Swede Lars Jalmert taking paternity leave in the EOC News
The ‘double-burden’ in the twenty-first century
The evidence from the time-use studies is that the share of domestic work is unequal, but less than it has been, and that the amount of time people spend on housework has been greatly cut back. (Perhaps surprisingly, parents are spending more of their leisure time with their children than before.) The fall in the amount of time spent on domestic chores is both cause and consequence of women’s much greater participation in the labour market. Also, the evidence shows that more women with young children are working and many of them are working full-time.
The changes have been spurred on and justified by the ‘business case’ for getting more women to work. But government also spent a lot to help women into work. For all the different ways of helping early-years childcare — tax relief on childcare vouchers, benefits for childcare, free nursery places — government was spending around £4.2 billion in 2012. A further £2.4 billion went towards statutory maternity pay — large-looking sums, though less than half a percentage point of Gross Domestic Product.44 As much as government spends, parents spend more on childcare and other costs. And families spend money to save time on domestic chores in other ways, spending nearly £30 billion a year on takeaway food and eating out.
With couples spending more time at work there were fears that this might lead to more family break-ups. Divorce rates did rise in the 1980s and 1990s, to around 150,000, or 14 per thousand married people a year. More recently, though, they have fallen back to around 10 for every thousand.
Women still do almost twice as much housework as men do, and while there are nearly as many women as men in work, two fifths of those are in part-time work (compared to 12% of men). The hourly pay gap between men and women has effectively closed for workers under 30 but beyond the age of 30 it opens up. One interpretation of that is that women will continue to lose out when children are born. On the other hand, the penalty for childbirth is less than it was. As women who might be earning more than their male peers have children, they are less likely to withdraw permanently from their chosen career progression. On paper at least, employers and the law are committed to protecting the station they have earned. ‘Average job tenure was falling for men’, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found, ‘whereas it increased quite significantly for women’:
Improved maternity rights led to more women remaining with their employer after giving birth to a child and fewer women either leaving the labour market altogether or changing employers to find a job that suited their new circumstances.45
Moreover, the penalty that women face by leaving work to have a child is less marked when the model of a career for life is the accepted norm. As Beatrix Campbell argued:
The assumption that people want to change careers, that they want time out of work, that they want to learn new things, go to college, have kids, move in and out of the labour market, rather than stay fixed in one place for forty years, with a gold watch at the end of it, all of those transformations are associated with women.46
Those changes are associated with women, but they are more and more models for men’s employment, too. Overall, the evidence is that responsibility for domestic work is far less of a handicap to women’s prospects in work than it was. Time outside of work is perhaps more pressured than it was, where two partners are both at work. People are spending less time on household chores, but also more time with their children.
The law has changed to reflect the changing position of women in society. In 1990 the Law Lords were asked to clarify the position of rape in marriage. The eighteenth-century Law Chief Justice Hale had set down the dictum that it was not possible for a man to rape his wife, on the grounds that she had already given her consent in the marriage vows. In 1990 the Law Lords thought that was unsustainable, and that the common law is ‘capable of evolving in the light of changing social, economic and cultural developments’.47 There were other changes in family law, such as the 1976 law against domestic violence, the 1989 Children Act giving public authorities power to act against parental authority in favour of the interests of children, further family law in 1996 that included a rule for police to detain any accused of domestic violence and the 2015 law against coercive and controlling behaviour in a marriage. All of these signalled the end of legal support for the patriarchal family as a privileged sphere.
The gender division of household and workplace that rose to preeminence in the period 1850-1950 survives today only as a shadow of its former self.
2. Race and Britishness
Trying to explain race discrimination, people often talk about the way a society needs ‘scapegoats’ to blame; or the point is developed by saying that communities shore up their collective identity by fixing a group as ‘the other’. Put at that level of sociological abstraction, the argument is not so controversial. To look at the question of race in Britain historically, however, would mean seeing that the collective identity that was affirmed by emphasising the exclusion of black people was the identity of Britishness, which it might be more provocative to call into question. National identity, the assertion of a common British identity, for much of the twentieth century was understood as a white identity, with black people’s foreignness highlighted to make that point.
National identity was not just an ideological question, but an alltoo practical one for black people in the labour market. Large-scale black migration to Britain began in the 1950s with Afro-Caribbean and Asian labour recruitment. In the years that followed special laws to control immigration laid the basis for a two-tier labour market and a two-tier society. Officialdom treated black people differently from white, in the control of their movements, withholding citizenship status, demanding to see their papers, creating a special immigration police to track them, creating special detention centres for ‘illegal immigrants’, and in the assumption of the police that black people were to be treated differently, more harshly, because they were not a part of the law-abiding indigenous majority. All of these real manifestations of the second-class status of black immigrants in Britain were the basis for discrimination at work that was outside of work.
Race discrimination was ideological as well as being practical. It was bound closely to the idea of national identity. Discrimination was targeted at black people, but it was addressed to white people. The British elite were making an appeal to the wider white population, a promise that they were insiders, citizens. The real foundations of that national identity were the rights of citizens — their right to contracts to work or trade, to go freely where they wished, to organise to defend their interests, and to elect a government — all rights that were withheld to greater or lesser degree from black people. The long argument over national identity and British citizenship between 1945 and 1992 was an assertion of a community of interest between the working and the ruling classes. The foundations of that white national identity, though, were being undermined in the 1980s. The post-war consensus had recognised the participation of the working class as represented by the labour and trade union leaders in the ‘tripartite system’. That system was under attack in the 1980s, and effectively dismantled by 1992.
The reason that the assertion of national identity was so shrill and forced in the 1980s was that the basis on which one might have claimed a community of interest between white citizens and elites was being dismantled. The Conservative government of the 1980s appealed stridently to national identity, and implicitly to a white identity, just as — and because — it was down-grading the rights of ordinary Britons. Targeting black and Asian immigrants was a way of reasserting the virtues of British citizenship as they were being emptied of substance. In time these shifts would lead to a big change in the general ideas of nation and community, in which colour played an altogether different role.
All through the 1980s, while the Conservative government was taking apart those institutions and agreements that bound British citizen
s to the national project, that same government projected a strident nationalism. The government claimed to defend ‘British interests’ in its dealings the European Economic Community, and in the Commonwealth of formerly British colonies. Prime Minister Thatcher fiercely defended British prestige abroad, sending troops to fight Argentina for possession of the Falkland Islands, as she berated the leaders in Brussels for taking ‘our money’. This heightened call to nationalism added to the ill feelings towards foreigners and to immigrants settled in Britain.
It stands to reason that the Commission for Racial Equality could never accept the argument that black people were not British. The Commission saw its role as ‘to help and encourage the minorities to confidently take their full place in the mainstream of British national life’. The Commission was grateful for ‘the full commitment of this Government to the good race relations which are fundamental to the success of our British society’, from Conservative Home Secretary William Whitelaw. The Home Secretary went on to say:
[I]n the interests of the whole nation, and in particular to remove unjustified fears stirred up amongst ethnic minority groups, I wish to reaffirm the complete commitment of our Conservative Government to a society in which all individuals, whatever their race, colour or creed, have equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities.48
These words would ring hollow for the many who were asked to show their passports to get treatment in hospital, or singled out by their colour for special attention from the police, as well as those subjects of the British Empire who were refused the right to remain in Britain. The ‘interests of the whole nation’, ‘the success of British society’, seemed to be very much at odds with those of the black minority. They were denied a place ‘in the mainstream of British life’.
Over time, though, attitudes changed. One effect of the much tighter controls on immigration in the 1980s and 1990s was, as Julian Clarke and Stuart Speeden noted, that ‘the ethnic minority population is no longer immigrant’ — more and more of the black population of Britain were born in Britain, and the pretext for denying their Britishness was becoming more and more tenuous.49 As discriminatory as the Nationality Act was in its impact, the promise that those migrants who met its criteria would have their citizenship recognised did fix the idea that some Britons were black.
As we have seen, the growing number of asylum seekers shifted attitudes to black people in Britain.
Number of asylum applications received by year of application (including dependents)
2000 97,860
1999 91,200
1998 58,000
1997 41,500
1996 37,000
1995 55,000
1993 28,000
1992 73,400
1991 32,300
1990 38,195
1989 16,775
1988 5,739
Junior Minister Ann Widdecombe made the case for the restrictions on asylum-seekers’ rights in Britain, when she warned that the ‘opportunity to seek employment is a major incentive for economic migrants and undeserving asylum applicants’.50 Official measures to curb and control ‘asylum seekers’ from overseas, like the opening of the Campsfield detention centre, searches at ports of entry, and police raids, all heightened hostility to more recent arrivals to Britain.
MP Martin Salter, a member of Reading Council for Racial Equality and long-standing supporter of the anti-racist magazine Searchlight, contrasted his ‘ethnically mixed and proudly multicultural’ constituency with the ‘legally aided, corrupt abuse of the system’ by ‘deliberate overstayers’ and ‘stowaways’, who ‘can justifiably be regarded as economic migrants rather than refugees’. In Salter’s telling, his black and Asian constituents, ‘people, who are as British as I am, resent the fact that the debate on race and community relationships in this country has become skewed’; ‘Someone whose skin is brown or who wears a turban might now, somehow, not be regarded as British any more, but as just another of those asylum seekers’.51
The Commission for Racial Equality had relatively little to say about the new asylum laws, keeping its criticism at the level of generalities. ‘The questions being asked were “where is the fairness, where is the compassion, where is the justice?”’ summarised Herman Ouseley, who had just taken over as Commission chair.52
In his 1981 book, The New Racism, Martin Barker anticipated the way that racial discrimination could be dissociated from biological ‘race’ as such, and attached instead to cultural differences. With the ‘asylum seeker’ panic of the 1990s, prejudice against the foreigner moved further away from the expected associations of black and brown migrants to Britain and hardened against the new dispossessed from Algeria, Somalia, and later Eastern Europe. The black but ‘British as I am’ were rendered more like insiders, in this way of looking at the question. But the shifts in racial thinking were not exhausted by this contrast of the good black Briton and ‘bogus’ asylum seeker.
The white underclass
Teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a gang of white youths in Eltham, South East London, on 22 April 1993. The case became a turning point in British race relations. The police inquiry was a farce, and it seemed likely that the killers would escape justice. A determined campaign by the boy’s parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, won the support of everyone from the Anti-Racist Alliance to the Daily Mail. This eventually led to an inquiry under Sir William Macpherson. Below we consider the conclusions of the Macpherson Inquiry, but let’s look first at the way the killing was seen.
Racially motivated killings, tragically, were not unheard of in Britain before 1993 and it seemed likely that Stephen Lawrence could become just another grim statistic. The family’s campaign to highlight their son’s death, though, struck a nerve. In the press the stereotypical image of violent black youths and innocent white victims was more or less reversed. Under the headline ‘INTO HELL’, Daily Mirror reporter Brian Reade went to a largely white housing estate in Eltham and ‘found racism seeping from every pore’ of this ‘E-reg Escort land’ where racial hate is ‘a way of life passed down from father to son’.53
The Lawrence killing became part of a new discourse on crime initiated by the future Labour Party leader, then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair. Knowing that ‘law and order’ had been an issue that the Conservative Party had dominated Blair was set to make it his own, saying he would be ‘tough on crime’. Blair pinned the cause of crime on the free market and the way that it had destroyed community cohesion. Talking about the Stephen Lawrence killing, and about the murder by two children of the toddler Jamie Bulger, Blair painted a picture of large swathes of society in a state of lawlessness. Even Thatcher, no stranger to crime panics, was moved to protest that ‘crime and violence are not the result of the great majority of people being free — they are the result of a small minority of wicked men and women abusing their freedom’.54 Thatcher’s crime panics targeted outsiders and tended to reinforce Britishness as a positive, Blair saw crime as endemic in a sick society. The Labour politician hit a rich seam of middle-class fear, now expressed towards a burgeoning white underclass.
Music journalist (now novelist) Tony Parsons penned a vicious diatribe in the Daily Mail titled ‘Why I hate the modern British working class’ — ‘treat them like humans… they still behave like animals’ — and for Channel 4 authored a film on the same theme of denouncing the ‘lumpens… dressed for the track, but built for the bar’, called The Tattooed Jungle.55 Jack Straw, then Shadow Home Secretary, gave a speech in 1995 about the ‘Aggressive begging along with graffiti and in some cities “squeegee merchants” all heighten people’s fear of crime on the streets’, while radical journalist Beatrix Campbell writing about rioting in the North East and Liverpool in 1991 thought she saw a ‘culture of crime’ with ‘coercive coteries… founded on bullying, intimidation and exclusive solidarity’.56 These former socialists were venting their frustration on a working class that they felt had let them down. No longer the vehicle of socialism, the British working c
lass was a big disappointment. These ways of thinking about the underclass were familiar to people who had paid attention to the racial insults thrown at black immigrants, except that now it was the white estate-dwellers who were being demonised, too. As Kenan Malik wrote at the time, paraphrasing the critics’ argument: ‘White yobbos, like black Yardies, are not part of civilised society.’ As respectable society would see it, said Malik: ‘Morally, socially and intellectually, the underclass, black and white, is inferior to the rest of us.’57
The coordinates of prejudice were shifting. Respectable society was not contiguous with white society any more. There were respectable black people, and less so, and there were degenerate white estates as there were good citizens. All of these prejudices floated on a very real social shift. The integration of organised labour into respectable society in the 1950s had come to an end as the century did. The furiously triangulating ‘New Labour’ party was putting a distance between itself and the working class in the 1990s as stridently as the Conservative Party had attacked them in the 1980s. The bond that tied the (largely white) labour movement to the nation state had been cut. All of that social change meant that the marked division between respectable white society and peripheral black migrants was breaking down.
The Macpherson Report and institutional racism
‘In years to come 1998 will be seen as a watershed for race relations in Britain’, Herman Ouseley wrote as chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality: ‘No one will ever forget that it was the year of the Macpherson Inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.’ The Commission played its part in the lead-up to Macpherson’s report, and ‘felt impelled to put the issue on the public agenda and decided to launch a hard-hitting advertising campaign’: ‘Our aim was to raise awareness of the extent to which racial prejudice still exists in Britain today and to suggest that everyone can and should do something to stop it.’58
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 21