blind in terms of whether skin colour determines statistically your chances in life.

The examples he gives can be subject to the same analysis:

• There are plenty of Asian people working in Canary Wharf (I wouldn't be surprised if people from Indian families/backgrounds aren't disproportionately represented over white people given relative populations in the UK). The difference is they tend to come from middle class backgrounds (a lot of the Indian immigrants to Britain were businessmen and professionals who were ejected from East Africa).

• The general public really doesn't care about Ukraine, because the population is poor, substantially ill-educated, and relatively far away, in the same way we don't care about Libya or Subsaharan Africa.

• The general public don't want immigrants from somewhere like Albania or Romania, any more than they do poor immigrants from Pakistan or Nigeria. They have a stigma of poverty, lack of education, and cultural incompatibility, regardless of whether or not they are white.