Around the same time the Minister of Health, Barney Hayhoe, lent his support to a big push to reform the Health Service. The London Association of Community Relations Councils (LACRC), had published a survey of equal opportunities policies in London health authorities, In a Critical Condition, funded by the CRE. The work was the basis for a special project set up by Hayhoe called the ‘Kings Fund Task Force’, ‘because health authorities were putting equal opportunities policies into practice too slowly’.29 According to the Tory Minister, ‘every health authority in the land should subscribe to the principle of equality of opportunity, but most would agree they were a long way from achieving it’; ‘Lack of equal opportunities in promotion is one of the major issues in the NHS.’30 According to the Kings Fund’s report: ‘Racial inequalities between managers and staff in the service are glaring.’ ‘When the Task Force was set up in 1986 a minority of health authorities had formally adopted an equal opportunities policy’, they noted in 1990: ‘Most have done so now.’31
Most importantly of all, the Department of Employment got behind the adoption of equal opportunities policies, as did the Confederation of British Industry. Even the abolition of the Greater London Council had an unanticipated consequence quite at odds with the hopes of the ideologues that pushed for it. The GLC worked as a laboratory, and a training school for experts in equal opportunities policies. As the organisation was shut down, a surprising number of its officers went on to become chief executives, Human Resource managers, and managers in other municipal authorities and the private sector. Many set up as private consultants advising companies on the adoption of equal opportunities policies.
In spite of all the noises coming from the Prime Minister and the Tory backbenches, the equal opportunities revolution was underway. Indeed, the greatest take-up and expansion of such policies took place while Thatcher was in office, between 1979 and 1990. The revolution was not really from the bottom up, as revolutions are supposed to be. There were important popular protests and movements around the issues of sex and race equality, but these were largely confronted and demobilised over the Eighties. Nor was the revolution from the top down, if the top is 10 Downing Street. The revolution was a molecular change, which reproduced itself through the adoption of Codes of Conduct, recruitment, training, workplace review, and monitoring policies. Its foot-soldiers were Human Resource managers, volunteers in workplace reorganisations, civil servants, quango-crats, consultants, trainers, and local government officers.
The radical reaction
Radical activists played a big role in giving the equal opportunities revolution its first push around 1980. But that was only after a debate within the left over the way forward. Initially, many radicals were sceptical of the more committee-room approach of the champions of equal opportunities. The first critique of official anti-discrimination came from the left. In 1972, in the pages of the Red Mole, the ‘Race Relations Industry’ was sharply criticised, both the ‘various strands within the State machinery, which constitute a good part of the race-relations industry’, and also ‘those independent bodies like the Institute of Race Relations32 and the Runnymede Trust’. These liberal Christian lobbies were influenced by their South African and Portuguese paymasters, according to the Red Mole’s correspondent, ‘S. C.’.33
The radicals and the Commission for Racial Equality
Under the well-meaning Etonian David Lane’s leadership, the Commission for Racial Equality was widely mocked. Writing in Race Today, Mala Sen (later known for the screenplay for India’s Bandit Queen) was caustic about the ‘recently appointed chairman designate of the Commission for Racial Equality’, leading a procession of ‘elders, all of them professional community relations wallahs’, but without being able to ‘restore confidence in the platform’.34 The radical Black Voice newspaper included among its ‘Short Term Demands’, ‘the scrapping of the Commission for Racial Equality and the 1976 Race Relations Act’. It was ‘merely a tool for the purpose of maintaining the status quo’.35
Mala Sen
In Race Today, a column signed ‘Tic Tac Toe’, probably by Darcus Howe, made the point that the Commission had failed match up to the events of that year — when the police operations in Brixton, Manchester’s Moss Side, and Liverpool 8 provoked wholesale rioting. That was the background to the CRE’s public humiliation: ‘the public trouncing inflicted by the Parliamentary Select Committee and there is no way that David Lane and Co could continue to justify the use of public funds to finance their whims and fantasies’. ‘Exit Chairman Lane, not without a firm prod from the Home Office’, said Howe. According to Race Today’s leader writer: ‘Pleased I am to note that Newsam intends to leave the black community alone, and to concentrate all of his forces on the white community. Many of us are breathing sighs of relief.’
Howe had some advice for the David Lane’s replacement, Peter Newsam, ‘the bureaucrat from the Inner London Education Authority’:
[F]ire the entire staff. No single quango in the UK boasts such incompetence in the middle and upper echelons. Time servers they all are. Step number two relates to the funding of self-help groups. That programme ought to be abandoned. Whatever else they are a cursory glance at their income would reveal that they are not self-help at all, but state-propped organisations.36
Race Today was only echoing the criticisms that came from the government. From them, the new Commissioner sought a promise that the CRE was not going to be hamstrung. After consultations, the Commission reported that ‘The Government backs the promotional and educational work of the CRE’, and that ‘They feel that the CRE could make an important contribution to the public debate on racial disadvantage in information, education and advice’.37
The reason that radicals were sceptical about official anti-racism was that they saw their movement as a popular, grassroots campaign. As we have seen, many black radicals dismissed the Race Relations Act and the Commission for Racial Equality as a top-down manoeuvre to divert activists. Even the Greater London Council’s attempts to reach out to black organisations were treated at first with scepticism. In Race Today, Farrukh Dhondy wrote scathingly about the ‘celebrated grandees of anti-racism, amongst them Ken Livingstone himself, A. Sivanandan who needed no introduction, Cecil Gutzmore who needed no microphone and Paul Boateng who needed only a seat in Parliament’. Dhondy saw it as ‘the GLC’s placemen in charge of the event, led by the polite and irreplaceable Mr Herman Ouseley’. To Dhondy it seemed that the event was a gathering of ‘Livingstone’s lost tribes, the beneficiaries or the hopeful, future beneficiaries of the limited largesse of the Greater London Council earmarked for blacks’. Among them ‘the no longer young Bengalis, erstwhile street fighters, now turned leaders of projects and makers of films about Bengaliness and anti-racism for the fourth channel’.38 Leonora Brito wrote up her bad experience of going for an interview for a special training post to promote black journalists at the Polytechnic of London’s School of Communications, under the title ‘Positive Discrimination: who needs it?’ To Brito it seemed that to ‘enable black people to compete for jobs in the media on an equal footing with whites’ was a ‘familiar litany’ that meant finding token black candidates who would adopt the professional values of the mainstream.39
Not just the Race Today Collective, but the Institute of Race Relations was sceptical about the municipal approach to anti-racism. In a review of a book in the Institute’s journal Race and Class in 1987, Rashid Mufti dismissed the arguments laid against Liverpool Council that it had not done enough for the city’s black population: ‘The rapid growth of municipal “anti-racism” during the past five years has been a key feature of the local state’s response to the rebellions of 1981’, Mufti framed the argument, ‘Yet there is little evidence to suggest that this has made any significant impact in dismantling racist structures and practices.’ Pointedly, Mufti went on to decry the fact that ‘the campaign for the city council to adopt an equal opportunities policy is seen as the most important development duri
ng this six-year period’. Much more important to this writer were the ‘the ways in which the community organised itself politically’. Also in Race and Class, Lee Bridges argued that the ‘official organs’, the ‘Commission for Racial Equality and local community relations councils, have proved so ineffective’.40
The head of the Institute of Race Relations, A. Sivanandan, was invited to speak at the Greater London Council’s meeting. Sivanandan announced ‘I come as a heretic, as a disbeliever in the efficacy of ethnic policies and programmes to alter, by one iota, the monumental and endemic racism of this society’. But this doubting Thomas had seen a small chink of light: ‘there is room for manoeuvre here, for a war of position if you like’. Sivanandan was sceptical, but he did not want to be left out. Anti-racists he thought, shouldn’t be purists and stand outside:
We can’t fight the system bare-handed. We don’t have the tools, brothers and sisters; we’ve got to get the tools from the system itself and hope that in the process five out of ten of us don’t become corrupt.41
Sivanandan’s rhetorical scepticism gave way to practical compromise. The background was that the wave of protest of the 1970s was dying back, and the opportunities for militant activism were narrower, making the local government-left look sexier than it really was.
At a trade union meeting organised at the end of 1984, Bernie Grant spoke for the Black Trade Unionists Solidarity Movement. The meeting was very radical, and already speakers had argued that ‘the English working class had become a “labour aristocracy” due to the indirect benefits it accrued from the super-exploitation of the under-developed countries’, and that ‘there was a legacy of cultural imperialism inherited by the labour movement in this country’. Grant spoke carefully, pitching his talk as critical of ameliorative social programmes, saying that there was
a very real danger that many fine sounding initiatives — for improved training, equal opportunities policies, less racist council services, support for independent groups like B.T.U.S.M. and local Women’s Units — would become tokens only without real substance.
What he meant, though, was that these would become tokenistic if the Conservative government succeeded in cutting back the funding, not the radicals’ criticism of the 1970s that they were inherently tokenistic. Grant’s conclusion, like Sivanandan’s, was that black groups should lend their support to the equal opportunities and grant-giving powers of the local authorities, and defend them from the attacks that the government were making.42
Feminist scepticism about the business case for equal opportunities
Amongst feminists there were some misgivings about the embrace of the Greater London Council and municipal socialism, but not many. Some thought that the drift into the corridors of power would lead to the bureaucratisation of the movement, and even called the new women’s officers and committee members ‘femocrats’. But these complaints were not typical.
Cynthia Cockburn does look at the conundrum that ‘equal opportunities’ is a policy ‘introduced into organizations by owners and managers “on behalf of women”’. Further she says that when they do so ‘it is organisational ends they have primarily in mind’, such as ‘to improve recruitment’ or ‘they just want a good image’.43
As the equal opportunities agenda developed and was taken up by private industry there were more openly expressed doubts about the ‘business case for equal opportunities’. Linda Dickens in particular worried that ‘In recent years the promotion of equality action appears to have rested primarily on one strategy — getting employers to see that equality is in the interests of the business, the so-called business case for equality’. Dickens quotes an argument made by Forbes that ‘support for equal opportunities becomes associated with a set of values unrelated to equality, difference, justice or diversity’, and, going further, suggests that this set of values ‘is potentially as much in conflict with, as supportive of’ equal opportunities.44 Dickens argues that relying on the claim that good business practice leads to equal opportunities is a mistake because it might be the case that it was good business practice to discriminate. She points out that the ‘business case’ has ‘greater salience for some organisations than others’ — that some employers might have less interest in promoting equality of opportunity; further, Dickens argues that ‘the appeal of particular business case arguments may vary over time as labour or product markets change, giving rise to “fair weather” equality action’.45
Irene Bruegel and Diana Perrons make a similar point about the limitations of the business case for equal opportunities. They set it out that ‘in the late 1980s there was also concern about the demographic time bomb’ — a predicted labour shortage — ‘and efforts made to tap into new labour reserves, especially women and ethnic minorities’. It was because of this labour shortage that ‘measures associated with being an equal opportunities employer were consistent with commercial self-interest’ and ‘a business case for equality could be defined’. ‘However’, argue Bruegel and Perrons, ‘the labour market forecasts were invalidated by the recession of the early 1990s and some of the enthusiasm for enhancing the role of women in organisations evaporated’.46
So too does Dickens say that ‘the defusing of the demographic time bomb in the recession of the early 1990s, for example, led to some backsliding in the detail and extent of equality provisions in response to market pressure’.47 These are the same sentiments expressed in the Equal Opportunities Commission report for 1992:
There was tremendous optimism and hope in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We were set to see a skills revolution and the proper recognition and valuing of women’s contribution to society brought about by what was described as the ‘demographic time bomb’. Much of that optimism receded with the onset of the recession and the continued concentration of women in low paid, low status jobs.48
Bruegel and Perrons conclude from the experience of the 1990s that ‘the business case is in reality associated with cyclical economic change’, that is that the British Industry will prove to be a ‘fair weather friend’ of women’s equality. Cynthia Cockburn sees employers ‘increasingly alarmed by the “demographic time bomb”’ — which is to say, the coming labour shortage.49 The suspicion that a downturn in the economic cycle would be bound to de-rail progress towards equality was strong. The Equal Opportunities Commission painted a depressing picture of the impact of the recession of the early 1980s on women’s employment and on equal pay: ‘The impact of growing unemployment has fallen heavily on women’, and ‘women have borne a disproportionate share of the increased rate of unemployment’. Moreover, ‘the severe increase in unemployment has meant a drastic reduction in opportunities for women to enter into paid employment’ and also arrested the move towards equal pay.50
The scepticism of feminists towards the business case for equal opportunities was an important expression of doubt over the direction of the policy. Still, in its assessment of the impact of the economic cycle on women’s employment and on equality at work, it proved to be too pessimistic — at least about parity between women and men. The record is that in the recessions of 1980-81, 1990-91, and 2009-10 the comparative position saw women increase their share of jobs, while pay parity either plateaued or improved — as we shall see in Chapter Seven.
Where radicals had expressed their doubts about the bureaucratisation of the movements for radical change, and their incorporation into the official, top-down structures of municipal socialism, those doubts were muted. Because of the government attacks on the GLC and the ‘loony left’ councils, and their radical policies on race and gender, activists tended to set aside their doubts, and instead rally to the defence of the policies under attack.
Radical criticisms of equal opportunities policies have generally been that they have not gone far enough, or that they have remained paper policies, not seriously put into action. Radicals shared the goals of equality of the sexes and the races to which the policies appealed. What was less often noticed was that while the purpor
ted content of the policies was equality, the form they took was an enhanced authority of the employers over the employees. Considered as process rather than as outcome, the operation of equal opportunities was a streamlining of recruitment, the management of diversity at work, and a common set of values enshrined in company policy.
Doubts over the worth of equal opportunities policies shape our perceptions of policy change. The headline attacks on equal opportunities policies from Tory backbenchers, the tabloid press, and ministers all lead to an assessment of the 1980s as a decade in which progress was put into reverse. Looking back, Beatrix Campbell said that in the 1970s ‘we won new laws on equal pay, marital status, reproduction, sexuality’ but ‘when Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberal Conservatives won the election of 1979 all that was threatened’.51 According to Herman Ouseley, ‘the government at that time was focused on promoting individualism, about people being competitive, and about no real sense of shared society’; for that reason ‘the agenda of “race” was limited in terms of how far we could push on’.52 Those are understandable reactions to the ideological onslaught against ‘social engineering’ for ‘Victorian values’, alleging black criminality and fecklessness. The irony is, however, that changes were put in place in the 1980s that would make the equal opportunities revolution unstoppable.
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 13