British police chiefs need to stop taking sides in “woke… culture wars” and focus entirely on the “prevention and detection of crime,” according to a government-backed report that recommends a “fundamental overhaul” of policing in the UK.

Co-authored by former Labour Party Home Secretary Lord Blunkett and published on Monday, the report found that Britain’s police departments are plagued by corrupt leadership, nepotism, abuse of power, and low morale among officers. 

The report also highlighted concerns that police leaders are “preferencing certain groups,” with some “woke” chiefs “taking sides in the so-called ‘culture wars.’”

“Police leaders should be resolute in refusing to take sides, or to be diverted from the course of focusing entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime,” the report recommends, adding that “the background or identity of any perpetrator or victim of crime should have absolutely no bearing” on their treatment by the police service.

The murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak last year triggered a national debate about so-called ‘two-tier’ policing in the UK. Nowak was stabbed with a ceremonial dagger by a Sikh man as he made his way home from a night out in Southampton, and bodycam footage released in May showed officers arresting and handcuffing Nowak and watching him bleed to death after his attacker falsely accused him of racism.

Official anti-racism guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council explicitly instructs officers not to be “color blind.” Equality, it states, “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’.” Although the document is now under review, other arms of the British justice system have doubled down on apparently two-tier policies. Last week,  the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales ordered its own prosecutors last week to question their own “unconscious bias” when deciding whether to charge suspects from ethnic minorities.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Blunkett admitted that “there is a perception” of two-tier policing in the UK. “We’ve moved the pendulum,” he said. “It swung from the [1999] Macpherson report about outright racism in the force… all the way through to people saying, ‘oh, it’s woke’, and we make it clear in the report that there’s no room for culture wars or woke.”

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has described the UK as “a two-tier state against white people,” and portrayed the death of Nowak as a direct consequence of decades of policing “guidelines that led them to treat different ethnic groups in different ways.” 

Two days before Blunkett’s report was published, Farage shared a video showing Birmingham police officers arresting a white youth after he was attacked by a group of black men. “This young man was attacked by ethnic minority men and instead of arresting them, the police arrested the victim,” he wrote on X, describing the video as “more evidence of two-tier policing against white people in Britain.”