The Equal Opportunities Revolution
Page 25
Discrimination at work was without doubt a problem for lesbians and for gay men — as was discrimination in other settings too. However, there was no obvious sense in which lesbians or gay men as a cohort occupied a distinctive role in the workforce, as was the case with women and black people. Were gay people penalised in the labour market? What evidence there is seems to suggest that lesbians and gay men had average incomes higher than the average for the country.9 Folding the rights of lesbians and gay men into the equal opportunities policy was one way that the logic of equal opportunities at work was coming to define liberation movements. The activists of gay liberation were reinterpreting their struggle as one of workplace discrimination to fit the preoccupations of the time. One councillor and gay rights activist despaired of the combative way that the issue had been raised, saying ‘the gay issue has been dragged in by well-intentioned councillors who think it is the same as sexism and racism, when it’s not, without realising the forces ranged against it’.10
Demonstration against Clause 28
That said, there was shortly afterwards a pointed struggle over gay rights that was indeed focused on the workplace, and that was the clash over Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988. The row took place in Haringey, after the education office circulated a booklet for schools called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, designed to familiarise children with the possibility that a child’s carers — parents — might be two gay men. The council offices were picketed by an unhappy ‘Parents’ Rights Group’, who did not want their children taught about homosexuality, which in their minds was associated with paedophilia. At the prompting of Dame Jill Knight, the Conservative government included the clause in its local government bill that forbade the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, and teaching the ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ in schools. Large protests against the bill galvanised the lesbian and gay rights movement. Beatrix Campbell pointed out that Haringey Council was imperious in its attempts to bring about lesbian and gay equality from on high: ‘in the absence of any public work within civil society, statism has replaced consciousness-raising’, was the way she put it. She was right. As chair of the group Council Workers Against Clause 28, I helped to organise a day of action to oppose the government attack on gay rights. An officer in the Council’s Lesbian and Gay Unit, who went round the council offices asking clerks for their support with me, berated those who were not sure, demanding to know why they worked for the Council if they did not support its equal opportunities policies. As she saw it, the task was to enforce compliance from employees, not to win over fellow workers to take solidarity action. In the way these things work out, when the bill became law, it was the Lesbian and Gay Unit itself that was tasked by the Council to ensure that its discriminatory clause was enforced. The contrast with the school secretaries in the local government union NALGO was marked. They were mostly working mothers and many were anxious about measures they saw undermining the family, and opening their children to undue sexual knowledge. On the other hand, they could see that those teachers who were gay would be open to persecution under the law, and voted to oppose it.
The Section 28 episode showed that lesbian and gay rights did not really fit into the argument about equal opportunities at work, but was part of a larger, more ideological debate about the sanctity of the family, and the presumed pressures upon it. Section 28 stayed on the statute books from 1988 until 2003 when it was repealed (three years earlier in Scotland). Around that time governments of left and right moved quite quickly in the direction of lesbian and gay rights to equalise the law of consent (Sexual Offences Amendment Act, 2000), to outlaw discrimination (Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, 2007), and eventually to legalise gay marriage (Civil Partnership in 2004, followed by the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act in 2013). The swift and surprising liberalisation of the laws on lesbian and gay rights comes about because, unlike the transformation of the position of women, gay rights do not require a reorganisation of the social order, but rather reflect the changing ideological position following on as ‘family values’ came to carry less weight.
Muslims in Britain
Over the last 20 years Britain’s Islamic minority has been in the spotlight. Muslims in Britain had been addressed in social policy not as Muslims, but as a subset of an ethnic group, Asians (allowing that there are a small but growing number of ethnically European converts). The main Muslim populations in Britain have come from Pakistan (43% of the total), India (9%), Bangladesh (17%),11 and more latterly from North and East Africa; as well as a smaller group from Arab nations. There are around three million Muslims living in Britain. Official policy to Muslims was not friendly or hostile, but the hostile attention to Asians by the immigration and police services, as well as by employers, often focused on Muslim beliefs and cultures.
In 1978 Dr Muhammed Iqbal and a member of the Home Secretary’s Advisory Council on Race Relations argued the case for separate schools for Muslim boys and girls in the Commission for Racial Equality’s newsletter, New Equals. Dr Iqbal understood the fear ‘that separate schools for Muslim girls and boys may perpetuate under-achievement, hence alienate school-leavers from single-sex institutions from jobs commensurate with their attainments parallel to the English’. As he saw it, ‘Westernisation may well bring about the desired results in terms of job opportunities’. But he asked ‘what about the resultant and internecine secularisation, irreligiousness, materialism, pseudo-individualism and erosion of moral values?’12
Since the Khomeini revolution in Iran in 1979, the British state has often been in conflict with states and movements motivated by militant religious-political ideology in the Middle East, and these have had an impact on relations between Muslims, the authorities, and the wider population in Britain.
In 1988 British Muslims in Bradford protested at the satirical picture of the prophet set out in British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The cause was taken up by an imam in India, and then by the Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Islamic state in Iran, who issued a ‘fatwa’ or judgment against the apostate author, to the effect that it was acceptable to kill him. How rhetorical or serious the fatwa was, was open to question, but his Turkish publisher was killed, and Rushdie was allocated an armed guard by the British government. It was a moment when many Muslims in Britain came to organise around their religious identity more than their Asian heritage (the popular Muslim News, for example, was launched shortly afterwards).13
Increasing conflict in the Middle East, with British and American military intervention in Lebanon (1984), Libya (1986), the Persian Gulf (1988), two wars in Iraq (1991, 2003), and a prolonged participation in the occupation of Afghanistan (beginning in 2001), as well as British support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, all added to the heightened tension between radical Islam and the British authorities. Terrorist attacks by small groups of radical Muslims against Western targets — most notably the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, but followed by bombing attacks in London on 7 July 2005 — heightened tensions between the authorities and British Muslims.
As well as the growing evidence of atrocities and torture carried out by British security services abroad, security measures to cope with ‘home-grown’ terrorism provoked anger. Anti-terrorism laws allowed for much longer time for those arrested to be interrogated before being released, for special orders imposing home curfews for ‘terror suspects’ and scores of early morning raids, and deportations of individuals — often to countries where they were at risk of torture.
The alienation of some Muslims, who were drawn to agitating for, and in some cases participating in, terror attacks against British targets, disturbed the British authorities. Alongside the surveillance and repressive measures undertaken against Muslims suspected of terrorist conspiracies, the British government has tried to build bridges with the broader Muslim population to reinforce more moderate beliefs. British support for mosque comm
ittees goes back to before the 1976 Act and the Community Relations Councils founded under the 1965 Act.
Mala Sen went to a day ‘Conference of Bangladeshi Youth’ organised by the Federation of Bangladeshi Associations and the Asian Centre in Islington in 1977, where ‘a young Bengali, from the local Bangladesh Youth Association, stood up and criticised’ their elders: ‘we were not consulted’, he said in Bengali, ‘This thing has nothing to do with us. You’ve only come down here because you want to control us — you want us to follow you.’ As Sen saw it back then, ‘Unabashed, the elders, all of them professional community relations wallahs, proceeded’.14
Back then the generation gap saw younger Bangladeshis organised on the basis of their ethnic identity, in a political lobby, the Asian Youth Movement. In 1981, 12 members of the Asian Youth Movement were arrested and tried on conspiracy charges, after they organised to defend themselves and their community against racist attacks. Through the Commission for Racial Equality’s grants to CRCs and through local government, the authorities shored up the influence of the mosques as a counter to the influence of the more political radicals. ‘In March 1994’, explains Kenan Malik, in the wake of the protests over The Satanic Verses, ‘the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard appealed to Muslims to form a “representative body” that he could “support and recognize”’. Before then the Foreign Office had been supportive of Saudi-backed Muslim groups. In 1997 the Muslim Council of Britain under Iqbal Sacranie was founded.15
With Islamist movements inspiring more people around the world than radical nationalist movements did, the generational divide among British Muslims looked a bit different. The secular challenge of the Asian Youth Movement had fallen away. Instead young Muslims challenged their more moderate elders on the terrain of belief. The traditional religious identification that the authorities had encouraged became a battleground between radicals and moderates. When the congregants at the Finsbury Park Mosque, swelled by refugees from the civil war in Algeria, embraced the teachings of radical Abu Hamza it became a focal point for Islamists, until Hamza was forced out. In 2003 the security services raided the mosque.
Burning The Satanic Verses, Bradford, 1989
Attempts to win over ‘moderate’ Muslims have led to more financial aid for mosque-based organisations that the government hope can act as interlocutors, like the Muslim Council of Britain. In 1997 the government changed the law so that Muslim schools could be stateaided along the same lines as Jewish, Catholic, and Church of England Schools. Some, though, have argued that the government’s policy of funding religious organisations has tended to promote ethnic division. Kenan Malik explains that the government’s preferred interlocutor, the Muslim Council of Britain, is in fact quite marginal to most Muslims and, being associated with the Pakistan-based organisation Jamaat-i-Islami, what most commentators would call ‘radical’. As Malik says, ‘if the prime minister believes that he can only engage them by appealing to their faith, rather than through their wider political or national affiliations, who are Muslims to disagree?’ After the ‘7/7’ bombings in July 2005 the government distanced itself from the MCB, thinking that it had not done enough to contain radicalism.16
Other than direct representation through Mosques and Muslim groups, British Muslims have tended to be Labour voters, and after some kicking back Muslims have won some standing in the Labour Party. In the 1990s Birmingham’s nine sitting Labour MPs were all white though many of the party’s voters and activists were Muslims of Pakistani origin. A membership fraud committee under Clare Short went through the party lists checking all the ‘Muhammeds’ they found there. Some popular Labour Party organisers of Bangladeshi background, like Jalal Uddin and Lutfur Rahman, were overlooked when parliamentary seats became available. In time some of these activists peeled away from the Labour Party to find a better welcome in the far-left RESPECT Coalition, the Liberal Democrats, or in Lutfur Rahman’s case, setting up his own Tower Hamlets First Party. To the embarrassment of Labour, George Galloway won the Bethnal Green seat for RESPECT in 2005, with a large base of Bangladeshi support (a performance he repeated in the Bradford West by-election in 2012). Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets First Party won control of the Council in 2014, but less than a year later was controversially thrown out of office by the electoral court on grounds of ‘corruption’. When the electoral court handed its investigation over to the Metropolitan Police they judged that there was not enough evidence to carry on. In May 2016, Labour’s candidate for the London Mayor Sadiq Khan beat the Conservative Party’s Zac Goldsmith. Goldsmith was widely seen to have run a scurrilous campaign that tried to smear Khan as a friend of terrorism. Khan’s own slogan, though — ‘the British Muslim who can beat the extremists’ — turned out to be very popular. The bond between Muslims and the Labour Party has been made strong again.
British Muslims are on average less well-paid, less economically active, and in less skilled posts than the rest of the population. They are overrepresented in the hotel and catering trades, and as cab drivers.17 The think-tank Demos highlighted the statistical evidence that on average Muslims in Britain are less likely to hold a managerial or professional position, and that ‘Muslims in England and Wales are also disproportionately likely to be unemployed and economically inactive’. Demos’ report ‘Rising to the Top’ proposes a number of measures, including a plea for employers to:
Do more to prevent discrimination and reduce the perception of discrimination — with the Government and organisations such as the CBI encouraging them to undertake contextual recruitment as part of their graduate recruitment process.18
The Demos report follows from the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 proposal for monitoring of religious affiliation in employment and national statistics with a view to taking action to stop discrimination against Muslims.19 The evidence that prejudice against Muslims has led to greater inequality is suggestive — though it is not easy to distinguish the effects of discrimination on racial grounds from those on religious grounds. The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations of 2003 ‘extended legislative protection to individuals on the grounds of religion or belief’ in the ‘areas of employment and training’. The Commission for Racial Equality ‘argued that new legislation should be introduced to give protection to individuals on the grounds of religion or belief not only in the area of employment, but also in provision of goods and services.’ The Commission
also considered that the introduction of new legislation to prohibit the incitement of religious hatred was necessary to protect individuals who were becoming increasingly vulnerable to verbal and racial attack, but who were not also protected by legislation that prohibited incitement to racial hatred, again due to the definition of racial groups.20
In 2006 Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which largely expanded the definition of race hatred to encompass hatred against Muslims and Christians (Jews and Sikhs had both already been categorised as ‘races’ for the purpose of previous legislation). Some objected that the law would make proper criticism of religions illegal, that these were bodies of thought, not racial identities, which ought to be open to criticism.
Whether Britain’s problematic treatment of its Muslim minority can be dealt with as a matter of extending anti-discrimination policy and enlarging the meaning of equal opportunities at work is not clear. What is clear is that the authorities have a problem persuading younger Muslims to identify with British society.
Disability rights
Long before disability was ever addressed as a question of rights, British society, like most others, had undertaken the care of the disabled as a charitable imperative. Edward Rushton’s ‘school for the indigent blind’ was founded in Merseyside in 1791 after many lost their sight to smallpox.21 Handicapped people in Britain were cared for in special schools like Chailey School in East Sussex. From 1944, under the Disabled Persons Employment Act, the government supported factories and workshops run by a dedicated corporation, Remploy, which open
ed its first factory in Bridgend in Wales in 1946, eventually managing some 83 factories around the country. From 1963 the Spastics Society ran workshops and day centres for people with cerebral palsy. Care and help for the disabled was for many years a voluntary activity undertaken by churches, Rotary Clubs, and the Variety Club.
In 1976 the Union of the Physically Impaired argued for a new way of looking at disability, which they defined as:
[T]he disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities. Physical disability is therefore a particular form of social oppression.