Sir William Macpherson’s conclusions were a considerable boost to the Commission’s view. The conclusions that stood out were that the Metropolitan Police investigation into the teenager’s death was compromised by the force’s ‘institutional racism’. It seemed to be a very hard-hitting phrase, one that was in common use among equal opportunity campaigners. The point of the term was to say that the problem of discrimination was deep-rooted, not just the matter of a few ‘rotten apples’ in the barrel. As he clarified the point, Macpherson made clear that he was not necessarily saying that individual officers were personally racist, but that they might unwittingly adopt practices that add up to institutional discrimination.
Macpherson’s report had the unexpected result of excusing individual officers of responsibility for failings. At the same time it opened up the police service overall to a level of scrutiny and criticism from which the establishment had previously pledged to shield them. If the institution was racist, then it needed thorough-going reform. What was more, the ‘report accepted the CRE’s submission that institutional racism was not an issue solely for the police service, but for every institution public and private’.59 Macpherson concluded that ‘If racism is to be eliminated from our society there must be a co-ordinated effort to prevent its growth’, and ‘this need goes well beyond the Police Services’.
Doreen Lawrence and Bernard Hogan-Howe
The Commission was pitched into the centre of public life, and the report’s ‘findings and recommendations have provided the CRE with a new framework for its work with organisations to eradicate racism and discrimination’. As they reported:
numerous copies of the CRE’s leaflet on the implications of the inquiry for racial equality were distributed within three months, and we were inundated with requests for advice from public sector organisations all over the country.60
The impact of the Macpherson Report was consolidated in a far-reaching new amendment to the Race Relations Act that came into force in 2001. ‘The amended Race Relations Act now includes all public functions’, reported the Commission under its new chair Gurbux Singh. ‘It gives some 40,000 public bodies in Britain a new, enforceable, statutory duty to promote racial equality and good race relations.’61
For the government Angela Eagle, Home Office minister for race relations, said:
The changes are aimed at the hearts and minds of organisations. The government wants public organisations to make race equality core to their work. These new measures build a robust framework to help public bodies provide services to the public in a way that is fair and accessible to all, irrespective of colour or ethnicity.
The focus was on public institutions, but the goal was to make race equality a core British value throughout society: ‘By placing the public sector at the forefront of the driver for race equality in British society, we hope to create a powerful lever to raise standards in all sectors of society.’62
The shift in attitudes at work that was initiated in the 1980s under equal opportunities policies had come to be a foundation stone of public policy in the ’00s. Some might object that these were rhetorical commitments, though in fact the changes were far-reaching, with public institutions committed to ongoing reform. A conference called to check on progress two years after the report concluded that ‘public authorities have a long way to go before they can say that their policies and practice are promoting racial equality’ — the Macpherson reforms were framed as a process, rather than a result.63
More to the point, the general declaration behind the 2000 Race Relations Amendment was that racial equality was an established goal of British society.
Community cohesion
As if to underscore the importance of the question of race relations, just as the authorities and the experts were talking about the ongoing reform of public institutions, ‘violent confrontations broke out between white and Asian people and the police in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford’ between April and July of 2001.64
Home Office Minister John Denham commissioned a report into the disturbances from government advisor Ted Cantle, of the Institute for Community Cohesion. Running alongside Cantle’s investigation, Herman Ouseley, having handed over the chairmanship of the Commission for Racial Equality, undertook an investigation at the request of the community and local government project ‘Bradford Vision’. Coming out of Ouseley’s and Cantle’s reports there was a debate about the merits of ‘multiculturalism’ that we look at in the next chapter. But here it is worth taking note of the proposals that Ouseley made coming out of the riots. He called first for:
A coherent response for Bradford’s public services (including the Police and all agencies) to meet their obligations under the new Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and to promote social interaction and mixing.
Secondly, Ouseley hoped for:
Ways in which leadership at institutional, organisational and community levels must promote and carry forward the mission, vision and values for greater community, cultural and social interaction across the different cultural communities.65
These proposals read like timeless platitudes, and would hardly be remarkable read alongside the many local authority policies that Ouseley and others have authored over the years. What is noteworthy is that in the context that it was made this vision of ‘community cohesion’ was what stood in the place once occupied by national identity. Kyriakides and Torres call this policy ‘Third Way Anti-Racism’, showing that it comes out of the ‘Third Way’ political programme worked up by Labour party reformer Tony Blair. The ‘Third Way became a means by which the state attempted to relegitimise itself in a world without alternatives to the capitalist system’, they argue.66
In the technocratic language that was commonly adopted during the years that Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ government ruled, Ouseley’s abstract appeal to ‘community cohesion’ is doing the work that a more atavistic ‘national identity’ promoted under previous governments once did. It expresses a wish for social solidarity that would overcome division. In this version of ‘community cohesion’, though, people are not excluded on the grounds of their colour.
Where the Conservative governments of the 1980s and ’90s jealously protected British national interests, the Blair and Brown governments were much more sympathetic to transnational institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. At least in the way they explained themselves, they were not following selfish national interests, but rather working with other nations towards humanitarian ends. Tony Blair seemed to be a lot more comfortable among other world leaders than he did with the British public, and much of the elite derived more authority from inter-governmental agreements than they did from any popular mandate. Cosmopolitan internationalism rather than national sovereignty was the clarion call of the elite.67
The end point of the Macpherson report and the Race Relations Act that followed it was, paradoxically, that Britain became institutionally anti-racist. Formally, at least, its institutions were committed to the goal of racial equality. Whereas in the past the moment of ‘community cohesion’ would be exemplified in the national anthem, the flag and the Queen, post Macpherson, the value most leant upon to emphasise social solidarity was diversity and tolerance in a multicultural society. Just how successful that could be would be tested in the years that followed. Still, it is worth underlining that the substantial reassertion of national identity that so pointedly excluded black and Asian people in the post-war years, was by the new century officially inclusive and diverse.
Limits to equal opportunities
Frustration with the lack of progress on equal opportunities led researchers to try to understand the more deeply-rooted, social bases of discrimination beyond the workplace. Those were valuable explorations that highlighted the way that women’s unequal responsibility for housework on the one hand, and the institutional racism in British institutions on the other, worked against equality at work. To investigators it often seems as if the identification of these barriers sh
ows that progress can only go so far, and that discrimination is as endemic as ever. To the contrary, though, the identification of these barriers to equality is itself a sign that they are being shifted.
It would be wrong to argue that discrimination has been brought to an end. No serious examination of the outcomes of the gender and ethnic pay gap, or employment prospects, would support such a conclusion. What is clear, though, is that many barriers that looked insurmountable are being moved.
There is a formula that activists used to explain — ‘oppression is prejudice plus power’. The saying was coined to show that prejudice is not just a psychological attitude, but one that can be powerfully reinforced by the social and institutional distribution of power. Today there are as many, if not more, prejudices at large in British society. On top of the mainstream prejudices of white and male superiority, there are a whole welter of misanthropic ideas about the underclass, alongside prejudices about asylum seekers and Muslims, as well as many ideas about the pathological collapse of masculinity. All of these prejudices are expressive of a less robust democratic culture in Britain, and the decline of the status of organised labour as a social partner.
What is less true of today, though, is that prejudice against women, and against black people, is reinforced by institutional power. Indeed, the one remarkable thing about Britain at the turn of the new century has been its institutional commitment to build an equal opportunities society.
— NINE —
International and Historical Precedents
The people who drew up the laws and policies on equal opportunities had many examples to draw on, in history and also around the world.
Empire
The most important historical precedents for equal opportunities policies were about coping with other races in the British Empire. As we have seen, the first ideas about race relations laws in Britain, those that led to the 1965 Act, drew on the times when Britain governed many races in the Empire.
Ideas about racial hierarchy came about because of the British experience of Empire. Writers like Thomas Carlyle and Anthony Trollope, explorers like Sir Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, and colonial officers like Sir Charles Gordon and Edward Eyre all gave voice to a strong sense of white superiority over native peoples. Later these ideas were made more systematic in the administration of the colonies, where pseudo-scientific doctrines of social Darwinism were commonly used to give grounds for the higher standing of white settlers over natives.
Not all ideas about natives were derogatory. Many colonial officers had a genuine sympathy with natives, though this was usually patrician and often a romanticised idea of the ‘noble savage’.
Sir Arthur Gordon, who governed the Fiji Islands, was one of many who romanticised the traditional society of native peoples — the Fijians — though largely as a better, ‘chiefly’ counterweight to the growing number of Indian labourers brought into the colony. Gordon’s ideas about native self-government, where the colony was run through traditional leaders, organised in a High Council of chiefs, was later taken up by Theophilus Shepstone, in Zululand, and Lord Lugard in Northern Nigeria. Lugard called this the ‘dual mandate’, where Britain ruled through local chiefs, deriving authority for British rule from the dual mandate of the Crown and the best interests of the native peoples.1 One of the unintended outcomes of ‘native self-government’ was that the exercise of power through tribes and their presumed chiefs led native peoples to organise themselves as tribes, and offer up chiefs to meet the expectations of the colonial authorities.2 These systems of rule through native leaders were copied all across the Empire. They were also in the back of the minds of the government officials who first organised the Community Relations Councils where church leaders and other elders from ethnic minority communities acted as intermediaries with the British authorities.
Native self-government was mostly about driving labour, and the ideas about tribes and peoples neatly fitted the needs of organising a division of labour. So it was that the Empire found different peoples with natural talents for waging war (Sikhs, Fijians, Pashtun), field labour (African slaves and Indian indentured labourers in the West Indies and Fiji), trade (Indians in Zanzibar and Chinese in Malaya), and the Tonga of the Zambezi Valley were held to have ‘a natural affinity to night soil work’.3 Handing out different kinds of jobs to different groups, marked out by their race, was a handy way of playing them off against each other, and so staying on top.
The colonial ways were also brought into the mother country at those times that colonial labour was recruited to fill jobs that English labourers could not or would not do. As we have seen, Ireland’s rural surplus played the part of the unskilled itinerant labourers in Britain’s industrial revolution. Indian (‘lascar’) and Chinese seamen were called on when the merchant marine lost English sailors to the navy in times of war. Not only were the lascars paid less, they were given smaller bunks in ship rules. Native labourers were treated with harsh indifference at times, and after the Second World War, many
Liverpool wives of Chinese seamen were shocked to find they and their children had been abandoned — only later learning that their partners had been rounded up and sent back to China on Churchill’s orders, to make way for the British merchant seamen released from the Royal Navy. The West Indians who came to Tilbury and London from 1950 onwards were at first billeted in church halls, and put to work labouring, on the buses and in hospitals. Workplace segregation had its roots in colonial labour organisation, and the colour bar was for a while followed in Britain.
Many of Britain’s old colonies, like Malaya, Fiji, and Hong Kong, carried on the system of a racial division of labour, and the corresponding distribution of political power, too. Indo-Fijians, whose grandparents had come as indentured labourers, still farm the sugar cane owned by Fijian tribal groups (called Mataqali), though these same Fijians are employed by the lease-holding Indian farmers to cut the cane at harvest time. In both Singapore and Malaysia, a delicate balance between Chinese business and native Malayan farmers is kept, with special laws obliging companies to employ a quota of Malays. Article 153 of the Malaysia Constitution protects the ‘special position’ of indigenous Malays, while Fiji’s Deed of Cession makes the interests of native Fijians ‘paramount’ (though that has been much argued over, since). Hong Kong’s Equal Opportunities Commission is tasked first and foremost with stopping sex discrimination, but also ‘protects people against discrimination, harassment and vilification on the ground of their race’. In all these places the older colonial models of a racial division of labour are changing into modern systems of ‘equal opportunity’ legislation and the protection of minorities. These systems are supposed to manage race relations, but they have often themselves been the terrain over which ethnic conflicts have arisen (particularly in Fiji, but also in Malaysia and elsewhere), and may even have entrenched the divisions that generate these conflicts.
Northern Ireland
Though it is officially a part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland has different laws on equal opportunities than Britain. In 1976 a Fair Employment Act created the Fair Employment Agency, a body to oversee the law forbidding discrimination in employment (in 1999, the law was repealed and a new Act created the Equality Agency). The reason for the special legislation was that Northern Ireland was built around sectarian discrimination against its large Catholic minority. The Northern Ireland state was an artificial creation, made up of six of the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster, cut off from the rest of Ireland, which asserted its independence in 1920. The six counties were set apart on the basis that this was the territory that the predominantly Protestant and loyal community of the area could hold against the Irish rebels. In the six counties in 1920, 840,000 Protestants dominated 430,000 Catholics. To consolidate their hold on what their leader James Craig called ‘a protestant parliament and a protestant state’, all Catholics were driven out of the shipyards and most industries in a long campaign of terror. Jobs in North
ern Ireland were allocated according to religion, on the assumption that the Catholic minority were disloyal. Many Catholics, and some Protestants, did protest at the discrimination, and in 1969, inspired by Martin Luther King, a civil rights campaign was launched — only to be beaten back by armed force. The suppression of political protest led to an armed conflict, with the Irish Republican Army waging a guerrilla war to free Ireland from British rule. The repression that followed further entrenched the sectarian division, as Protestant loyalists were recruited to man the burgeoning security services.
Refugees from the 1920 Belfast pogrom arrive in Dublin
The 1976 Fair Employment Act was a sop to the civil rights agitation, but substantially a failure as the UK government leant heavily on the loyal Protestant population to defeat the challenge. By 1978 the proportion of Catholics to Protestants was closer to 40:60, but employment in industry was 72.5% Protestant, in vehicle building it was 80%, and in the shipyards 90% were Protestant.4 After 16 years of the Fair Employment Agency, the position was hardly better. The aircraft manufacturer Shorts’ workforce was only 11% Catholic, while major shipbuilders Harland and Woolf’s had a workforce that was just 4.5% Catholic. Local authority employer Craigavon Council, pulled up by the Fair Employment Agency for drawing only 4% of its senior officers from the Catholic community (while 12% of its manual workers are Catholics), simply tossed the report in the bin. So damning was the Fair Employment Agency’s report into Larne District Council, where no senior officer was Catholic, and most Catholics were employed on the very lowest grade, that the FEA itself suppressed the report. Even where discrimination was clearly shown, as in Northern Ireland Electricity, with its 3.5% Catholic workforce in 1992, the Secretary of State stepped in to stop the FEA’s investigation and gave the electricity company permission to carry on.5
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