The British Council of Organisations of Disabled People, launched in 1981, did a great deal to promote what they called the social model of disability, and to campaign against segregation and stigmatisation. The more activist approach to disability gave a lot of people with disabilities a greater dignity, and sense of ownership of their issue. In 1986 the British Association of Social Workers adopted the social model of disability and it has been influential in the bringing of disabled students into mainstream education, who would otherwise have been segregated.
The social model, though, is not wholly true. Physical disability is physical disability. Social action, whether attitudinal, or in the provision of ramps and other material infrastructure and equipment to mitigate disability, cannot overcome serious disability. Mainstreaming has many good outcomes, but in cases of serious disability, such as autism and blindness, mainstream schools and workplaces can only do so much to accommodate. The influence of the social model of disability, though, has led governments to move away from special schools and employment for the disabled. Both the Blair and Cameron administrations oversaw the winding down of Remploy with the loss of thousands of jobs for disabled people, the last three factories in Blackburn, Sheffield, and Neath, South Wales closing in 2013.
One of the more controversial interpretations of mainstreaming and the social model of disability has been the Conservative government’s determination to get thousands of people off of incapacity benefit and into work. Lord Freud lauded the approach of government action ‘to support people with health conditions and disabilities into work’ and said that ‘we want to ensure that we spend money responsibly in a way that improves individuals’ life chances and helps them to achieve their ambitions, rather than paying for a lifetime wasted on benefits’.22 The system of interviewing and reviewing claims under the workfare scheme has widely been seen as an attack on disabled welfare claimants.
Men’s rights and ‘Rights for Whites’
As a rhetorical response to equal opportunities policies aimed at helping women and ethnic minorities, some of those who had been thought of as privileged have tried to frame their ambitions in the language of equal opportunities. In a well-publicised exchange in a House of Commons Committee in October 2015, Tory MP Philip Davies asked for time to be set aside for a debate on a proposal for an International Men’s Day, just as there was an International Women’s Day. Labour MP Jess Phillips was withering, saying ‘as the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day’. Nonetheless men’s rights campaigners have lobbied for greater access to children in divorce settlements as well as organising seminar series for picking up and dominating women. For the most part men’s rights activists have been dismissed as creeps or weirdos.
There had been a different sort of ‘men’s movement’ proposed in the late Seventies. The second national conference organised by Men Against Sexism took place at the Abraham Moss Centre in Crumpsall, Manchester in 1979:
the 50 workshops spread over the weekend included the experience of fatherhood and child care; rape; the need for national men’s campaign; therapy groups; sexuality; how feminism affects your daily life; and theoretical analyses of the role of men.23
The conference decided that a national men’s campaign was not what they wanted, and no further conferences were planned. Later some researchers and activists argued that the damage done to men by changing gender relations, and by the ideology of masculinity, needs to be addressed. Books by Roger Horrocks (Masculinity in Crisis, 1996), Anthony Clare (On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, 2000), Susan Faludi (Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, 1999), and R W Connell (Masculinities, 1995) all talked about the difficulties that men were having reconciling the ambition to domination in the ideal of masculinity, with the decline in the status of men.24 Campaigners Diane Abbott, the Hackney MP, and feminist Laurie Penny both took up the call for action. ‘We still don’t have any positive models for post-patriarchal masculinity, and in this age of desperation and uncertainty, we need them more than ever’, wrote Penny, while Abbott deplored what she imagined to be a culture of pornography, ‘Viagra and Jack Daniels’ on offer to men.25 Not surprisingly few men took up this offer of an investigation of post-patriarchal masculinity. It seems unlikely that any call for a men’s movement will be anything but a movement that blames women for the problems that individual men confront. But perhaps that is to be expected when the model for the negotiation of modern life is as a series of competing claims in a zero-sum game.
‘Rights for Whites’ was a slogan adopted by the far-right British National Party in the early 1990s, around the time that it won a seat on the Tower Hamlets Council for the Millwall ward. The BNP played on some feeling that white residents had lost out in the allocation of council services to Bangladeshis. The seat reverted to Labour at the next election. Investigating rioting in Bradford in 2001 Herman Ouseley found that ‘many white people feel that their needs are neglected because they regard the minority ethnic communities as being prioritised for more favourable public assistance’. While Ouseley was a bit sceptical about the claims, some in the Committee for Racial Equality took note. Chair Trevor Phillips, in a television programme for Channel 4 and the associated press publicity, argued that many of the assumptions of redressing inequalities were wrong, and said for example that ‘non-white school-leavers are more likely than their white peers to head for university’, and that ‘poor whites are the new blacks’.26 In the programme Phillips pointed to the way that some schools were taking the kind of remedial measures to make sure that white working-class children prospered that once had been reserved for minorities.
The feeling that Britain’s white working-class communities were losing out lay behind the remarkable vote in a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union in June 2016. While most of the country’s business and political leaders called for a vote to stay in the Union, widespread disaffection in the country among the less well-off led to a majority vote to leave. For the ‘Remainers’ it seemed as if there had been a revolt of the ‘left-behind’ against the multicultural society.
Whether men, or whites, considered as a group, could ever be the target of positive action on an equal opportunities model is hard to work out. The arguments for equal opportunities were always imagined as correctives to the advantages that whites and men had over black people and women respectively. ‘Rights for whites’, or ‘rights for men’ — by their controversial nature — seem to be claims that call into question the universalizability of the equal opportunities model.
Overall the equal opportunities model, in coming to fruition, has invited different groups to make claims within its logic. More recently, for example, transgendered individuals have been included in workplace policies over discrimination, and in 2016 the Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller has been looking at legislation to help. Miller could not help but notice the outcry of protest from people that she said were ‘purporting to be feminists’ over the inclusion of transgender people’s rights. But the transgender lobby is in many ways itself a creation of the logic of equality of opportunity. Inclusion in the list of those whose discrimination must be addressed is important for those individuals because it is the way that their broader social status is recognised.
Mainstreaming: the end of the CRE and the EOC
The generalisation of the case for equal opportunities, its adoption by business as equal opportunities policies, and the greater legislative framework supporting their adoption, was beginning to have some strange consequences for the special Commissions dedicated to them.
In Lewis Carroll’s book, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, the author has fun imagining a country where:
‘[W]e actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’
‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired.
‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected…’
With Britain largely committed, at
least on paper, to the ideal of equal opportunities for people of different races and genders, the question of why you needed a special commission to advance the case was bound to come up. Or as Carroll’s Mein Herr explains ‘we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’.
At a conference called by the Local Government Information Unit, ‘Equalities’, held in 1991, Gurbux Singh, who was then Haringey Council’s Chief Executive, argued that the dedicated equal opportunities units that had been pioneered by Lambeth and adopted by local authorities all over the country ‘were no longer appropriate’. What was needed was ‘mainstreaming’, getting all the local authority departments to ‘take responsibility for equalities work’.27 Singh’s approach caught on, and the race, women’s, and lesbian and gay units were closed. Haringey councillor Davina Cooper saw the changes as evidence of a downgrading of the importance of equality work. In some senses it was, as the revolutionary tide of ‘equal opps’ was giving way to more practical generalisation of the model. At Channel 4, Commissioner of Multicultural Programming Yasmin Anwar made a similar point, saying that the real success would be when there was no need for multicultural programming.
The question of what the role of the Commission for Racial Equality would be in a country that had ‘mainstreamed’ equal opportunities was one that Gurbux Singh himself had to address, when he took over as its chair. Under Singh the Commission had some campaigns to carry on with, like one over the problem of rural racism. Talking about the 2000 Race Relations Act, Singh said that it was ‘to make equality (as much as “value for money” and efficiency) an essential part of the way public services are conceived and delivered’. There was a private-sector focus, too, with the formation of a new business advisory group that was ‘inaugurated in July 2001 to discuss policy and strategy with leading British businesses’:
Our aim was to create a forum where ‘critical friends’ could air their concerns. The group is made up of representatives from IBM, Shell, BP, Landrover, British Airways, HBOS, Barclays Bank, Lloyds TSB, J P Morgan and HSBC.
These initiatives were not a marked departure from the way that the CRE had worked since David Lane and Peter Newsam’s day, except that all of the businesses that were signed up had by this point had equal opportunities policies in place for 15 years or more. The participating companies were those which were seeking to show their support for the government’s initiatives. Most of them would in different ways, particularly at the time of the banking bailout in 2008, be grateful for the government’s support in the years afterwards.
One initiative that the Commission sponsored was called ‘The Leadership Challenge’:
In signing up to the Leadership Challenge, individual leaders make a personal commitment to promote racial equality, both in their own organisation and more widely, through their sector, and to drive the creation and successful implementation of a corporate racial equality action plan.
The initiative was launched by Chancellor Gordon Brown in a speech in 1999. Brown told the assembled business leaders: ‘this process — clearly nothing more than good practice — needs to become the ordinary way of doing business. This won’t happen by itself — you as leaders need to make it happen.’28 The business challenge was notionally about race equality, but substantially it was about business leadership, and a platform for motivational waffle of the kind that was so influential then. ‘There is a duty upon all of us in positions of leadership’, said Prime Minister Tony Blair, ‘to try and offer a lead to everyone else. That includes government itself, and I am happy to take up the Leadership Challenge and to acknowledge that we’ve got more to do to make progress.’29 Only very tangentially was the Leadership Challenge about race at all. It was really about geeing up business leaders, creating a sense of a cadre, with a mission and common goals.
The Commission for Racial Equality’s work, like that of the Equal Opportunities Commission, was drifting. They no longer occupied the position of custodians of an ideal, or advocates for change. The changes that they had embodied were, by the new millennium, taken on by most people in Britain as if not an unalloyed good, at least the right direction to be going in. In May 2004, the government published a White Paper, ‘Fairness for All’, ‘outlining its proposals for a Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) to replace the existing race, disability and sex equality commissions, with additional responsibility for religion or belief, sexual orientation, age and human rights’. The Commission for Racial Equality put up some resistance, but broadly the position was won without much argument. By comparison to the outcry over the vague threat to the CRE in 1981, when the Labour government wound up the Commission, it went almost unremarked.30
On 1 October 2007 the Equality and Human Rights Commission was set up, with Trevor Phillips as its first chairman. At the time of writing the chair is David Isaac, a lawyer and former Chair of the LGBT campaign Stonewall. The Commission takes up a broad range of issues, from those of travellers’ rights to the impact of legislation on victims of domestic abuse. Its campaigning role, though, has proved more diffuse and less controversial than that of either of the two Commissions that it replaced.
— ELEVEN —
Contradictions in the System
Throughout the advance of the language of equality of opportunity there have been a number of sharp conflicts. To the proponents of change, it seemed clear that these were just the complaints of the old order, the backlash against progress. But that is not always the case. As with any emerging regulatory regime there are moments when the imposition of order provokes a reaction. Some of these early conflicts took place in the local authorities that first experimented with equal opportunities.
‘Race spies’
In 1986 Brent Council suspended the popular head teacher of the Sudbury Infants School, Maureen McGoldrick, who had been accused of refusing to take on a teacher because she was black, which McGoldrick denied. McGoldrick was exonerated by a panel of the governing body, but the local authority overruled them and suspended her. The Brent Teachers Association supported McGoldrick, as did local parents; even the teaching candidate Miss Khan, who had later been taken on, joined the strike against McGoldrick’s suspension. Only the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance joined Brent LEA opposing the strike — a position they later regretted as they were denounced as ‘parasites’ on black parents’ struggles. ‘Brent appeared to be defending only its own prerogatives and procedures, rather than the community’s rights’, reported Marxism Today: ‘the council appeared to be defending their own right to hire and fire, when they were defending their perfectly sound anti-racist policy’. But the Council were indeed defending their procedures when the community had already decided for McGoldrick.1
Ron Anderson, chair of the education committee in Brent, argued that the Brent Teachers Association was really pushing ‘their own campaign against compulsory Race Awareness Training courses’ and other anti-racist policies. RAT courses were often a source of conflict. In 1986 an inquiry into race relations in Manchester schools was launched under Ian Macdonald and Gus John after the murder of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah at the Burnage High School. The report looked at the culture of ethnically divided gangs in Manchester schools. They also drew attention to the way that Race Awareness Training had been put in place. ‘In practice it has been an unmitigated disaster’, they said, ‘leading to polarisation between black and white and to a potentially greater racial conflict’. ‘Since the assumption is that black students are the victims of immoral behaviour of the white students’, Macdonald and John summed up, ‘white students almost inevitably become the “baddies”’.2
In Lambeth a conflict broke out between social workers and the Council when 600 walked out in protest at disciplinary hearings called after the murder of a young girl, Tyra Henry, by her father in 1984. The issue was fraught with tensions over race. The girl and her father were black, the social workers mostly white. Under pressure to act, Lambeth Council set up an internal tribunal of four, tw
o of them race advisers, to look at the case. Social workers felt that the first report, issued after two weeks, was unfair: ‘Akin to a show trial in Eastern Europe’, said the British Association of Social Workers Southwark chairman, John Wheeler: ‘people were dragged forward and hectored and shouted at’. The chair of Lambeth Social Services argued that the black councillors understood the black community better: ‘A lot of us are more in touch with communities than the social worker.’ When the Council announced disciplinary action against three social workers a mass meeting of the department staff voted no confidence in Janet Boateng and her vice-chairman Stephen Bubb. An independent inquiry into Tyra Henry’s death, under Stephen Sedley, QC, concluded that the issue of race had contributed to the child’s death, but not in the way that was thought. The social workers’ lack of confidence to confront the black parents meant that they did not take action in time. Sedley also found ‘tension’ between Boateng’s social services committee and the social workers.3 Arguably the climate of distrust at Lambeth compounded the social workers’ caution.
The call-out culture
With the rise of equal opportunities, a number of sharp clashes over apparently rival claims and policies broke out. As the champions of these newer ways of understanding workplace relations were finding their feet, there were some ugly clashes. One gay activist described the mood at the Greater London Council, working on questions of equality around sexuality and class: ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘a system that was ripe for guilt-tripping and denunciations’, adding, ‘GLC equalities at times resembled a wartime bunker or a city under siege, riven by internal strife’.4
Believing that the political issues being advanced were crucial and could brook no compromise without betrayal, many of the activists working around equality issues painted themselves into corners. These conflicts were particularly bitter once equality issues were put into grievance procedures and codes of conduct. It was quite common in the local authority offices in the 1980s to find two or more co-workers locked in mutually antagonistic grievances taken out against one another, alleging discrimination. Where the claims made were evenly balanced in justice, as between a white woman and a black man, each alleging discrimination against the other, these disputes could go on for months with the work in the office paralysed as each party called on all other employees to take sides, the two glowering at each other over mountains of paperwork, all relating to their case, rather than their employment, which consumed their every moment.
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 26