The United Kingdom (UK) comprises England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (NI), with the term Great Britain (GB) used to refer to England, Wales and Scotland. The UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020, with EU law continuing to apply in the UK until the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020. The UK is a parliamentary democracy, based around the core principle of parliamentary sovereignty. It has neither a written constitution nor an entrenched constitutional bill of rights, but an extensive set of constitutional conventions establish what has been described as an unwritten constitution. The UK has always been a country of migration and the increase in the size and variety of different ethnic groups since the late 1940s, added to the constant influx of migrant labour from EU and non-EU states, has made the UK a multicultural state. Certain ethnic minorities, including the native Traveller communities, continue to suffer from high rates of unemployment, social exclusion and poverty. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people have the worst outcomes of any ethnic group across a range of areas, including education, health, employment, criminal justice and hate crime. During 2021, a Law Commission report on hate crime recommended levelling up protection for hate crime based on sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity, and extending the offence of stirring up hatred to cover the grounds of sex or gender; the Scottish Parliament introduced the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 to consolidate, modernise and extend its existing hate crime protection; and the Department of Justice Northern Ireland Hate Crime Review proposed amendments to strengthen its protection of race and religion and other protected characteristics with respect to hate crime. In 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, set up by the Government in response to the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, published its report concluding that most of the racial disparities examined did not have their origins in racism. Many NGOs protested that the report downplayed the role of institutional racism, and the findings and the report's analysis were rejected and condemned by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.
