The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  The legislation on race relations in Britain was closely tied to the laws stopping immigrants from coming to Britain. In opposition, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson had spoken out against the ‘colour bar’ raised by the 1962 Immigration Act, ‘strongly opposed to its terms because it was based on racial and colour discrimination’. Wilson was aware of the suggestion that race discrimination was damaging to Britain’s reputation, as had been shown by the protests and boycott of Bristol’s bus service over its colour bar — condemned throughout the Commonwealth.3 As Prime Minister, he said that: ‘In 1964 the world cannot live with a division between first-class and second-class citizens differentiated by the colour of their skins.’4

  Patrick Boyle, the Earl of Cork and Orrery, warning of the dangers of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act, asked the House of Lords: ‘Apart from the justice or the legality of the matter, what does it look like to the rest of the world?’5

  Harold Wilson recoiled from open race discrimination, but he still kept the limits on non-white immigration in place, pleading ‘we accept in this congested island the need for control’.6 The race conflict was inflamed by the debate over immigration, which was why the 1965 Act was brought in. It was a widely shared fear, so that even the chairman of the Immigration Control Association, John Sanders, welcomed the Race Relations Act: ‘The most positive statement he makes is that he would introduce legislation to bar incitement of racial strike. Every responsible citizen in the country would be behind him on that.’7

  Some black activists, though, were sceptical. Paul Stephenson, who had organised the Bristol Bus Boycott, remembered worrying that ‘the government wanted to take the sting out of the racial protest we had started’.8 There were grounds for thinking that the Race Relations Act was not there to help black people but to defeat militant activism. Those who were first investigated under the clauses on incitement to race hatred were black radicals Michael de Freitas and Obi Egbuna (who were both imprisoned) and the visiting American black power leader Stokely Carmichael (who was told to leave the country).9

  The 1965 Act criminalised discrimination in shops and on the streets, but not, initially, in employment, which was seen as too great an incursion on the individual liberty of employers.

  In 1968 a tougher act to outlaw race discrimination in employment was brought in by Home Secretary James Callaghan, though its first goal was ‘to protect society as a whole against actions which will lead to social disruption’.10 Under these laws ethnic leaders were asked to join Community Relations Councils and act as go-betweens to the government and the community.

  In 1976 Home Office Minister Roy Jenkins looked again at the policy. The chairman of the Select Committee Frederick Willey saw the need to address the problems that ‘job levels are substantially lower for the immigrant communities, that earnings are lower and that we have an alarming proportion of young West Indians unemployed and homeless’.

  The Select Committee concluded that:

  Race discrimination and race prejudice are still widespread. The fact that much of the discrimination and prejudice is covert, negligent, or unintentional does not make this less harmful, and it is aggravated by growing lack of confidence among the ethnic communities, especially the young — the second generation non-immigrant population. Consequently, there is a risk of the communities becoming permanently alienated. What is needed, above everything else, is a clear and demonstrable Government commitment to equal rights.

  Prince Charles, David Lane of the CRE, and Norman Gardner, 1979

  Conservative William Whitelaw thought that ‘the main requirement for the Bill’s success is that the Home Secretary gives the public real confidence in his approach to race relations policy as a whole’. What he meant was that the management of race relations meant first and foremost that ‘he must demonstrate clearly that there is strict and effective control of the numbers entering the country’.11

  The Select Committee, taking account of the cost to the public purse, argued for a more targeted approach, which justified the setting up of the Commission for Racial Equality. The head of the Commission was David Lane, who had been a Tory junior minister for immigration at the Home Office, after working for the Confederation of British Industry.

  Grassroots anti-racism

  While the officials were talking about containing the race problem, many people were doing something much more practical. They were speaking out against race discrimination, both on the part of the government, and by bigots.

  When the 1965 Commonwealth Immigration Act was being argued for, students, black Britons and trade unionists protested against the laws. Among them was Claudia Jones. Originally from Trinidad, Jones had been in Harlem until she was barred from the United States for her radicalism, and took refuge in London. Jones saw that the far-right British Movement was stirring up hostility against West Indian migrants in Notting Hill. After a young carpenter Kelso Cochrane was murdered, Jones had the idea of starting a West Indian carnival to showcase the best of Caribbean society for Londoners. In 1963 the West Indian Development Council and their spokesman Paul Stephenson led a four-month boycott of a Bristol bus company over its bar on black crews.

  In 1968 there were a few groups that took their inspiration from the Black Panthers in the United States, including those led by the playwright Obi Egbuna, another led by Michael de Freitas, who set up the ‘Black House’ on Holloway Road and styled himself ‘Michael X’, and a group based in North London led by Althea Jones-Lecointe and her husband Eddie. This last group campaigned with great effect when Frank Critchlow’s Mangrove restaurant was raided many times on spurious charges of drug-dealing. The Black Panthers’ marches were broken up, and when they were charged under public order offences, they fought a strident campaign around the trial at the Old Bailey.12

  British Black Panthers on the march in Brixton / Neil Kenlock

  Another group of migrants was organised by the Indian Workers Association. Drawing on the ties with Communist and Socialist parties, and trade unions in India, they related awkwardly with trade union officials and Labour Party members in Britain. Recruiting especially among the textile workers in Lancashire and West Yorkshire, the Indian Workers Association leaders were active in many industrial disputes. In Birmingham, IWA leader Avtar Jouhl fought against the colour bar, and against the racist candidate in the Smethwick by-election.

  Another militant group were those around Darcus Howe, of the Race Today collective. With him, Howe had an impressive team of activists and writers, including his uncle, the veteran left-wing activist C. L. R. James, the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mala Sen and Farrukh Dhondy, the radical educationalist Gus John, and Leila Hassan. Sen and Dhondy played a key role in a housing campaign in the Seventies, with squatting activist Terry Fitzpatrick, under the banner of the Bengali Housing Action Group. Opening up scores of vacant homes to Bangladeshi families who had been shut out by Tower Hamlets’ surreptitious colour bar against Asian families, the prolonged protests won the Greater London Council to release additional housing to the homeless families.13

  On 18 January 1981 a fire was started at a birthday party in New Cross Road, Deptford, killing 13 young people, all West Indian. Around that time there had been many firebomb attacks on black venues, like the Moonshot Club, and it seemed clear that this was another.14 The New Cross Massacre Action Committee galvanised a remarkable movement of protest. Twenty thousand mostly black marchers left from Deptford on Monday, 2 March 1981. When the police tried to stop them crossing the river to go to parliament, the numbers were too great and the police line was pushed aside. When I was a boy at Kingsdale School, black school-leavers barricaded themselves into the headmaster’s office, announcing themselves as ‘Radio Revolutionary Kingsdale’, and played Bob Marley and Tapper Zukie records over the school tannoy, to the delight of all the children (nearby Tulse Hill School had its own Black Panther chapter).15

  Grassroots resistance to racism in Britain was strong and effective. It did, though, have o
ne pointed weakness. For the most part black people in Britain marched alone. White opposition to racism was not often attempted by activists. There were some important exceptions. The left wing of the trade union movement organised protests in support of the Grunwicks strikers, and joined large protests outside the firm, in support of the mostly Asian women workers. At Ford, black stewards like Jupiter Harry tried to organise with white counterparts to challenge racism in the company (and in the 1980s, Ford workers refused to handle goods from South Africa). There were attempts, too, to organise defence against racist attacks, with the group East London Workers Against Racism. Protests against the National Front, organised by the ‘Anti-Nazi League’ and ‘Rock Against Racism’, were also popular with a broad range of younger people, though pointedly these tended to emphasise the alien, un-British character of the ‘Nazis’, rather than identifying a problem of British racism.

  National Union of Mineworkers join the picket line at Grunwicks

  The trade union leaders endorsed the Anti-Nazi League, and sponsored other campaigns like the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. These though were mostly top-down campaigns that relied on letter writing and middle-class sponsorship. Those campaigns would relate well to the Commission for Racial Equality, as well as the Community Relations Councils that preceded it. Grassroots activism, though, was at odds with the official approach.

  Propagation of equal opportunities policies

  The new Commission for Racial Equality was established under the 1976 Race Relations Act under chairman David Lane with the duties of:

  a) Working towards the elimination of discrimination;

  b) Promoting equality of opportunity between persons of different racial groups generally; and

  c) Keeping under review the working of the Act, and, when required by the Secretary of State or when it otherwise thinks it necessary, to draw up and submit to the Secretary of State proposals for amending it.16

  In 1977, the Commission for Racial Equality announced that:

  We intend to adopt a vigorous, firm approach. We shall make full use of our powers to ensure the twin objectives of eliminating discrimination and promoting equal opportunity. In pursuance of our statutory duties we shall seek to identify every area where blacks are the victims of undisguised or thinly disguised discrimination, or of indirect discrimination or discriminatory practices… as well as tackling the deeper causes of disadvantage.17

  At a conference in Leicester in 1977 Dr Peter Sanders, director of the Commission’s Equal Opportunity Division, talked of ‘encouraging employers, local authorities, estate agents and others to promote equal opportunity so that discrimination does not occur’.

  Sanders promised to make full use of ‘new powers of investigation’ that ‘had been shown to be necessary by the experience of the Race Relations Board in operating the weaker 1968 legislation’: ‘subpoena powers would be available where information was deliberately withheld, and at the end of the investigation the Commission could publish a report making recommendations for change’.18 These were powers that gave the Commission more leverage over employers and other agencies to enforce compliance.

  Sanders announced another proposal, too, which was more positive: ‘his Division would be concentrating on producing a Code of Practice for Employment’.

  In April 1980 the new Code of Practice19 was announced: ‘The importance of the Code was that it was a model that employers could incorporate into their own policies.’

  The Code of Practice

  The point of the Code was ‘to give practical guidance which will help employers, trade unions, employment agencies and employees to understand not only the provisions of the Race Relations Act and their implications, but also how best they can implement policies to eliminate racial discrimination and to enhance equality of opportunity’.

  The important point about the Code was that it was voluntary: ‘the Code does not impose any legal obligations itself’. But the appeal to voluntary compliance was made in the context of the Act, since if ‘its recommendations are not observed this may result in breaches of the law where the act or omission falls within any of the specific prohibitions of the Act’. And, ‘moreover, its provisions are admissible in evidence in any proceedings under the Race Relations Act before an Industrial Tribunal’.

  The appeal to employers was that by adopting the voluntary Code of Practice they would get ahead of the policy, and avoid having it imposed upon them, so retaining control of the process. The background to the adoption of the voluntary Code was that ‘the Race Relations Act 1976 makes it unlawful to discriminate against any person, directly or indirectly, in the field of employment’. The risks of investigation, or a ruling against them in an Industrial Tribunal, all added up to a lot of potential embarrassment for employers, some of whom preferred to adopt a voluntary code.

  As the Commission explained, under the Act of 1976, ‘Responsibility for providing equal opportunity for all job applicants and employees rests primarily with employers’. It was to this end that the Commission ‘recommended that they should adopt, implement and monitor an equal opportunities policy to ensure that there is no unlawful discrimination and that equal opportunity is generally available’. To make sure that the policy is effective, employers should allocate ‘overall responsibility for the policy to a member of senior management’.20

  The Commission motivated the Code to employers on the grounds that ‘many of the Code’s provisions show the close link between equal opportunities and good employment practice’. The claim that an employer’s adoption of an equal opportunities policy would be good for business would become very important. The idea is that the interests of employers and minorities would be happily reconciled in an equal opportunities policy. Instead of being the villains of the piece, the employers would be the good guys, and it would help their businesses, too.

  As well as creating a new responsibility for managers, the Code also had consequences for employees, and for relations between managers and employees. So, ‘to assist in preventing racial discrimination and promoting equal opportunity it is recommended that individual employees should… cooperate in measures introduced by management designed to ensure equal opportunity and non-discrimination’. Unions, too, were called upon to ‘cooperate in the introduction and implementation of full equal opportunities policies’. As we shall see, this injunction to cooperate with management was made at a time when workers were, on other issues, contesting workplace codes of discipline — and challenging the ‘managers’ right to manage’.21 Here, though, obedience to management diktat was justified as being in support of a larger goal of equal opportunity, not the more narrowly-defined interests of managers getting more out of their workforces.

  As the Code set it out, employees, by their actions, were cast as a threat to racial equality, and it was demanded that they ‘refrain from harassment or intimidation of other employees on racial grounds, for example by attempting to discourage them from continuing employment’. Unions, too, were warned that ‘is unlawful for trade unions to discriminate on racial grounds’. On the other hand, the Commission thought that ‘trade union officials at national and local level and shopfloor representatives at plant level have an important part to play’, and that ‘trade unions should encourage and press for equal opportunities policies so that measures to prevent discrimination can be introduced with the clear commitment of both management and unions’. So it was that the Code aimed to draw unions into the implementation of equal opportunities policies, and even to make them into an advanced guard for the same, proposing that:

  although positive action is not legally required, unions should encourage management to take such action where there is underrepresentation of particular racial groups in particular jobs, and where management itself introduces positive action representatives should support it.

  There were of course a number of trade unionists on the Commission, such as Bill Keys and Bill Morris. In the years that the Commission for Racial Equal
ity’s Code was being taken up, union negotiating rights, and status generally, were under attack. The promulgation of the Code as it was taken up by employers, alongside parallel commitments to women, was a revolution in workplace relations with far-reaching consequences. Some of those changes would challenge aspects of workplace organisation in ways that were resented by workers and their local union leaderships. On the other hand, other union officials welcomed the new policies, and were glad that their own status as agents of change was recognised by the Commission for Racial Equality.

  In July 1981 the Code was still under consideration, according to Secretary of State for Employment Jim Prior, who in answer to a question said that both the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress ‘have suggested a number of detailed amendments’. The MP John Grant was hoping to hear ‘whether the Government have objections to the proposals’, but the Employment Secretary said that he had not been presented with the final version, at which point, he promised, he would decide whether to agree to it or ‘withhold my approval’.22 Events, though, were moving quite quickly, and it seemed as if the equal opportunities policies would be unequal to the task.

  The following year the Commission had better news. In their Annual Report for 1983 they welcomed ‘the Secretary of State for Employment’s approval and Parliament’s acceptance of its Code of Practice on Employment’. ‘Looking back,’ chair Michael Day thought that it was ‘astonishing that the CRE’s Code of Practice in Employment was approved by the’ very right wing Minister Norman (now Lord) Tebbit.23 The Commission

  hopes the Code will do for employment what the Highway Code has done for driving and ensure that good practice becomes almost automatic for all but the perverse and dangerously incompetent, the small minority against whom sanctions are appropriate.