Though it was put forward as worry over others’ reactions, the headline for the papers the next day was the word ‘swamped’, and Thatcher’s fear that immigration would threaten the British way of life.
The second headline message was also given in an interview, five years later when the Prime Minister talked about the ‘Victorian values’ of thrift and self-help (the words were interviewer Brian Walden’s, but she happily took them up). Thatcher had already said, ‘I feel very strongly that women should not leave their children to come home to an empty house’.2
The Conservatives’ ideas about equal opportunities can be seen in the 1982 Cabinet talks on policies for the approaching election. The Cabinet’s Central Policy Review team put together papers outlining their ideas. The first was to ‘encourage mothers to stay at home’. Behind their thinking was not just traditional attitudes, but a hope that the family — women, that is — would take on the extra work that the government was trying to get out of, as a kind of bulwark against the recession. The team asked ‘what more can be done to encourage families to resume the responsibilities taken on by the state, for example, responsibility for the disabled, elderly, unemployed 16 year olds’. (Later on, benefits for younger people were cut, on the understanding that unemployed youngsters would have to rely on their families into their twenties.) The Cabinet wanted parents to take on more responsibility for schooling, and for the care of the elderly. On race, the Cabinet team thought that it would be good to ‘publicise success stories of immigrants who have made good’, in ‘accordance with philosophy of self-reliance, e.g. Asian corner shops’ (as patronising and tokenistic as these proposals were, they would later on become quite important). While they were looking for success in the private sector, the Cabinet looked askance at the work of the quangos their Labour predecessors had set up to push for equal opportunities, arguing that they should ‘Review the effectiveness of the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission’. A question they asked of the CRE was ‘how far present institutional arrangements in this field, most of which were introduced primarily to settle immigrants, are appropriate for dealing with problems faced by a largely British-born ethnic community’. It sounded as if, behind closed doors anyway, the government wanted to get rid of the two Commissions, and that their idea of equality of opportunity was met without any special measures, but through the market. At the same time cuts in welfare services to the elderly and the young, at a time when unemployment was rising sharply and incomes were under pressure, put a greater burden on families, enlarging women’s duties at home.3
The message from the government was for ‘liberalisation’ of financial markets and labour markets, but they were very illiberal in other ways — often about sex and race. The 1981 immigration law drew up the drawbridge around the UK, against black and brown migrants — and the immigration police raided, detained, and deported people they called ‘illegal’. Young black men, who were much more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts, were targeted by the police who regularly searched them ‘on suspicion’, talking about them as a problem of ‘street crime’. Many were beaten, like Trevor Monerville, left with brain injuries after a police attack, or killed, like Clinton McCurbin, strangled by arresting officers in Wolverhampton. When young blacks reacted to these provocations by fighting back, as they did in the summer of 1981, in Brixton and then in Southall, Toxteth, and St Paul’s, Margaret Thatcher saw the fault lying first with ‘young men, whose high animal spirits’ had been ‘unleashed’ in a ‘virtual saturnalia’, ‘a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest’. While some of the ripples from the 1981 riots would lead to social programmes to deal with race discrimination, the headline was what Thatcher told the police: ‘I promised them every support.’ When fighting broke out again between the police and black youth at the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, Tory policy advisor Oliver Letwin dismissed calls for spending to encourage social stability and a black middle class, saying that the money would only go to ‘subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops’ or to people who ‘will set up in the disco and drug trade’.4
Margaret Thatcher and Oliver Letwin
The family, and sexuality too, were the focus of a lot of legislation. The 1989 Children Act opened up family life to much greater scrutiny by the police and social services. The changes were argued for by pointing to the supposed problem of broken homes and bad mothers who neglected their children. An amendment to the 1988 local government act, ‘Clause 28’, put by Dame Jill Knight, banned schools from holding up homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relation’.
In the summer of 1981, after the inner-city riots, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality David Lane talked about his plans to meet the problem of black unemployment. In parliament, the government was asked over and again whether it would talk to Lane. The riots ‘were of course’, said Thatcher, ‘a godsend’ to ‘the government’s critics in general’: ‘Here was the long-awaited evidence that our economic policy was causing social breakdown and violence’.5 ‘Does the Secretary of State agree with the Commission for Racial Equality’, Hackney MP Clinton Davis demanded of Michael Heseltine, ‘that effective measures to tackle racial disadvantage have been frustrated by the shift of resources from the inner cities for which he has been responsible?’6 In turn, Tory backbenchers, led by Nicholas Winterton, attacked the Commission for Racial Equality.
In November 1981 a Select Committee Report into the Commission found that it was amateurish and ineffective. The criticisms may have come because the Commission had been critical of the government’s 1981 Nationality Bill. At that time there were doubts among Tories whether there really ought to be social engineering of race equality. In the House of Lords Max Beloff asked whether it was true to say that ‘we accept the fact that Britain is now a multiracial or multicultural society’, arguing that the laws against discrimination were not to be taken as seriously as ‘the laws about larceny, divorce or whatever it may be’: ‘they are quasi laws’.7 In the Select Committee Report it was the Commission’s grant-making that came in for criticism, as overreaching. In the press, ‘“Failure of a Commission”, “Lady Bountiful race board attacked”, and “Rocket for Race Chief”, were just some of the headlines’.8
The Home Affairs Committee hauled the Commission and its chairman David Lane over the coals. The Tory backbenchers, and their friends in the press, made fun of the names of the groups that got grants from the Commission — ‘the Dominican Joy Spreaders, Women in Dialogue, for example’ — and the report argued that the grant-making powers be taken away. In Parliament Nicholas Winterton asked whether ‘following the First Report from the Home Affairs Committee… on the Commission for Racial Equality, he will review existing race relations legislation, with a view to seeking the repeal of the Race Relations Act 1976’. But the outright call for abolition was not taken on by the Home Affairs Committee, which instead of calling for it to stop its actions, attacked it for the slow pace at which it was dealing with race discrimination claims — in effect they were demanding it prosecute the law more efficiently, a demand that the Commission took on board. In answer to Nicholas Winterton, the Home Office Minister Timothy Raison said that the government had ‘no plans to abolish the Commission for Racial Equality or for the repeal of the Race Relations Act 1976’.9 All the same, Chairman David Lane was made to stand down, and Peter Newsam took his place. Less was heard of the CRE in Parliament after that, but Newsam, who came from a municipal background, working in the Inner London Education Authority, was more proactive behind the scenes.
The Commission’s model code of conduct for employers was at last signed off by the government, after the Home Affairs Committee’s attack. A Commission that upheld the rule of law, and encouraged a voluntary approach by employers to equal opportunities, was preferable to the government than one which was voicing criticisms over the inner cities. The Commission complained that their ‘statutory responsibilities giv
e us a plain duty to diagnose their particular problems and to draw public attention to them’, but they had effectively been told to rein it in.10
As well as losing its chairman, the Commission was starved off funds. Money was tight anyway, and the government had little feeling for quangos that attacked them. According to the Commission:
Early in 1979, the Government’s Staff Inspectors suggested that the size of our task justified an increase of about 40 per cent in our staff complement, including more staff for law enforcement work, but the Home Office could not agree and our complement was reduced.
The Equal Opportunities Commission was similarly out of step with government thinking. While the Cabinet was planning that women should spend more time in the home, the Equal Opportunities Commission was arguing that ‘services for the under-fives and school-age dependent children are essential in allowing parents to combine careers and public duties with a responsible family life’.11 It was a message that won little support from the governing party. The Equal Opportunities Commission, too, found that ‘resources, both in terms of staff and in terms of finance, [were] far more slender than it was led to expect when it was first established’.12 All the same, radical journalist Martin Wainwright was relieved that there had been ‘no moves to abolish the Commission for Racial Equality or the Equal Opportunities Commission’.13
Assault on the ‘loony left’
The early experiments in equal opportunities policies by Labour-controlled local authority employers were targeted by the Conservative government and its supporters in the 1980s. Local government was, in Thatcher’s view, one of the places in which the ‘hard left was entrenched’. She was sure that the public ‘knew that Labour’s “loony left” had a hidden agenda of social engineering and sexual liberation’.14 To right-wingers schooled in the thinking of Frederick Hayek and Karl Popper, policies designed to redress discrimination seemed like an example of ‘social engineering’. For the Centre for Policy Studies, David Regan wrote a pamphlet about the The Local Left, which analysed their supposed methods:
Social engineering is the deliberation manipulation of people’s attitudes and behaviour to produce predetermined types of society as opposed to allowing natural social evolution… seeking to create a radically changed society according to some ideological blueprint.
And, thought Regan, ‘perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new approach is an obsession with “discrimination”’.15 In Camden, Tory councillor Julian Tobin said the decision to keep ethnic records was ‘one of the most retrograde steps this council has taken’.16
Sometimes employers dug in their heels. Mrs Jean Jenkins, a part-time machinist at the Kingsgate Clothing Company in Harlow, complained that she ought to have been paid the same hourly rate as a full-timer. Though she lost the case at an industrial tribunal, the Equal Opportunities Commission helped her take the case all the way to the European Court of Justice, which found for Mrs Jenkins. ‘All the politicians bend their knee to the Equal Opportunities Commission, the most powerful quango in the land’, fumed the company director Bernard Clayman.17
The press took its cue from the Tory right and looked for stories to show how the left-wing council leaders were using public money for eccentric causes. Some of these instances of ‘loony left’ policies were invented and others elaborated. It was also true, though, that unable to effect a substantial increase in jobs for women and ethnic minorities, the local authorities had supported token projects which, while unexceptional to the funders, were at odds with the ideas of the public. Particularly alarming were the advisers in schools and councils that the press labelled ‘race spies’, whose actions struck many as dictatorial and extreme. The ‘loony left’ label hurt the Labour Party in local elections because they had not always won the public over to support the reforms that they thought had to be made.18
For the Tory government, though, it was important to make sure that the left did not succeed in securing a social base by taking the credit for counter-cyclical spending programmes at the local level. In the lead-up to the 1983 election the Cabinet set out plans to limit municipal spending (by putting a cap on the ‘rate support grant’, central government’s subsidy to local government) and also the abolition of the Greater London Council. A war council of the Labour-left-controlled authorities decided to take a stand, and agreed that they would refuse to set a rate or publish a budget, but go into illegality, rather than implement the cuts. But in the event, only Lambeth and Liverpool Council held to the agreement. Lambeth leader Ted Knight and his councillors, along with the Liverpool Labour group councillors, were removed from office (and landed with enormous fines). Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the other councils stood down and agreed to set a budget and rate within the government’s agreed limits.
The outcome was misery for the many council workers who lost their jobs, and for residents who were relying on council services that were cut back; and it was humiliation for those council leaders, and the senior officers that they had put in place. ‘We’re trying to find a way of ensuring that the misery is shared out equally and fairly’, said Hackney councillor John Bloom in 1984.19 Better a dented shield than none at all, said that master of lowering expectations, Neil Kinnock. In Haringey Council, where I worked in the 1980s, many new staff had been taken on in an expansion that was funded through borrowing on the financial markets. The Council’s solicitors told them that the new staff had to be on temporary contracts, because the spending commitments could not be secured. When the government told the Council that they had to cut back expenditure, those on temporary contracts were all sacked. Since they were also the staff that were recruited under the new equal opportunities policy, many were black or Asian, and yet these were the people that were being singled out for sacking. Among the new senior officers employed by the Education Offices at Haringey was the feminist historian Carole Adams. School secretaries, who were made to take on great stacks of extra work to cover for the sacked staff, protested at a seminar Adams was giving about the exploitation of women workers in the nineteenth century. Adams had taken the job in the hope that she might do good, but instead found she was the person making working women’s lives worse.
One of the reasons that the Labour-left councils were humiliated by the government is that the Conservative Party nursed a lot of resentment against the equal opportunities policies that they were pioneering. That was the sub-text of a lot of the criticisms of the ‘loony left’, the alarm of ‘race spies in the classroom’, ‘lesbian workshops’, and so on. These criticisms played on prejudices that were grounded in more traditional ideas of race and family. But they also played on the idea that equal opportunities policies would penalise white working-class men. It was, thought Anna Coote, a zero-sum game: ‘If women had more power, more opportunity, more pay, more time, more choice, men would have less’, she wrote: ‘It is rare for any group or class of human beings to give up power voluntarily.’20 The Labour-left councils lost support among some working-class voters because they did not think that the newer policies were aimed at them.
The sharpest blow to the equal opportunities strategy in local government was the abolition of the Greater London Council. The Commission for Racial Equality announced ‘a general investigation into the effects of the abolition of the GLC on ethnic minority employment in local authorities and related areas’.21 The GLC had been in many ways the laboratory in which equal opportunities policies and practices had been developed. Along with the surcharging of Lambeth councillors, the champions of equal opportunities in local government seemed to have been delivered a knock-out blow, but in the event, things turned out differently. After David Lane, the Labourist and educationalist Peter Newsam, too, was replaced at the Commission for Racial Equality by a senior probation officer and church-goer, Michael Day. Day worked with the government, and Newsam’s investigation ‘into the effects of the abolition of the GLC on black employment’ was ‘discontinued’.22
Just as the government was targeting t
he ‘loony left’ councils and pulling the plug on their social engineering, they were, more quietly, taking up the cause of ‘equal opportunities’. The House of Commons Employment Committee’s report on discrimination in employment ‘strongly endorsed the importance of positive action and also recommended a form of targeting’, reported the Commission for Racial Equality, under its new chair. The report fully endorsed ‘the adoption of equal opportunities policies by employers’. ‘In particular’, the Employment Committee ‘mentioned the importance of ethnic record keeping and monitoring’.23 The Employment Committee also ‘recommended that wider use should be made by employers of schemes which would help suitable black candidates to acquire the required qualifications’, and suggested that the civil service should give these ‘in its training programme’.24
Challenged by the Tottenham MP Bernie Grant in Parliament a spokesman insisted that ‘the Government are firmly committed to the elimination of all unlawful discrimination and to the promotion of equal opportunities in employment for all workers regardless of race’.25 A proposal to stop local authorities from using their buying power to persuade contractors to adopt equal opportunities policies had been floated by the Government, but they backed down after lobbying from the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission. In Parliament the Tory back-bencher Tony Marlow complained that ‘our heroic Government have been got at by the moral blackmail of the race relations industry’.26
Once the issue had been prized out of the hands of the left-wing Labour councils, the government felt much more at ease with the idea of equality of opportunity. The ideological leadership of the government in the 1980s was at odds with the idea, but the pragmatists in the Ministries, helped by the civil service, promoted equality of opportunity as a policy that was all about modernising industry and increasing competition. In the first place, the civil service itself took on the equal opportunities policy, as well as ethnic monitoring. Since 1978 the government had been pressed to introduce equal opportunities policies, but had resisted.27 From 1986, though, the civil service had begun monitoring its staff and adopted an equal opportunities policy. The Commission for Racial Equality welcomed ‘the decision of the civil service to strengthen the central unit responsible for equal opportunities policy’. They were pleased, too, to note that the Equal Employment Opportunities branch ‘has now been enhanced to divisional status and is now part of the Personnel Management Group of the Cabinet Office’ — a sign that the changes were being taken seriously.28
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 12