INTRODUCTION

The year 2006 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the Commission for Racial Equality, and the end of an era in the way that Britain has tackled discrimination in society. On the eve of the creation of a new organisation to promote all forms of equality – the Commission for Equality and Human Rights – this anthology brings together many different voices to reflect on the transformation of Britain over the last 30 years.

Thirty distinguished contributors, one for each year of the CRE's life, discuss the changes that have taken place in society, politics, literature, the arts, the law, science and more, and consider the future that today's children are likely to inherit. A sense of contemporary Britain is also reflected in the poems and the photographs that run throughout the book.

As a whole, 30: At the Turning of the Tide is a chronicle of the way Britain and its sense of itself have changed. It stands as a lasting testament to this period of British history.

HOW FAR WE’VE COME

Adair Turner

Racial equality in Britain has progressed massively in the last 30 years; we should not allow important remaining problems to make us forget that fact. Blatant overt racism has almost entirely disappeared: there are no job or housing adverts warning ‘no blacks, no Irish’.

Some ethnic minority groups now outperform the white majority in educational attainment: some are highly successful in professions and in entrepreneurial business. Mainstream culture meanwhile is relaxed about racial diversity and intolerant of racism. Look at some television comedy programmes from the 1960s and 1970s and one is taken aback by what was then socially acceptable, and reminded of how much things have changed.

Much of that progress reflects the gradual effects of wide economic and social change. Inherited prejudices slowly decay with familiarity, and with new generations. Businesses will ultimately pursue their own interests, and self-interest means hiring the best talent, regardless of skin colour. Globalisation and global communication have made people aware of other economies and cultures. For most young people, racism becomes simply unfashionable, unsophisticated, uncool. But legislation has also played a crucial role in defining what is unacceptable, and in establishing new norms of behaviour, which, once established, become self-reinforcing. And legal sanctions remain important; overtly racist job adverts may have disappeared, but cases of egregious racist abuse and discrimination continue to shock us.

For 30 years, the Commission for Racial Equality has played a crucial role as the custodian of that legislative framework, as a researcher into progress achieved and into remaining problems, and as an advocate of further change. That role remains vital for the future.

In some ways, however, the challenges for society and for the CRE have

become more difficult. The very different economic performance of different ethnic minority groups suggests that self-reinforcing cycles of economic deprivation and social isolation can be as important a problem as straightforward racial discrimination, but the policy levers to address those barriers are less easy to identify and to implement.

Multiculturalism meanwhile does not appear as simple a proposition as it did 30 years ago; we struggle with defining the line between welcome cultural diversity and unacceptable rejection of society’s core values; we struggle indeed with defining what those core values should be. And respect for others’ religion is not as simple a proposition as acceptance of someone else’s skin colour. To be biased against someone’s race is both stupid and morally objectionable; criticising someone’s opinion or belief is an inherent right within a free society, provided the disagreement is expressed without violence or personal malice, and is not used to justify discrimination.

But distinguishing legitimate criticism from coded racism is not straightforward; and convincing devout believers that the right to criticise is a core value is not always straightforward either. In the years ahead, society will have to find a way through these complex issues while continuing to combat discrimination. The CRE, in whatever form, will have a crucial role to play in challenges both old and new.

BENEFIT WITHOUT PROFIT

Ajab Singh

In 1994, Saatchi’s were a pretty huge advertising agency with a lot of pulling power – the most famous name in the business. We were one of several agencies that the Commission for Racial Equality approached for help with marketing. They probably thought we wouldn’t be interested but we jumped at it. It was a non-profit project for us, and I was asked if I would be interested in overseeing it. It was an opportunity to do mould-breaking work in an area that hadn’t been tackled by the advertising industry. As a government body, the CRE didn’t really have much money, so it was a case of us pulling our weight in the advertising and media industry to pump up the budget through free advertising (on a cost only basis) and media space for the CRE to promote its messages.

I think the budget was about £100,000. At the time we worked out that if you really costed the campaign’s exposure, including adverts on TV, in print and on posters, any normal client of ours would have had to pay something in the region of £1.5 million. A lot of good will came from the press and media owners (particularly The Independent , which gave us a lot of space for free), and TV and radio stations that gave us free airtime.

What did we try to get out of the campaign? Our understanding of the situation at the time was that the CRE was under attack; it was picked on by certain papers, such as the Daily Mail . No matter what the CRE did, their attitude was always, ‘look how this government quango is wasting your money’. There was a feeling that no matter what good the CRE was doing, it was being undermined by certain sections of the media. Another problem was that many people simply didn’t know what the CRE was. So our starting point was how to address both issues. My feeling was that if we were really going to go for this, we had to jolt people out of their thinking and create advertising that would get talked about.

We decided to break the campaign down into four or five sections: one was a generic, overarching idea about racism, and the others reflected the sectors that the CRE was involved in, like employment, the criminal justice system and education. The approach was deliberately shocking and attention-grabbing. But the key thing about that campaign was that it was completely based on fact. For me, that was the make-orbreak point for that first campaign: if the CRE was going to go out and publicly call for action, it had to back it up with solid foundations. Much of our time was spent researching, collecting facts and statistics.

It was interesting to see what people responded to. The first advert we launched was about junk mail and I think a lot of people were outraged that at breakfast they were being forced to look at an advert with excrement in it. But it wasn’t done for the sake of controversy: it was based on the fact that this kind of thing was happening in Britain at the time.

People began to sit up and listen a bit more to the CRE once the adverts began. There were extreme right-wing groups that attacked the organisation immediately, but on the whole, the campaign was received incredibly well. Within the industry domestically and globally that year, it was the most awarded print advertising campaign in the world. It was the first time Britain had ever done a high-profile anti-racist campaign, so people hadn’t seen this kind of thing before.

We created a very, very powerful advertising campaign, and we as an agency got something out of it, as did the CRE. Saatchi’s have always done issue-related advertising; it’s a chance for us to give something back. But it is also an opportunity to create ‘showcase’ advertising, as well as to win awards. What was important was that we were careful to do it in a sensible way.

Some research into public recognition of the CRE was done six or seven months after, and I remember thinking that the results were incredible. Of course, you’re never going to reach everyone; the CRE could never spend the

money that major advertisers do. But considering what was spent, the improvement was impressive. Certain publications began to back off, and that word ‘quango’ disappeared.

By the second campaign, things had changed a little, and we moved on to focus on people who represented excellence in their field, and what motivated them. Launching Roots of the Future [a CRE publication looking at the contributions migrants past and present had made to this country] was about celebrating the benefits of multiculturalism and diversity in Britain. From that, we did various other projects, including radio campaigns highlighting the CRE’s work. We were involved in some of the early work on ‘Let’s Kick Racism out of Football’, which went on to become a huge campaign.

Over the two years of working with the CRE, we went from a strong, aggressive tone of voice to something that became a quieter presence. We had to do something first to get noticed, and we did. We got talked about on News at Ten , we got global coverage, other anti-racist organisations wanted to run some of our advertising. It was an interesting period.

I would have liked to develop the campaign further by going into schools, reaching people at a very early age. That would have been a great opportunity, a chance to get out a really positive message to the next generation. As long as racism exists – and while its form changes, I don’t think you can ever get rid of it completely – there will always need to be a counter-balancing voice giving people the real facts. I think it’s important that an organisation like the CRE, whatever shape it’s in, plays a role here. Whether or not you see an absolute result, it is important that you have a voice out there, because if that voice stops, other organisations can end up taking over.

When I first arrived in advertising, 20 years ago, it was appalling. It was a white, middle-class, Oxbridge industry across the board. You got clients who used

to say ‘I don’t want a black person in my advertising’. You saw very few black people on TV. That has all changed because corporate companies know they can’t behave that way any more.

I think there was still a feeling when I started that you needed well-spoken people to wine and dine clients, who were also mostly white and middle-class. But I’ve seen the most powerful change, in TV and everywhere. The advertising industry has realised that different people bring new ideas. This is a creative industry, and my approach is always going to be different from that of a white guy from Cambridge because my background and my points of reference are different. There’s a role for both of us.

Reflecting society in your advertising shows you understand the people you’re trying to talk to. The moment you don’t do that, a competitor will take your business. So it’s important not to live in a marketing bubble. Car companies are a classic case: 20 years ago you were lucky to see a black face associated with high value goods. It’s not a problem now. Over the last 10 years especially, advertising has embraced the multicultural society that is Britain. I think we’re there. Of course, there’s always room for improvement, but as a country we’re not as stiff as we used to be.

THE CASE FOR FREEDOM

AC Grayling

It is easy to be cynical about the idea of ‘the West’, a term broadly used to denote the collection of liberal democracies characterised by the rule of law and respect for human rights. But whatever cause for complaint they might otherwise offer, the states that make up ‘the West’ share a notable and praiseworthy feature: their ordinary citizens enjoy rights and freedoms, opportunities and possibilities, that were once the prerogative only of aristocrats.

The institutions and practices constitutive of Western liberal democracies exist because certain key notions have concrete application in them, one of which – freedom of speech – is fundamental to all the others. Without free speech, people cannot receive and impart information, debate matters of fact and opinion, take an informed part in politics, hold public officials to account, assert their rights and defend their interests, and speak up in the interests of others whose cause they care about. There can be no democracy without it. It underwrites the possibility of a free press and independent legal institutions. Without free speech this entire apparatus fails; and any interference with it or diminution of it constitutes a threat to all other freedoms and rights.

Because free speech is, in this way, truly fundamental, there has to be extremely good reason indeed for any limitations to be imposed on it. Each individual diminution of free speech has to be independently justified, and kept under review. There can be no careless mishandling of it, and certainly no blanket proscriptions. That is why the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights forbids Congress to make any law that abridges the freedom of speech or the press – a safeguard which has repeatedly proved to be a bulwark of American civil liberties.

The struggle for freedom of speech began in England when printing made the expression of views and opinions more difficult for authorities to control. The

first pre-publication licensing measure was introduced by royal proclamation of 1534, and succeeding governments made the restriction more severe while extending it from religious dissent to political opposition. The poet Milton famously attacked prior restraint of speech in his Areopagitica , and his arguments eventually became a cornerstone of freedom of the press in England, and inspired the First Amendment right in the United States. But in England the free speech principle was not fully accepted until the principle in libel law that speaking the truth constituted a greater libel than spreading falsehoods (‘the greater the truth the greater the libel’) was ended in the mid-nineteenth century.

The long struggle for free speech is another reason for being jealous of it in the face of persistent efforts by governments to limit it. At the same time, however, it has to be accepted that wholly unlimited free speech carries costs that are not always acceptable. The point is sometimes put by citing the example of shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded cinema. Speech that incites violence, and speech that embodies or encourages discrimination on grounds of race, sex, age and disability, raises serious concerns, and there is clear justification for imposing restraints on it.

But it is vital to be careful not to indulge in the careless thinking that sees this as a licence to extend restrictions into areas where they are not justified – for a prime example, speech that criticises or mocks religious beliefs. No one can choose their race, sex, age or degree of disability. But religion, like politics, is a matter of choice. In a liberal democracy, no one would dream of preventing people from challenging or satirising other people’s political outlook; no more should they dream of preventing challenge or satire directed at any other aspects of people’s choice of outlook. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, religious outlook is the result of upbringing in childhood, and for that reason does not appear to be a matter of choice. Yet in fact it is, because people can (and sometimes do) give up or change their religious outlook. One cannot give up or change one’s race.

It has become commonplace for people to claim to be ‘hurt’ or ‘offended’ in their religious sensitivities by what others say or do. It is important for the sake of free speech as a fundamental value that this effort at silencing others should not be conceded. In the two or three years before these words were written, different religious groups – evangelical Christian, Muslim, Sikh – variously attempted to shut down theatre productions, or to stop the publication of printed matter, or to have cartoonists punished, because something was said, acted or drawn that ‘offended’ the sensibilities of activists among these groups.

What others say can indeed offend, disgust, trouble or hurt. But the answer to free speech that does these things is not the silencing of speech but more free speech in return – in the form of criticism, defence, refutation, the giving of a robust response. Arguably, this should be the way that all forms of hate speech are answered, including even racist and sexist speech. But at least a case can be made for restricting these latter on the ‘shouting fire in a cinema’ principle, as a special case for special circumstances. One day, in a better state of society, legal restrictions even here might no longer be necessary.

In the last 30 years, British society has sought to entrench its traditionally tolerant and liberal character by legislating against racism and other forms of discrimination premised on unchangeable facts about people and groups of people. This has done much to help bring about positive changes in the social climate, not by eradicating discrimination entirely but by tempering its effect and providing remedies for those who suffer from it. This is greatly to the good. The laws in question placed constraints on free speech of the ‘fire!’ variety, as an inevitable component of achieving their aims. The constraints are limited and specific.

But in recent years, there has been an extension from this limited restriction into areas where it does not belong – where, indeed, free speech is crucially needed: namely, in connection with differences of ideology and particularly religious belief. This is wrong; it marks a worrying trend towards a reduction in traditional British liberal values, a sad reflection on the change in the political and social climate which 30 years ago was more progressive and optimistic than it has latterly become. It is no paradox that in the same recent period, parliament has passed a Human Rights Act; it is often the way that, as the reality begins to fade, lip service is paid to it in the form of a shadow version of it.

The classic case for liberty was stated by John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century, and it turned on the idea that only if people have freedom can there be the widest range of possibilities for human flourishing. Without freedom of expression, as the basis of liberty, this quest for the best human life cannot even start. Free speech is a fragile right; governments of all kinds, even in ‘the West’, are always conscious of the expediency of limiting it. One of the noblest of all causes is to defend it, even on behalf of those with whom you emphatically disagree.

THIRTY YEARS ON

Anthony Lester

My involvement with the campaign for effective equality laws began in the early 1960s, when I was in the USA studying at Harvard Law School. In 1961, I saw at first hand the entrenched racism in the Deep South during the period of civil rights activism. In 1964, I returned for Amnesty International to report on racial injustice in the American South during the ‘Long Hot Summer’. When I returned, inspired by Dr Martin Luther King, I joined Dr David Pitt and others to found a civil rights organisation in Britain, the Campaign against Racial Discrimination (CARD).

At that time I was a member of the Labour Party, and was one of the Labour Party lawyers lobbying the home secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, to introduce a broad and enforceable law to tackle racial inequality. We recommended that the law should give remedies, not only for racial, but also for sex and religious discrimination. We persuaded the home secretary to abandon his notion of making racial discrimination a criminal offence to be enforced by the attorney-general: Soskice accepted that the anti-discrimination part of the bill should be civil in nature. But we failed to persuade him to include employment, housing, education and the provision of services. The 1965 Race Relations Bill was confined to criminalising incitement to racial hatred and making it unlawful to discriminate on racial grounds in public places. It set up a Race Relations Board (RRB) and a process of conciliation. Only the attorney-general was empowered to bring legal proceedings.

Because the 1965 Act was fatally flawed, we campaigned for something better, together with Mark Bonham Carter and John Lyttle, the chairman and chief conciliation officer of the RRB, respectively, and a broad range of immigrant organisations. Roy Jenkins helped us behind the scenes as the then home secretary.

We were all much influenced by the experience of the United States. I helped Jenkins to write a memorable speech on racial equality in Britain, which he gave in May 1966, in which he defined integration ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’.

Our concepts of equality and integration were far removed from the muddled notions of multiculturalism which developed later. I wrote in Race and Law that it would

be entirely misguided for public authorities to tolerate the exploitation of children or the maltreatment of wives and daughters because such practices were condoned by a particular national, religious or cultural group. Prejudice and discrimination ought to be opposed with equal force, whether among white or black people, natives or immigrants; and cultural tolerance must not become a cloak for oppression and intolerance within the immigrant communities.

In 1967, Jenkins was able to announce that he had decided to extend the legislation (even though nothing in Labour’s 1966 election manifesto had foreshadowed this). Unfortunately, he was fated not to implement the decision. Jenkins was soon succeeded at the Home Office by James Callaghan, who introduced the 1968 Race Relations Act after rushing through an unsightly bill to exclude British Asian refugees from East Africa from settling in the UK, their country of citizenship, later found by the European Commission for Human Rights to have subjected this vulnerable group of British citizens to racially degrading treatment. The 1968 Race Relations Act was wide in scope but deliberately weak in enforcement. It created a Community Relations Commission (CRC) to promote ‘harmonious community relations’ by carrying out research, making recommendations to government, and helping to fund a network of community relations councils (later renamed racial equality councils).

In 1974, Roy Jenkins became home secretary again. I left the bar to work as his special adviser, developing new anti-discrimination legislation on sex as well as race. In the White Paper ‘Racial Discrimination’, we explained the need for

a determined effort by Government, by industry and unions, and by ordinary men and women, to ensure fair and equal treatment for all our people, regardless of their race, colour, or national origins. Racial discrimination, and the remediable disadvantages experienced by sections of the community because of their colour or ethnic origins, are not only morally unacceptable but also a form of economic and social waste which we as a society cannot afford.

We referred to emerging evidence suggesting that ‘the problems with which we have to deal if we are to see genuine equality of opportunity for the coloured youngsters born and educated in this country may be larger in scale and more complex than had been initially supposed’.

We argued that it was the government’s duty to prevent morally unacceptable and socially divisive inequalities from hardening into entrenched patterns. The White Paper recognised that a ‘fuller strategy to deal with racial disadvantage’ would have to be deployed, and that there was a need for urgent action, including using government contracts as a tool for securing compliance with the law.

We decided that the concept of unlawful discrimination should be extended to include not only direct discrimination (less favourable treatment on forbidden grounds) but also indirect discrimination (practices, procedures and rules which are equal in form but have a disproportionate adverse impact on a particular racial group, and which cannot be objectively justified). For the first time, alleged victims were given a direct right of access to courts and tribunals. We also decided to create the Commission for Racial Equality, which would have ‘a major strategic role in enforcing the law in the public interest’. Working side by side with the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), the CRE would be empowered, not only to support individual cases, but also to use new investigative and enforcement powers to tackle unlawful discriminatory patterns and practices. We also decided (contrary to my advice) to combine the new law enforcement functions with those of the CRC, which the bill abolished.

Jenkins left the Home Office in September 1976 and I returned to the bar. Our new strategy was not implemented as we had hoped. The Callaghan administration abandoned the promised use of government contracts to secure equal opportunity practices, and there was no effective implementation of the fuller strategy to tackle racial disadvantage. Those appointed as chairs and commissioners then and thereafter did not regard strategic law enforcement as the main priority for the CRE, and the organisation was not staffed with the degree of professional experience and skill required for that important role. The use of the CRE’s investigatory and enforcement powers to tackle persistent and significant discriminatory patterns and practices were eventually all but abandoned. Individual cases were supported even though they were weak or unlikely to have any value as precedents within an overall strategy of law enforcement. And the incorporation of the role of the CRC blunted the CRE’s cutting edge.

These broad generalisations do not do justice to the CRE’s achievements, but it remains the case that the CRE, and to a lesser extent the EOC, did not carry out the mandate given to them 30 years ago. Perhaps it was unrealistic to have expected that they would do so, especially in a context in which the courts

tended to doubt their legitimacy, and reviewed their actions excessively strictly when the commissions were challenged for allegedly abusing their powers. Perhaps they would have performed more effectively if subsequent administrations had given stronger political and financial support to their work. Once the brief liberal interlude of Roy Jenkins’ second period at the Home Office had ended, there was never the same enthusiasm for strategic law enforcement – especially when legal challenges threatened government practices.

The 1976 Act remained unchanged for more than 20 years. The CRE recommended repeatedly and unsuccessfully that the Act should be amended to require public authorities to promote racial equality. In 1997, when New Labour won power, Bob Hepple and I tried to persuade the government to review the existing legislation, with a view to introducing a comprehensive, coherent, userfriendly single equality bill, and an equality commission. But there was no political momentum for reform, so we set up an independent review under Hepple’s leadership. The report was published in July 2000 and a year later I introduced an equality bill modelled on the Hepple Report. It passed through the Lords, but died in the Commons for lack of government support.

Meanwhile, the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent report of the Macpherson inquiry persuaded Home Secretary Jack Straw to strengthen the 1976 Act by extending the prohibition against direct and indirect racial discrimination to public service providers, and by imposing a statutory duty on the public sector to promote racial equality. The way in which the duty has been implemented is excessively mechanical and bureaucratic, and the CRE is not well equipped to carry out the necessary monitoring.

The Equality Act 2006 provides the opportunity to create a new commission which combines equality and human rights, is independent of government control, and is fit for the purpose of using its powers strategically and effectively to secure compliance with the anti-discrimination legislation, and to seek judicial review of public authorities whose practices and procedures breach the Human Rights Act. Much will depend upon the appointment of the new commissioners and staff. Thirty years on, it is also essential for the single equality act, promised in New Labour’s election manifesto, to contain a coherent, comprehensive, userfriendly and non-bureaucratic scheme. It should strengthen, not weaken, the existing legislation; and it should not be another incomplete and inconsistent patchwork. The time is over-ripe for effective new measures, and an effective commission able and willing to tackle the problems of persistent and entrenched patterns of discrimination.

WHERE IS BRITAIN GOING?

Bhikhu Parekh

The Race Relations Act 1976 and the Commission for Racial Equality that it created were the products of their time. They reflected a particular way of describing, explaining and dealing with the prevailing racial situation, and advocated a particular vision of Britain. Basically their underlying philosophy was correct and has served Britain well. Considerable improvements that we have registered in this area, and which have rightly earned the country its reputation as a society at ease with its diversity, are a proof of this.

Several important changes have occurred in British society since 1976. Since we have not yet grasped their full significance, there is considerable confusion concerning the direction in which we need to move. I shall comment on four of them.

First, compared with 1976 we now have more ethnic minority MPs and peers, and even a few ministers, including one, and previously two, in the cabinet. Ethnic minorities are accepted as part of society and are good at using the political system. The media are generally more sensitive, and include ethnic minority reporters and columnists. The CRE is therefore neither the sole focus of national attention, nor the only agency in charge of race relations.

We also have the Human Rights Act, which provides basic protection to ethnic minorities and lays down the minimum standards around which to unite the country. The new Commission for Equality and Human Rights is expected to tackle all forms of discrimination within a common conceptual and institutional framework. This can be a source of considerable help to ethnic minorities, but it can also create problems. Race will lose its specificity. Racial discrimination will not enjoy the focal position it has enjoyed so far, and will lack a distinct organised constituency. Concern with human rights could also easily eclipse that with equality. We therefore need to explore how race issues can be best conceptualised and pursued in the new context.

Second, the past two decades have brought home to us that race relations in Britain cannot be insulated from the larger global context. The Rushdie affair, during which Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa , showed that local issues can acquire a global dimension. Conversely, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that global issues have a profound impact on domestic race relations. They radicalised a large section of our Muslim population, and even encouraged a small group to engage in terrorist activities at home and abroad. It is odd that while the prime minister rightly exhorts us to change our economic thinking in the context of globalisation, he fails to acknowledge that the effects of globalisationcannotbelimited tothe economy. Our foreign policy,whatwedo to and in other countries, has domestic consequences,and is a legitimate object of concern to those struggling to promote better community relations at home.

The third change, which is closely related to the second, raises important questions about the nature of citizenship. Citizenship implies a basic commitment to the country and a sense of loyalty. One may rightly protest against government policies, but as a loyal citizen. The question of loyalty never arose before 1976, nor for some time afterwards. Race riots occurred, but they never cast doubt on the political loyalty of immigrants. All agreed, including many of those who condemned the riots, that they were born out of frustration caused by systematic discrimination and exclusion, and reflected a desire to belong to Britain.

In the aftermath of the July 2005 bombings in London and the alleged plot to blow up planes which was uncovered this August, there is a widespread feeling that the loyalty of some young Muslims, albeit a small number, can no longer be taken for granted. The rhetoric of some Muslim leaders reinforces this feeling. They privilege religious identity, and argue that obligations to the Islamic ummah trump those to Britain. A political community is based on the opposite assumption that in normal circumstances, loyalty to it should override other loyalties. Not surprisingly, the irresponsible utterances and actions of a small section of Muslims have aroused deep fears among the rest of their fellow citizens.

A multicultural society is easy to accept and run if its citizens can trust each other to discharge their basic obligations and wish their shared community well. Once this basic trust is weakened, the willingness to accept the strains of multicultural society declines. We need to find ways of restoring that trust. The onus lies as much on Muslims as on the wider society. The former need to put their house in order, and the latter must find ways of tackling the causes of legitimate Muslim alienation. The CRE and other official organisations can do little in this area.

Fourth, in 1976 we held up integration as our model. We contrasted it with assimilation, and took it to imply that ethnic minorities should play their full part in the economic and political life of the country, while retaining such differences as they cared for. Our ideas on integration were vague, and subsequent years have revealed their ambiguities and tensions. Can minorities be said to refuse to integrate if they bring spouses from their homelands, demand faith schools, choose to live together, or confine their cultural lives to themselves? Some answer the question in the affirmative, and virtually equate integration with assimilation. In many circles today the vital distinction between the two is more or less ignored, and integration has become a vehicle of narrow cultural nationalism.

Take the recent controversy surrounding the veil. The veil is not new, and was worn in the 1970s and 80s. No one minded it then as it harmed no one, and was seen as a matter for the Muslim community. Today, all manner of specious objections are raised against it. It is said to imply a refusal to integrate. Why? Some of those women wearing it were born here, speak fluent English in local accents, vote in elections, and are gainfully employed. How can the veil by itself gainsay the reality of their integration? And why must integration extend to dress? Is the sari a symbol of refusal to integrate?

Sometimes it is argued that the veil is a symbol of patriarchy and gender subordination. It could be, but it might also be an act of choice, a protest against our sexually-obsessed culture, or a way of scoring political points or establishing one’s religious superiority. Even when it signifies patriarchy, the latter is not going to disappear simply by removing the veil. It could easily find less visible forms of expression.

If we are not careful, we may generate a moral hysteria that could have disastrous consequences for all of us. Large numbers of Muslims could feel deeply stigmatised, unfairly targeted and alienated, and turn inward, or worse. Other ethnic minority groups might wonder what differences would be picked on and whether it will be their turn next time. And wider society might build up an insatiable and destructive spirit of intolerance.

While building on the valid elements of the 1976 settlement, we need to revise it in the light of the changes occurring in our society. We need to appreciate and applaud the remarkable efforts large sections of Britain’s ethnic minority groups have made to integrate, and to build up the trust and good will that will entitle us to ask them to make greater efforts in directions where we think they have not done enough.

A CHALLENGING FUTURE

Bill Morris

The introduction of the 1976 Race Relations Act was a landmark statement for British society. By this piece of progressive legislation, Britain committed itself to a fair and just society built on the twin tracks of eliminating discrimination and promoting equal opportunity. For the first time, those engaged in the fight against discrimination were given the tools to do the job.

But above all, the Act was an empowering instrument, which gave individuals access to justice by enabling them to take cases of discrimination on the grounds of race to the courts, including industrial tribunals. In addition, through its remit for the promotion of equal opportunities, the Act enhanced the case for positive action and cemented the values of multiculturalism. While many employers were challenged by the provisions of the legislation, for trade unions the duty to comply was required on many fronts: as employers, service providers and representatives of their members.

Thirty years on, there is no doubt that Britain is a very different country today. No longer can you be denied a job or turned away from a restaurant simply because of the colour of your skin. So, yes, we’ve made huge strides since 1976. But that doesn’t mean that inequality has been consigned entirely to the history books. Subtle and discrete acts of institutional discrimination continue to disfigure many of our public and private institutions; sections of our communities remain stigmatised and victimised merely because of their religion; and while ethnic minority groups remain woefully under-represented in positions of power, wealth and influence, they continue to be painfully over-represented on every measure of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion.

There is still a long road to travel before we have completely erased every last vestige of discrimination and prejudice from our national life, and there is still a big task for the Commission for Racial Equality and its soon-to-be successor, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. But I also believe that, just as it has in the past, the trade union movement must play a pivotal role in tackling discrimination and promoting equality in the future.

If they are to play that role fully and effectively, trade unions must recognise that they do not exist simply to defend and advance the pay, terms and conditions of their members at work. As this country’s biggest and most influential civil society organisations, they also have a duty to reach out beyond the narrow confines of the workplace and their membership base to fight for the rights, and champion the causes, of all those in our society who suffer inequality and injustice.

Put simply, in the years ahead, building an inclusive and just society should be as much of a trade union priority as securing fair employment legislation, protecting jobs and negotiating collective bargaining agreements. Such an approach to trade unionism will obviously throw up a number of important challenges. Not least among them will be the need to ensure that the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights is far more than the sum of its merged parts; it would be a setback for race relations if the work, skills, expertise and focus of the CRE were to become poor relations within the new organisation.

Another key challenge is that posed by globalisation, characterised by mass migration. Faced with this new global reality, trade unions will need to develop, advocate and campaign for asylum, immigration and socio-economic policies that manage migration while tackling exploitation. They must mobilise workers to combat extremism while defending civil liberties. They must encourage sustainable economic growth while promoting social cohesion.

Globalisation also brings in its wake what is arguably the most fundamental challenge confronting all of us; namely, building a society that is rooted in, and reflective of, the changing dynamics of race, faith, culture and identity. And I believe that, if we are to succeed in meeting this challenge, we must dedicate as much time to agreeing and establishing the shared values and common principles that bind us together, as we do celebrating the diversity that makes us different.

The scale and the scope of the challenges facing us cannot be exaggerated or underestimated. But, having witnessed and experienced the changing face of UK race relations up close and personal, I know the real difference to people’s lives made by a combination of enlightened law, an effective enforcement organisation and campaigning trade unions. Together they have made our country a better place and will ensure that progress made is progress sustained. And together they will succeed in taking us forward into a future where the right to be different and the right to be equal go hand in hand.

HOLD THE MIRROR UP

Bonnie Greer

In 1986, I lived in New York City, in ‘Loisaida’ – the name that the Hispanic community had given to the old Jewish Lower East Side. Black people, Jews, Ukrainians and Puerto-Rican Americans lived side by side in a volatile, stimulating mix.

I worked, at that time, as dramaturge for the most important producer in public sector theatre in America, Joseph Papp. I was also literary manager of a small theatre in Harlem called the Joseph Thurman Theatre, as well as having my work produced in small theatres in New York, attending writing and directing classes in midtown at the Actors Studio, studying under the legendary Elia Kazan, and at the venerable Negro Ensemble Company under the great American-Caribbean playwright, Steve Carter.

Yet, for me, it was the UK that held the pulse. It was the UK theatre scene where the diversity of black people was encouraged and celebrated. Twenty years later, after having taken out citizenship and working here as a writer and critic, I find that that glorious reality – with its nascent promise of perhaps being the first country in the Western world to present, through theatre, the complexity of people of African descent and other minorities – has been all but destroyed, leaving us at a kind of Year Zero.

Partly this has to do with Thatcher’s scorched earth policy in relation to the arts, which sent everyone scurrying. Partly it has had to do with the ascendancy of the director; partly as a consequence of subsequent ‘Thatcherite’ policies; partly in response to the public’s growing appetite for ‘entertainment’ (which can encourage a kind of conservatism and ‘safety’); and partly, perhaps, because what I perceived from my vantage point in New York City was not in fact real.

As much as this country prides itself on its various art forms, Britain is considered supreme by the rest of the world in theatre. That Shakespeare flourished in

Britain seems to me to have been no accident. It is right, therefore, that it is the theatre which embodies the greatest emergency, and the greatest failure, in the cultural sector with regard to ethnic minorities.

Many people may ask how a statement like this is possible. They point to the promising young playwrights we have, the actors and actresses. But on closer inspection another picture emerges.

When casting my latest play this past summer, I needed a black actress who could sing. I was told by more than one black theatre practitioner: ‘Bonnie, you’re going to have a hard time. Showboat and Porgy and Bess are in town.’ Setting aside the undoubted fact that the scores of these two works are among the masterpieces of American musical theatre, in their books, they hardly present a timeless, or even realistic for the time, portrait of black life. And why is it that Caroline, or Change – the most interesting piece of theatre, in terms of stagecraft and experimentation, currently on in Britain in which black actors might have the remotest chance of appearing – comes from New York?

The theatre is a living, breathing art form, which at its best reflects the inner and outer reality of a nation, examines its past, holds the mirror up to its present and perhaps points a way to its future. This is Hamlet’s charge to the Player King. But the theatre has largely become derelict in this duty. It has, for the most part, restricted ethnic minorities, not allowing onstage the breadth and depth of our experience, nor has it made room for those writers who can provide it. Plays that deal with interior reality, devoid of cantankerous outside circumstances; right wing plays; plays by ethnic minority writers not about (dare I say it?) themselves but other aspects of the human condition do not exist. Where are the experimental musicals, the ethnic minority women in leading roles, the artistic directors, board members, executive directors, producers, directors on our main stages?

If the theatre is to mean anything anymore, it has to join the modern world. The present situation, if allowed to continue, will ensure its total irrelevance to future generations, no matter what race they may be. The cry ‘Bring out your dead’ will not apply only to some Christmas panto.

A near fatal illness requires radical, emergency surgery.

1. Subject every publicly funded theatre to a diversity audit. This will demonstrate to ethnic minority tax-payers and other interested parties that the work is truly getting done. We can no longer afford to leave it to the sector alone. The times are much too urgent. This audit should happen every two years.

2. All artistic directors in publicly funded theatres should have fixed terms only. After that, if they care to, they can then reapply for their jobs. No more artistic- director-for-life; no more fiefdoms. Fixed terms will allow fresh blood to invigorate the sector and destroy once and for all theatre’s greatest ill: the ubiquitous and pernicious White Boy Network.

3. Handsomely reward those theatres that diversify their boards. Too often theatre boards are filled with the usual Great and the Good. Of course, theatres need people who can raise money and lobby the government, but theatre also needs the young; those who don’t speak the language of the Charmed Circle; those who don’t adhere to the Received Wisdom; and those who see no point in theatre at all. They are the most valuable. They’ll keep everyone on their toes.

4. A moratorium, please, on all new initiatives toward diversity in the theatre. Let’s implement the ones that have already been suggested, two, five, seven, 10, 15 and 20 years ago.

Culture is one of the creators of our humanity. It is one of the tools through which our species asserts its common relationship with itself, other species, the earth and the higher realm. I’m proud to say that every cultural organisation with which I am associated accepts this, and is passionate both about its role in society and the need to assert culture as a vital civilising force now and for the future.

At a time in which our values are being challenged and changed, it is through culture and in particular the theatre, where humanity can investigate, demonstrate and celebrate itself in all of its diversity. It is through culture that we can build a better world.

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

Brendon Batson

Football is a habit. Everybody has a story as to why they support a particular team: ‘it was my granddad’, ‘it was my dad’, ‘it was my mates’. But for black people, that generational habit doesn’t exist. The game is recovering ground, but it’s important to remember that for many people from ethnic minorities, it was starting from nothing. Football crowds are more diverse than they used to be, but they are still not representative of the population. This is partly a result of the violence, overt racism and threatening behaviour of the 1970s, which went unchecked and meant that many felt it wasn’t safe for them. Clubs need to do more to engage with their local communities.

Football has changed greatly over the last 30 years. At every level, stadiums are more inviting places. In Britain, hostility against black players has effectively died out. Those who chanted racist abuse in the past may still be there, but they’ve been silenced. Whether people’s personal attitudes have really changed is more difficult to measure, but I think we can be reasonably optimistic. There’s more diversity now, education is much more sophisticated and people are far more tolerant: the issues remain, but the problems are much less overt.

Legislative changes are partly responsible for the improvements we see today. We now have a structure in which people can report racist comments, racist chanting is a specific offence, and players can be sent off for racist comments. As far as the players go, football is a very good example of an integrated industry: talent is easily spotted, so good players will rise to the top; you can’t hold them back.

Off the pitch, there is a self-perpetuating insularity in terms of who makes it to the top. There are only 92 clubs and 92 managers. Unless there is already someone from an ethnic minority in these positions, nobody aspires to it. Paul Ince has just been taken on as Macclesfield manager, but there are only three black managers in the football league, and none in the Premiership. I have no answer to breaking this cycle of an unrepresentatively white administration. The process is getting better, but it’s still down to the people applying that process. Clubs are more aware of the situation, but often

they simply pay lip service to it. Football has changed because of society, but society has also changed because of football. Football has had an impact because it is the world game. It is headline news, always in the public eye. It’s a shop window for diversity and behaviour in Britain, all the more obvious because of the contrast with other European countries. The situation in the friendly between England and Spain in 2004 was especially embarrassing. The racist comments Luis Aragonés, Spain’s national manager, made about Thierry Henri gave the crowd a licence to behave appallingly. Equally shameful is the failure of the international governing bodies to take racism seriously enough. FIFA and UEFA are stumbling around in the dark not knowing how to deal with the situation. When they fine someone £3,000, it makes a nonsense of all the pronouncements they make. FIFA have threatened to deduct points from clubs whose supporters chant racist slogans, but their threats are often empty.

Another big change in the last few decades in Britain has been the influx of foreign players. People worry about English clubs not having enough English footballers. At Arsenal there are very few English players, but there are lots of young players being developed, even if they are from all over the world. I don’t think any Arsenal fan thinks that Cesc Fabregas is anything other than an Arsenal player. He came at an early age from a very big club and he has signed an eight-year extension to his contract. It doesn’t matter where he is from. But it is true that football has become a big money entertainment industry, and some clubs are not being built from a strong foundation. Parachuting people in can be a problem. Winning masks a multitude of potential problems: players may kiss the badge for public consumption, but their hearts aren’t necessarily in the club.

Looking to the future, I see two main challenges for football: the game has to avoid becoming predictable, and clubs have to keep their support. The top clubs have too much power and money compared with the rest of the game, and that could make football less exciting. Clubs should operate within their means: turnover should be important, not rich benefactors. Supporters are being priced out of going to matches as ticket prices continue to rise. There has to be a collective look at a national pricing structure.

There have always been doom and gloom mongers saying this or that will be the end. Even in 1966, people said that Ramsay’s wingless wonders would be the death of the game. It never happened. Football always survives.

ROLLER-COASTER FAITH

Callum Brown

In 1976, the days of church power seemed to be numbered in mainland Britain. The swinging sixties had dented the dominance of Christianity within British culture, and people were emptying the pews in droves. Sexual liberation, followed by women’s liberation, accompanied for some by drugs and hedonistic popular music, led a generation away from the religious restraint and moral austerity of the 1950s. There was no party-political revolt, no coordinated state campaign, and no mutiny of secularists to cause this. The sixties did not lead so much to an uprising against Christianity, but to a gentle slinking away of religion from the thoughts and everyday culture of the vast bulk of 1970s’ Britons. No one could say exactly when it went. One day religion was there; the next, it wasn’t.

But then it came back again – though not as the same thing at all. To the amazement of most Britons whose faith had oozed away, religion reared its head once more in the brutal cultural shock of a world apparently ruled, since 9/11, by religious division. This was the not the result of a revival of religion among Britons in general, nor the resumption of going to church or saying prayers before meals. Those things show no sign of returning. But what had arrived by 2006 were new things for this country: religions defined by race, and government policy to encourage faith schools and welfare. A curious society evolved, divided between an increasingly militant faith minority and a wholly un-militant secular majority. It was a struggle between belief and culture.

Faith has had its ups and downs in Britain. In 1954, the Revd Dr Billy Graham preached to two million people at crusade meetings at Haringey and Wembley Stadium, and in 1955 to over a million more in Glasgow. He brought showbiz to British churches, attracting the respectable middle-aged from the suburbs in their fur coats and tippets, but also attracted the young – what the Daily Express

described as ‘girls in sweaters and drainpipe trousers, youths in duffle coats and beards’. But a decade later, in 1966, Graham returned to London, and his car was surrounded in Soho by a jostling crowd of cynical ‘hip’ young people, with a young blonde woman being dragged by police from the car roof. Grabbing a loud hailer, Graham told them: ‘I haven’t come here to condemn you. God is willing to forgive you every sin you’ve ever committed.’ He was laughed at and mocked. Though he still attracted many to his religious services, young Britain as a whole seemed to reject the Christian message.

Young Britain was at a cultural turning point that was to last for 35 years. There was a revolt against deference to a church and the establishment it represented. While government dismantled the Christian state – repealing religiousinspired controls on abortion, homosexuality, censorship of plays and radio, divorce, suicide, statute blasphemy, Sunday sport and trading, and much else besides – the young stopped thinking and talking about religion. Organised Christianity crumbled. Between 1976 and 2000, church adherence fell by 45 per cent, churchgoing by one-third, the religious baptism of children by over half, religious marriage by 40 per cent, and marriage itself – that quintessentially religious- inspired contract – by 35 per cent. Religious organisations like Sunday schools and Bible classes collapsed to the point of near extinction.

What kept faith from shrinking even further in late-twentieth-century Britain was the arrival of small but vibrant religious traditions. Migrants from the Caribbean brought to England and Wales a strong personal and community faith, founded in the Christian culture of Anglicanism, Methodism, Presbyterianism and Pentecostalism fostered by centuries of colonialism. But coming to Britain, many found a hostile reception in the churches. Tens of thousands turned instead to Pentecostalism, which developed into one of the truly booming parts of British Christianity.

From former British colonies, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and East Africa, came others, founding mosques and gurdwaras across London and the cities of England and Wales, and later in Scotland and Ulster. Though faith was important to community and domestic life, it tended not to be militant or fundamentalist. First-generation migrants expressed their faith as a link to homelands and cultural identity. In many ways, multicultural Britain took shape in the 1970s and 80s – both in principle and in practice – as faiths acting as racial and regional identities. Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism represented colour, diversity and joyous spirituality in a post-Christian country needing to take the austerity out of its own religious heritage.

But in the late 1980s and 90s, the next generation of British Muslims changed. Many said that when their parents arrived in Britain, they had been ‘meek, invisible immigrants grateful to be allowed in’ (in the words of AS Ahmed, in his book Islam Today ). Through commercial and professional success, some of the Muslim young became even more secular than their parents, while others became involved in a culture of fast cars, drugs and street crime. But for others, there was little short of an Islamic revival among the young of the 1990s and 2000s, notably young women, for whom dressing modestly in the hijab (scarf), burqa or niqab (veil) has become a claim to female religious identity. It is the young religious people of Islam, Christianity, and of Judaism too, who have become militant, less often the old.

Declining in numbers they may have been, but the rising militancy of the faithful has been accompanied by a higher political profile. Since 1989, Britain has gone through the Rushdie affair, the rise of the Revd Dr Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and of charismatic renewal; it has seen challenges by both evangelicals and Roman Catholics to liberal laws on homosexuality and abortion, and rising religious opposition to attempts to legalise assisted suicide, drugs and common-law blasphemy. A few politicians have even started to bring religion to their public persona. In 2003, it was reported that Alistair Campbell had said of the Labour government: ‘We don’t do God’. Yet in 2006, Blair said on the Parkinson show that religion played an important part in his decision to enter politics. When asked if it still informed his view of politics and of the world, he replied: ‘Well I think if you have a religious belief it does’.

But then, in what might be seen as acknowledgement of just how jarring religious rhetoric can be in the ears of the very secular British, Blair added: ‘but it’s probably best not to take it too far.’ So, even the prime minister restrains his language of religion in public. In the roller coaster that has been British faith since the 1960s, spiritual expression now needs to be carefully handled. For all that faith is on the political agenda in new ways in the twenty-first century, politicians reflect how Britain has become one of the most secular electorates in the world.

THE ‘M’ WORD

Courttia Newland

I have always believed in a multicultural society. Why wouldn’t I? Growing up black in the UK, I’m hard pushed to remember the last time that I felt like I was part of some homogeneous mass of people that think, feel and believe the same things as I. From the cradle (and probably to the grave), I have long become used to being part of a culture that is not only separate from the mainstream, but is also influenced by traditions and cultures spanning thousands of years, from all over the globe. My favourite meal is chicken roti. I was brought up on Hong Kong kung fu movies, and as a teen, I ate couscous and learnt how to swear in Arabic. Maybe it’s because I’m (sort of) a West Indian, an oxymoron of geography in itself. Or is it something more? Is it that multiculturalism is in some way built into the DNA of our African bloodline? That the descendants from the cradle of civilisation, in growing and spreading to spawn the varied cultures of the world, in turn wallow within the sea of change and diversity that has evolved throughout history?

There is much evidence of this. In my travels around the globe, I have firstly felt surprise, and then vindication, whenever I have been to remote places only to find evidence of black communities in isolation. Iceland, the Philippines, Thailand, Oman. Black people living side by side with, or in some cases, within the dominant culture. Wherever I have gone expecting to find homogeneity, I have found more multiculturalism, more questions. On my return to the UK the questions have always become more profound. I have no doubt that there isn’t a place on earth that has as many different colours, creeds and religions living together on one land mass. But are we really a melting pot society as the Mayor of London proclaims, or is this just an unhappy accident, a by-product of colonialism? Is learning to cook jerk chicken during Black History Month a true indication of mainstream culture’s acceptance of a formerly immigrant population as their own?

I would like to say yes, but I find myself hesitating even as I write. It would be a great thing, of course it would, to be fully accepted as part of the fabric of this society. For the most part though, and for most people, we are painfully aware that we are not. There have been individual cases of multicultural success – there always have and always will be, as I am in no doubt that this is the true nature of mankind. Yet on the whole, the ‘black cultural experience’ is segregated into neat little compartments for mainstream consumption; the black interest section of the bookstore, or the record shop (where it is swiftly renamed ‘urban’). The late night programming slot on TV. We are constantly being told that what interests us doesn’t interest our wider society unless it echoes the thoughts and opinions of that society.

I am not sure what long-term effect this will have on the black community, but the warning signs are not good. Our inclusion into government-funded television, the high street window of the nation, consists of the recent shows The Trouble with Black Men , The Crouches and Shoot the Messenger . While opinions will vary wildly about the strength and content of these individual programmes, most black people are in agreement that we as a community could be better served by the BBC. In bookstores our infamous and highly paid ‘black authors’ (I’ve used inverted commas because I know that they will have trouble with the term) steer clear of any reference to their own ethnicity. And in the field of music, a genre of art that has been monopolised by African-American youth culture, record labels rely heavily on black musicians who portray the darker, seamier side of street life; then abandon their artists when promoters refuse to book them because the police have closed down all their venues. Even visual artists are short-changed; recently, I watched a documentary on BBC2 focused on the next generation. Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst were heavily featured, but there was no mention of Chris Ofili, or even Steve McQueen: both black artists, both Turner Prize winners. Emin has never even won the prize, although she has been nominated. I often wonder if this is the multicultural society that won us the Olympic Games.

It is impossible to talk of multiculturalism as it pertains to black people without mentioning the ‘S’ word. Slavery. Always a taboo subject in the eyes of our mainstream culture, it will be difficult to ignore next year, when the abolition of slavery will be celebrated worldwide. As usual, in the UK, black people have been largely misinformed in all the best cases, or ignored in the worst, when it comes down to exactly what form the proposed celebrations will take. No one seems to know.

It’s almost as though the government is orchestrating its own response, devoid of voices that speak for the ancestors of the enslaved. There seems little chance of people being taught the cold hard facts that surround the subject; that England’s wealth was built on the back of inhumanity and cruelty practised by its own ancestors; that the Africa of today exists mainly due to the loss of its countrymen, its mothers and daughters, as well as the pillaging of its many resources. That slavery was abolished, not due to the will of so-called philanthropists like William Wilberforce, but because of a slave rebellion in which the slaves burned down so many plantations it became economically unviable for the trade to continue. Teaching these things might make the wider society appreciate that black people are not sponging or begging when we reach the UK; that we have as much right to share in its wealth as any other resident. Perhaps, as the hands that built the Empire, even more.

Walking through Trafalgar Square one Saturday afternoon, I noticed that a stage had been set up. I enquired and found out that in the evening Scissor Sisters would be playing live for charity in support of AIDS in Africa. While I applaud their generosity, I would also like to ask the Mayor of London when we, as black people, will be allowed to support our brothers and sisters in Africa through song, performance and dance. When I looked at that stage, I saw a prime opportunity for London to showcase its true diversity, to have musicians of all disciplines and cultures standing shoulder to shoulder, centre stage for the entire world to see. I saw a chance to promote unity instead of an album.

I have a strong suspicion that multicultural attendance at the concert was not too high, but no one seemed to care very much. As I drifted away, feeling vaguely disgruntled, somewhat ignored, I reflected on the opportunity that had been missed. There will be others, no doubt. I can only hope that we, as a unified, wildly diverse community, can take the reins and seize the time.

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE

David Edgar

Last year the Arts Council published Respond, ‘a practical resource’ for arts organisations developing a ‘race equality action plan’. Veering between the patronising (‘a well-written press release can raise your audience profile’) to the questionable (the only example of a ‘mutually beneficial relationship’ for an arts organisation is with ‘business and finance’), this 106-page document is written in a parodically bureaucratic style (‘the main deliverables of your plan should be the objectives and their success criteria’), and is exactly the kind of document which gives the race relations industry a bad name. When faced with a difficult policy question, it is either perfunctory (integrated casting is mentioned once, in a list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’) or silent (the report was produced in February 2006; there is no mention of Behzti).

This is a pity because, overall, the Arts Council has encouraged, enabled and in some ways led a huge change in the character and purpose of the arts over the last 20 years. Set up to defend the high British arts against the threat of American pop culture, the Council now promotes the idea that arts organisations should both attract and look like the wider communities they serve. Integrated casting is one obvious and highly successful example of this process. When I came into the theatre in the early 1970s, black actors played identifiably black parts in contemporary plays and servants or fairies in Shakespeare. The battle for colourblind casting in plays where colour is un-coded has been a long one (it caused a stir when David Oyelowo was cast as Henry V1 at Stratford five years ago), but the principle that where it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter has worked exactly as its proponents said it would: that a white father can have a black daughter has become as solid a theatrical convention as the aside or the fourth wall.

The dramatic increase in the number (and therefore the experience and range) of black, and later Asian, actors hasn’t been matched backstage. Jatinder

Verma’s 30-year campaign to open different theatrical cultures up to each other has been impressive in its scope and achievement. But, as Michael Billington pointed out six years ago, 18 revenue-funded black and Asian theatres have dwindled down to two. The Arts Council’s failure to enable a permanent home for Talawa last year was the latest of a succession of disappointments in the battle for buildings, and there has been no non-white director of a major British theatre company.

And while there is now a significant canon of British ethnic minority plays, this work has tended to sit on the periphery of other movements. Since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court 50 years ago, theatre has provided a site for many hitherto invisible communities to enter into conversation with themselves and each other. In the late 1950s and early 1960s – from Look Back in Anger via Arnold Wesker’s Roots and Chips with Everything to Edward Bond’s Saved – young men from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds questioned the cultural consequences of the democratisation of Britain which arose from the Second World War. In the 1970s, the huge generation which had gone to university during the Vietnam war challenged the limited ambitions of the social-democratic welfare state, calling for much more radical change in a country that appeared to be in freefall political, economic and cultural decline. In the 1980s, an upsurge of young women writers posed an alternative model of change, based around personal identity, while in the mid-1990s, the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ generation of playwrights, many of them gay, responded vibrantly and sometimes violently to a complex crisis of masculinity that followed (among other things) 25 years of feminism, 15 years of Thatcherism and 10 years of AIDS.

Throughout this period, important black playwrights charted the black (and, to a lesser extent, Asian) experience of migration to, and living in, a rapidly changing Britain. Plays like Errol John’s groundbreaking Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (triumphantly revived by Paulette Randall three years ago) and Barry Reckord’s Flesh to a Tiger and Skyvers were produced at the Royal Court in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ten years later, Mustapha Matura and Michael Abbensetts depicted the struggle of first generation West Indian immigrants, and, later, their sons and daughters. The upsurge of plays exploring the politics of personal identity embraced Hanif Kureishi’s stage output in the early 1980s and the work of Winsome Pinnock a bit later on. Meanwhile, white writers intermittently addressed the changing character of post-colonial Britain. Trevor Griffiths, Stephen Poliakoff and I all confronted the growing impact of the National Front, and Caryl Phillips recently described Barry Keeffe’s 1979 Sus as ‘probably the most successful “black” play of the late 1970s’.

Taken as a whole, and together with the work of other key figures like Edgar White, Alfred Fagon and Tunde Ikole, this canon adds up to a considerable intervention in British theatre, providing a particular – and perhaps unique – picture of the making of multicultural Britain. But, paradoxically, this work has only begun to feel like a movement quite recently – since multicultural Britain has been called into question by the war on terror. This is partly because of changing generations: following long-established figures like Yvonne Brewster and Josette Bushell-Mingo, there is a remarkable cohort of increasingly experienced ethnic minority directors and producers. But there’s also a sense that, as for other groups in the past, theatre has become a site for a necessary conversation between ethnic minority theatre-makers and their audiences.

This was brought home to me with a vengeance early last year, when I went to five plays in one theatre. All of them had overwelmingly or entirely nonwhite casts, all of them attracted substantial ethnic minority audiences, all but one were written by ethnic minority writers. That would be remarkable enough for any regional theatre, but it is doubly remarkable as the theatre was the Birmingham Rep.

After the forced closure of the play Behzti in December 2004, two things were widely predicted. One was that theatres would become more conservative in their programming of potentially contentious work (particularly on religious and sexual themes). The other was that it would be more difficult for theatres to retain an already fragile non-white audience.

Well, the Rep didn’t have much choice about its post- Bezhti repertoire: it had already announced a programme of plays on issues as bland and uncontroversial as African-Caribbean gun crime, Muslim brothels, terrorism, communalism and teenage sex. During their runs, the theatre kept a rough head-count, by ethnicity, of audiences for all its shows. In the studio, Asma Dar’s Chaos (set in a Muslim home, concerned with careerism, communalism and terrorism) gained a 40 per cent, largely Asian audience; about the same as Yasmin Whittaker Khan’s Bells , the play about Muslim brothels. A revival of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (in Birmingham en route to London’s West End) achieved the largest black audience of its pre-London tour (nearly one-third) in the Rep’s 900-seater main house. Over 60 per cent of the audience for a short run of Roy Williams’ Little Sweet Thing (co-produced with Ipswich and Nottingham) was non-white.

Although all of these plays had tough and challenging content, Little Sweet

Thing was probably the most controversial of all. Williams’ story of a black excon who tries but fails to break free from a criminal sub-culture contained two white characters, both of whom are threatened and bullied by black characters, whom they seek first to emulate and then to out-do. The idea that emulating black urban culture can turn weak nice people into strong nasty ones is a pretty brave notion for a black writer to express.

So why was over half the audience black (responding, on the night I saw it, with enthusiasm and recognition)? Why, after the Behzti protests, did a play about Muslim brothels survive and flourish (despite an attempt by a local radio station to whip up protests, by alerting the police to non-existent pickets)?

One reason is consistency. Before Behzti , the Birmingham Rep studio presented well over 20 plays by black or Asian writers, from Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East , via Charles Mulekwa’s A Time of Fire and Sudha Bhuchar’s Balti Kings to Amber Lone’s Paradise . In the same period, the main house hosted twelve shows with predominantly ethnic minority casts, including Peter Oswald’s adaptation of The Ramayana , Jatinder Verma’s Journey to the West and Benji Reid and Felix Cross’s Slamdunk . Like the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and the Tricycle in North London, the Birmingham Rep understood long ago that the way to grow a new audience is to sow the seed, water it, and keep mowing.

A second reason is that, clearly, these plays are dealing with subjects of acute concern to audiences, which are not being debated elsewhere in the same way (witness, more recently at the Rep, Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummies and Amber Lone’s Deadeye ). Young Asian women formed a substantial part of the audience for many of the plays I’ve listed, including Behzti itself (clearly, the sexual abuse of a young Sikh woman by an older Sikh man struck a chord among female Asians from many different backgrounds).

The fact that theatre is providing a site for hitherto unheard voices to speak (as it has done for the last 50 years) makes the Behzti affair even more bitterly ironic. Along with Roy Williams and Kwame Kwei-Armah, young Asian women writers have understood that theatre is a particular kind of place, with particular rules of engagement, which arise out of its character as a public but intimate space, where human activity is not enacted directly but represented. If that site closes down – if theatre becomes, God forbid, the kind of exclusive, elitist place it was held to be in the years before 1956 – then audiences will suffer just as much as practitioners. It’s up to everybody, from the Arts Council to individual artists, politicians to producers, to defend the theatre as a site, not for targets, criteria or deliverables, but for saying those things which are unsayable elsewhere.

IMMIGRATION AND THE NATION STATE

David Goodhart

Britain’s liberal democratic state, and the political class that manages it, are more confused about immigration than 15 years ago. The issue now cuts across many of the usual tramlines of political thought and, by forcing us to consider the boundaries of national cultures, citizenship and belonging, it seems to challenge the universalist tendency of modern liberalism.

The Labour government has reflected some of these new uncertainties. On the one hand, it has overseen the biggest ever flow of migration into Britain, and has been more positive about this migration (and about minority rights in general) than any preceding government. On the other hand, in response to public anxiety, it has introduced stiff controls on low-skill migration, and adopted a rhetoric of national citizenship that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

It used to be so much simpler, especially for people on the left. West Indian and Asian immigration into Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was economically and culturally enriching. Moreover, it was socially just, allowing people from poorer countries – many of which had suffered under British colonial rule – to become richer at the stroke of an immigration official’s pen. Opposition to immigration, and to immigrants, was seen as the product of a primitive, pre-liberal nativism or racism.

This narrative, although born on the left, became the dominant national story about immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, partly thanks to the success of organisations like the Commision for Racial Equality, but also thanks to its convergence with another narrative, born on the right, about free markets and globalisation. If goods and capital were now to flow freely around the world, then labour surely must be allowed greater freedom to migrate too? Meanwhile a new political worldview was also emerging – particularly on the liberal left – that was anti-national and post-socialist, and rooted in a mix of universalist liberalism (cross-border human rights) and cultural relativism (all cultures are equal).

Much of this narrative is now in retreat. This is not because the average British citizen has become more racist (although it is true that the far right has never been as electorally successful). Thanks in part to legislation such as the Race Relations Act, the principle of anti-discrimination is now more widely embraced and practised than ever before in British history, and the average Briton is more comfortable with racial difference than ever before (consider the rise and rise of inter-racial marriage). But the political worldview described above has proved far too insouciant about the nation state and feelings of identity and belonging. Moreover, it has been unable to formulate a practical political response to the challenges associated with the sheer scale of immigration since the late 1990s – one million new legal residents between 1998 and 2004, then the 500,000 new citizens of the EU since 2004 – nor the growing scepticism about multiculturalism.

Although almost all opinion polls show large majorities opposed to mass immigration, and politicians of all parties talk about ‘managed migration’, setting out clear arguments for limiting immigration remains controversial. Even a politician as robust as David Blunkett shied away from contemplating a ‘cap’ on immigration, when pressed to do so in a television interview. One reason for this, as the Oxford philosopher David Miller has argued, is that it is difficult to make the case for limiting immigration ‘without at the same time projecting a negative image of those immigrants who have already been admitted’. It is possible both to argue that every member of the political community, whether native or immigrant, must be treated as a full citizen, enjoying equal status and equal respect, and that there are good grounds for limiting the overall number of new immigrants. But this requires more sensitivity than our adversarial political conversation sometimes allows.

Another reason for the difficulty in formulating a liberal case for immigration control is the continuing influence of liberal universalism. It is now taken as axiomatic in the political discourse of most developed nations that all humans are morally equal and worthy of equal regard, wherever they happen to live. This truism appears to undermine the case for favouring our own national citizens above those of other countries, but it does not prevent us doing so in practice – for example, we spend 20 times more each year on the NHS than we do on development aid. In any case, it is a non sequitur to suppose that the moral equality of all humans means that we are equally obligated to all humans. It is

quite possible, indeed desirable, to believe that all humans are morally equal and yet to consider that national citizens have special obligations to each other that do not extend to all humanity – after all, we do not consider our own families to be morally superior to others, yet we would not hesitate to put their interests above those of others. Until a couple of hundred years ago, the basis of this national ‘specialness’ would have been mainly ethnicity – shared ancestry, history, sacrifice and myths. In multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies, the basis of specialness is citizenship itself.

But what is the moral basis of the specialness of citizenship? I believe it is ultimately a pragmatic claim relating to the efficacy of the nation state. Most of the things that liberals desire – democratic legitimacy and accountability, equality of citizenship, economic redistribution, strong welfare states, the shared language and norms that can create the bonds of fellow-feeling – only work effectively at nation state level. It is national citizenship, membership of the national community, that grants us the legal, political and social rights that we associate with the good society.

For this reason we should be glad, as the smoke clears from the great globalisation explosion of the past 25 years, that the nation state is still standing, if not wholly unscathed, then in reasonably good shape. It is true that, as economic borders and regulations have fallen away, some of the traditional government levers for controlling the national economy have lost their power, but as the nation state has stopped doing some things (like controlling the flow of money across its borders), it has started to do other things (like regulating what we eat more closely).

In technologically complex states, national governments will continue to loom large in the lives of citizens. In most of western Europe the state still accounts for more than 40 per cent of GDP, on average. And even in the EU, which has greater ‘porousness’ between nation states, and a more developed supranational structure than anywhere else in the world, the nation state is still easily the most significant element in the political lives of citizens. Consider what matters to most people at election time – personal tax levels, public spending, the health system, education, crime and policing, immigration, foreign policy. The EU impinges very little on any of these things.

This has been a long preamble to establish two vital points: in democracies the interests of existing citizens must come first, and the nation state is still central to political life. Of course, this does not preclude individual citizens, groups of citizens, or even whole countries having a strong interest in the wellbeing of

people or countries outside their own nation states, but it does underline the fact that immigration should be considered first and foremost from the point of view of the interests of the citizens of receiving states. With the exception of genuine asylum cases, immigration is not a right. And it is perfectly legitimate for receiving societies to choose migrants on the basis of who would fit in most easily and contribute most.

Immigration is always in the interests of the immigrant, otherwise the painful and disruptive business would not be voluntarily undertaken. It is often in the interests of some, if not all, citizens of the receiving country too. And while there is no doubt that most immigrants make a valuable contribution to the life of their new country, that is a by-product of their primary motive to seek a better life.

With this in mind, I want to consider two broad arguments that support a liberal case for restricting immigration: first, the economic issues surrounding labour markets, public services and fairness to existing citizens, particularly poorer ones; and second, the more intangible questions of culture, community and cohesion, and how much demographic continuity the good society requires. The costs and benefits of immigration tend to be very unevenly distributed among the citizens of receiving countries. Supporters of mass immigration base their case on economic growth, the replenishment of ageing societies and the fact that the work immigrants often do allows existing citizens to get better jobs. All of this may be true, but if the immigrants are low skilled (and bring their families), they will not necessarily add to per capita GDP. Furthermore, they will grow old too, and the impractical goal of stopping the population from ageing would require tens of millions of migrants over a 50-year period. Lastly, even if migrant labour is not taking jobs from existing workers – because the quantity of employment in an economy is not fixed – it usually helps to keep wages down. That is good for employers and richer people, but less good for people on low incomes (often recent migrants themselves). When it comes to immigration, the left appears to dispense with its usual scepticism about the benign working of the capitalist economy.

The relationship between public services and immigration is also complex. While many migrants provide essential care services in both the public and private sector, they may be resented as consumers themselves of scarce welfare services. This is especially true when newcomers are felt not to have ‘earned’ their access to benefits or housing; for example, when universal criteria based on need allocate council housing to a large, poor, newly-arrived family, ahead of existing citizens who may have been queuing for years.

This leads to the second argument for liberal scepticism about mass immigration. Strong communities are based on continuity, shared experience and trust, and it takes time before their members feel comfortable about sharing their resources with newcomers. If immigration is too high or too rapid, or if immigrants continue to live in ‘little Pakistans’ or ‘little Somalias’, the ‘them’ will not become part of the ‘us’ and Britain will become a more fragmented society. Even for those newcomers who do make an effort to be part of the society they have joined, it takes time to turn formal equality into ‘felt’ equality.

How much integration is required in societies with large and diverse ethnic minority populations to engender the solidarity that underpins a generous welfare state is not clear. And what exactly the means of integration should be in liberal societies that put a high value on individual choice is also not clear. But it does seem to me that the standard multicultural argument – so long as I pay my tax and obey the law, British society has no claim on me – is a recipe for the ‘thinning out’ of society. Some degree of commitment to one’s fellow citizens, and to the public norms and symbols of British society, is necessary for social solidarity to flourish.

WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?

David McCrone

Anniversaries, like birthdays, are good moments to take stock. They have a capacity to make us realise how much (or indeed how little) has changed in our lives. Once we have adjusted to the shock of how quickly time passes, we are better able to make sense of key moments and processes. So with 2006, the thirtieth anniversary of the Race Relations Act, and of the Commission for Racial Equality.

So what has changed? Thirty years ago, most of the so-called ethnic migration from the Caribbean and the Asian sub-continent into the UK was complete, and yet such a process still had to work its way through into new conceptions of what Britain was becoming, and what it meant be British. Back then, Britain still thought of itself as a monocultural, even a mono-national, society constructed on the twin anvils of warfare and welfare: especially the experience of total war a mere generation previously, and the homogenising function of the Welfare State. Back then, the British thought of themselves as a single, largely white society, born and brought up in these islands. So unprepared were they, culturally and socially, for inward migration that they constantly over-estimated the numbers coming to the UK. And if people came to this country, they thought, then perforce they must adjust to the British Way of Life.

It is a measure of how much things have changed in the last 30 years that such a phrase is redundant, or at least confined to the cultural and political margins. If indeed there ever was a ‘British way of life’, then it has undoubtedly become plural, and more importantly, highly contested. These days we find politicians across the spectrum making speeches about ‘being British’, itself a reflection of how problematic and diverse national identity in these islands has become. Three interlocking trends are significant. In the first place, Britain is shifting its self-conception from being an ‘emigrant’ to an ‘immigrant’ society. Whereas once we thought of ourselves as peopling settler societies like Australia and Canada with our kith and kin under the influence of Empire, by the final quarter of the twentieth century we were adjusting to a turnaround in population flows. A few dramatic statistics

make the point. Whereas the decade 1973 to 1982 saw a net outflow of just under half a million people, the following decade up to 1992 had reduced this by half, though still a net outflow. By 2002, almost four million people came, and fewer than three million left, a net inflow of around one million. By 2005, net international migration into the UK from abroad had become the key factor in population growth, with the largest amount coming from the accession countries joining the EU in 2004.

This underlines the second shift in British self-conceptions: that we have become, whether some like it or not, a much more European country than we were in 1976. Then, the ink was barely dry on Harold Wilson’s 1975 referendum to keep the UK in the EEC, as it then was. Now, we have grown used to Polish plumbers and Slovak skivvies, and between 2003 and 2004, net inflows of non- British EU citizens increased five-fold. As an open economy and society, Britain has transformed itself into a much more multicultural one than it had ever been.

Thirdly, the UK has become, formally, a multi-national state. Devolving government to the nations of the UK actually began in the 1970s but was stymied in Wales and Scotland by political resistance in 1979, before becoming reality 20 years later. In the 1997 referendums, Scots voted three to one in favour of devolution, while in Wales it was a much closer-run thing: fewer than 7,000 votes out of more than one million gave Wales its National Assembly.

Nevertheless, the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales have, in their own ways, reinforced a ‘civic’ rather than an ‘ethnic’ definition of national identity. In other words, because you live in the respective territories and are governed by their devolved institutions, you are, by that definition, Scottish or Welsh. In Wales in particular, this is important. Because, ironically, a significant proportion (roughly a quarter) speak and understand the Welsh language, there was always a question as to whether you could claim to be ‘really Welsh’ if you didn’t speak it. In Scotland, on the other hand, less than two per cent speak or understand Gaelic, and while the Scottish parliament is pleased to adopt bilingual signage in English and Gaelic for symbolic purposes, language is not the cultural identifier it is in Wales.

In other words, the linguistic tariff which non-natives must pay matters far less in Scotland than it has done in Wales. Nevertheless, because ‘English’ is such a lingua franca in the modern world – it is interesting, in passing, to note that the

English language has long since lost its unique correspondence with the English people (contrast that with German, French or Italian) – language does not operate as a prime cultural marker of national identity in these islands.

Devolution has not in itself led to a significant jump in the numbers calling themselves Scottish or Welsh. In Scotland’s case, it is well over 80 per cent anyway, and in Wales 70 per cent, even though around six out of 10 people in each country would (also) call themselves British, thereby adopting dual identity. Even in England, where the distinction between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ has historically been far less clear-cut, as befits a country containing 85 per cent of the UK population, seven out of 10 describe themselves as ‘British’, and six out of 10 as ‘English’, not that far out of line with their Celtic neighbours to the north and west. Only in Northern Ireland is the self-description ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ a clear-cut indicator of one’s political and constitutional attitudes, the former closely tied to political Unionism and Protestantism, and the latter to Republicanism and Catholicism. Elsewhere, we muddle through, using the complex and fuzzy vocabulary of territorial identity as and when it suits us, often to the confusion and bemusement of foreigners.

In a further twist, because parliament and assembly elections are deemed under Westminster electoral law to be ‘local’ elections, you don’t even need to be a British citizen to vote. In this way, simply living in Scotland and Wales gives people the right to participate in politics, and helps to counteract the commonsense notion that you are only a ‘national’ if you are born in a country. These days, terms like ‘nation’ and ‘country’ are ambiguous, referring as they can do to devolved territories as well as to Britain as a whole (just to confuse matters, the ‘United Kingdom’, to give it its Sunday title, technically includes Northern Ireland plus the three countries on the British ‘mainland’).

So who do we think we have become? The late and former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, waspishly observed in a speech in 2001: ‘Chicken tikka masala is now a truly British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences’. Cook started something. Politicians have lined up to extol Britishness and, post 9/11 and 7/7, to urge Brits to be Brits in ways which suit their political purposes. The problem is that what ‘British’ means cannot be easily answered. You will get quite a different answer in Scotland, for example. Indeed, there, saying you are ‘British’ (rather than ‘Scottish’) places you far more on the right of the political spectrum than it does in England (where, to date, saying you are ‘English’ performs a similar function). Relatedly, people belonging to

so-called ethnic minorities (itself surely a problematic and contested concept these days) are far more likely in England to describe themselves as ‘British’ rather than ‘English’. North of the border, being a hyphenated Scot (Scottish Muslim is the most common) is far more likely than self-defining as a Brit.

What will happen to ‘us’? Much depends on who we think ‘we’ are. I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s comment: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)’. For some people, it is all rather disconcerting. ‘British’ as we knew it in 1976, let alone in 1946, is no more. We use the term these days as a shorthand way of describing a quite transformed country. To some, teaching people to be ‘British’ is the imperative. For others, ‘British’ is something of an empty box; you can put into it what you want. Perhaps, to continue the metaphor, if you over-tighten the screws on the box, it will fall apart. Perhaps ‘integration’ comes about because we have the good sense to adopt a latitudinarian view of national identity, to recognise the multi-dimensionality of ‘Britain’. The key is to go on asking the questions about what it means to be British in the twenty-first century, rather than coming up with definitive answers. Questions mean that things don’t get set in stone. The fact that in 1976 the questions weren’t asked very much probably indicates that back then, we didn’t have the vocabulary and repertoire to problematise identity.

Where will we be in 30 years’ time? Britain may, like the Cheshire cat, be merely a smiling trace on the cultural landscape of these islands. On the other hand, it may have evolved into a bundle of Whitman’s contradictions and anomalies, cultures and nations, hybrids and transformations. To return to our birthday motif: speaking as someone who was born immediately post-war, and who has lived through both 30-year periods, it has been something of an unpredictable journey, but not one you could describe as boring.

BRING ON THE PIONEERS

Fiona Millar

I left school in 1976. I had gone back for one extra term for A level re-takes, the consequence of having put my social life before studying for much of the sixth form, and proof that being a well-supported student in what was then a high- achieving selective school wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of academic success.

I left behind me a school system in a state of flux. By the mid-1970s, the emergent comprehensives were starting to mitigate the stark divide between the grammar schools and secondary moderns in many parts of the country. In spite of the well-publicised myth that the 11-plus provided a ‘ladder out of poverty’ for working-class children (a claim that has relied heavily on highlighting individual successes without establishing how representative they are), it was clear to anyone educated in most grammar schools then that home background was largely reproduced in the school system.

While some children with parents in unskilled, manual jobs did pass the 11- plus, the majority were educated in secondary moderns, many of which were poorly resourced and without sixth forms. Most university graduates came from professional and managerial backgrounds. Ethnic minority pupils, often among the poorest in society, tended to do worst of all.

Thirty years on, my own children go to school in the same London borough in which I was educated. Although the class and racial difference in outcomes for children has by no means been ironed out, I am proud to be able to send them to good, mixed comprehensive schools, which are well supported by the local community.

In spite of the consistently bad press that comprehensive schools have received over the last 30 years, usually at the hands of journalists who don’t use them, there is no doubt that educational opportunities have opened up for thousands of young people who didn’t have them before. In 1968, just 18 per cent of students left school with five O levels. Today the equivalent figure is over 50 per cent. The number of young people going on to higher education has trebled.

Some comprehensive schools may not be as good as they should be. Lack of funding, low aspirations, weak leadership, high pupil and staff mobility, and the fact that many urban schools are still not really comprehensive, have all no doubt been factors in schools that fail.

But no one now publicly questions the founding principle of comprehensive education – that children are of equal worth. Nor would any politician dare to suggest that some children merit a better education than others, or that we should return to a system where an elite did extremely well but standards were depressed for the rest, and 80 per cent of children started their secondary schools feeling like failures.

In theory therefore, 30 years on, England provides a more or less equal system of public education. In practice, though, the situation is far from simple. The 1997 Labour government’s mantra of ‘education, education, education’ led to record and welcome investment in school buildings, teacher training, leadership and the primary school curriculum.

However this was accompanied by a continuation of the Conservative belief that ‘diversity and choice’ and a ‘quasi market’, in which schools compete against each other in league tables and for the best pupils, would somehow magically raise standards for all children.

A powerful private sector continues to offer a highly resourced education, with ready access to the higher status universities, to an affluent minority. Within the urban state sector, children are now divided up in an ever more subtle ways by specialism, ethos, faith and in some areas, academic tests, into what the London schools commissioner, Tim Brighouse, calls ‘a dizzyingly steep hierarchy of institutions’.

The overt selection that blighted the post-war years has given way to many new forms of covert selection. While primary schools remain largely comprehensive and have shown the greatest improvements across the board, children are still ‘sorted’ at the age of 11, with the poorest children often ending up in the least successful and most challenging schools.

That gap in attainment along race and class lines may have narrowed slightly, but it is still a shameful stain on the English school system, which the superficially seductive notion of ‘diversity and choice’ has failed to eradicate.

More recent education reforms have included some thoughtful ideas, such as the ‘Every Child Matters’ proposals for more integrated children’s services, extended schools, massive investment in early years and targeted personal tuition to tackle the continuing inequalities.

However, these too have been overshadowed by often contradictory marketdriven policies. Instead of complementing community-based projects like extended schools and children’s centres with radical reform of the school admissions system, to help schools achieve the more balanced intakes they need, they will be expected to ‘compete’ amidst a proliferation of independent state schools run by external providers with the freedom to choose which children they admit.

More faith-based schools are to be encouraged into the maintained sector, also with the freedom to admit only children of their faith, a development that appears likely to encourage segregation rather than social cohesion.

And amidst the rhetoric about freeing up the curriculum, personalised learning and ending the model of ‘one size fits all’ education, young people still face a highly prescriptive testing and exam regime dominated by GCSEs and ‘gold standard’ A levels.

In the early days of the old post-war tripartite system, some educationalists did talk about ‘gold, silver and metal children’. No one would speak in such blunt terms now. But the structure of the exam system, allied to a complex cocktail of low expectations, unwitting discrimination, institutionalised racism, and the traditional English academic curriculum, have historically led to poorer outcomes for many ethnic minority and disadvantaged white pupils.

The current solution to the attainment gap and our poor record of keeping young people in school post-16 is to offer 14–19 year-olds a range of vocational diplomas. Schools will be expected to collaborate to offer every student an ’entitlement’ to different academic or vocational paths.

New opportunities to engage pupils de-motivated by academic study are welcome, but in a culture driven by league tables and exam results, will all those institutions in Tim Brighouse’s ‘dizzying hierarchy’ really be ready to share out pupils? And while the A level remains the ‘gold standard’, will parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications become a reality?

However good the intentions, we may be effectively turning the clock back. Rather than sorting children at 11 into their gold, metal and silver categories, that transition could now take place at 14 with the old grammar/secondary modern divide simply reappearing in an infinitely more devious form.

The government’s decision in 2005 to reject the findings of Sir Mike Tomlinson’s enquiry into 14–19 education, which proposed one wrap-around diploma to incorporate academic and vocational qualifications, might in the next 30 years prove to be the rashest political decision of all.

If 20 years of the quasi market in schools tells us anything, it is that simply introducing competition and endless reorganisation of school structures hasn’t delivered excellence for all children.

We should learn the lessons from that and focus on ‘managing the market’, and tackling the perverse incentives that exist for schools to admit and invest in some children while locking out or excluding those they don’t want to teach. That means an aspiration, not just to fund state schools at the same level as their independent sector counterparts and to reform admissions, but to finance pupils progressively so that the most disadvantaged get the personal attention and support they most need.

It means prioritising not business sponsors, but first-class heads for every school, and making the lowest attaining schools, with the most disadvantaged pupils, most attractive to the best teachers.

It also means confronting what children learn, how they learn, how they are assessed, and possibly following the lead of Scotland and Wales, where they have fully comprehensive systems which are now trying to develop a more engaging curriculum with less testing, more teacher assessment and simplified qualifications. This would bring us in line with countries like Finland, where high standards co-exist with high equity and where teachers are autonomous, valued, highly trained (to Masters degree level), and where learning rather than the regurgitation of facts is emphasised.

The simplest and most profound way to understand the values of any society is through its education system. It would be good to say now, 30 years on from 1976, that we have schools that offer equal opportunities to all young people and which no longer reinforce existing privilege or disadvantage.

That is not possible – yet. We have come a long way, but achieving real quality and equality will depend on a bigger vision, like the one the early comprehensive pioneers had, for schools as the route to a fairer society, as well as the courage to take the tough political decisions needed to achieve that.

WHO CAN PASS THE SPELLING TEST?

Frank Furedi

Throughout most of modern history, Britain enjoyed the relatively privileged status of being able to take its national culture for granted. Compared with most European countries, there was little flag-waving or outbursts of patriotic fervour in the UK. Indeed British intellectuals frequently derided the ‘unhealthy nationalism’ of their European counterparts. They extolled the kind, restrained and tolerant sense of British nationhood that was said to characterise their culture. Writing in the early 1960s, the Oxford-based colonial commentator Margery Perham boasted of the special qualities of British nationalism due to ‘our exceptional unity, our island position, and the confidence arising from our power’, which ‘may have bred in us an unconscious kind of nationalism, one that seldom needed to assert or even to know itself’. In one sense Perham was absolutely right. A powerful sense of racial, moral and national superiority based on legacy of imperial achievement dominated the selfimage of the British elite. Unlike their insecure continental counterparts, the British elite did not always have to remind the world what defined their nation. Britishness did not need to be spelled out.

By the time of the 1976 Race Relations Act, it was difficult to argue that that Britain possessed an ‘unconscious kind of nationalism’ that did not need to be made explicit. At the 1964 by-election at Smethwick – two years after Perham penned her words – the Labour MP, Patrick Gordon-Walker, lost to a Conservative candidate who coined the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. Immigration had become an important issue and race relations were thoroughly politicised. Understandably during the next two decades, the focus was on immigration and on race relations. And despite the diminishing sense of a shared national identity, relatively few observers asked ‘what does it mean to be British?’ And when they did, the question was often stated in a hesitant and round-about way. When, 16 years ago, Norman Tebbit posed his famous ‘cricket test’, it was interpreted as a statement about the questionable loyalties of immigrants to the UK.

‘Which side do they cheer for?’ asked Tebbit, as he observed that ‘a large proportion’ of Britain’s Asian population failed to pass the ‘cricket test’. However, the very fact that he demanded such a statement of loyalty betrayed a sense of insecurity about the status of Britishness.

Questioning the loyalty of immigrants has assumed an even more intense form in the early twenty-first century. However, such questions actually can be interpreted as an attempt to evade answering the far more difficult problem of what it really means to be British. In previous times, a legacy of imperial confidence spared the Establishment from asking that question. Today it is a sense of insecurity and confusion which encourages Britain’s political and cultural elites to constantly talk about it. In retrospect it is evident that the debate about race relations and immigration was less about ‘them’ than about ‘us’. Inventing cricket tests or citizenship tests for others is driven by the imperative of giving some kind of meaning to being British.

The many attempts to give meaning to a British identity expose the mood of disorientation driving the project. Take Gordon Brown’s speech, ‘The Future of Britishness’, given in January 2006. In it, Brown expressed his aspiration for a ‘common patriotic purpose’ which ‘binds people together’ and can ‘motivate and inspire’. He claimed that ‘you must have a clear view of what being British means’ and stated that British patriotism is founded on ‘enduring values’. However, his roll-call of values – creativity, inventiveness, enterprise, fairness, liberty – represent a shopping list of desirable attributes, rather than a cultural statement of Britishness. They are values embraced by virtually every modern nation and do not add up to a distinct national identity. Is it any surprise that politicians are continually arguing that we need a debate ‘about who we are and what we are as a country’? When Ruth Kelly launched her Commission on Integration and Social Cohesion in August 2006, she asked ‘have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds?’ The answer is possibly yes.

Concern with community isolation has intensified since the events of 7/7. But apprehensions about groups segregated from the rest of society can serve to distract attention from how the ‘rest of society’ feels about itself. It is worth noting that the so-called mainstream or majority society is itself often ambiguous about public displays of British national identity. During the 2006 World Cup,

millions of St George flags were displayed throughout England. Tessa Jowell, the UK culture secretary, famously flew two flags from her official car. Yet many were less than comfortable with this display of flag-waving, and less than certain that it had become a symbol for a tolerant, inclusive patriotism.

New citizenship ceremonies are not very clear about what it is that people are signing up to. Spelling out the meaning of Britishness is fraught with difficulty. It is not a lack of intelligence that prevents politicians from doing so. Communities gain definition and meaning from shared experience, and learn to express that through the idiom of everyday life. Government initiatives and citizenship projects, no matter how well-designed, are artificial substitutes for that experience. National and cultural identities are not brands that can be invented. Such inventions do not touch people in the conduct of their lives. In any case, a patriotism born out of defensiveness and insecurity is likely to be far too inwardlooking to inspire people living in modern globalised society.

Genuine allegiance needs to be earned rather than declared. People’s loyalties evolve through engaging with an inspiring public culture, one that offers them a genuine role. Instead of dreaming up schemes about how society can reconnect with its past, our focus should be on encouraging people to take responsibility for their future. Community isolation and segregation will be overcome when people perceive their wider engagements as an attractive option.

MAKING CHANGES

Gurpal Singh Virdi

I am a police officer currently serving at New Scotland Yard. I am dedicated to the police service, in which I have served for 24 years. I am also one of very few officers to have exposed racism and discrimination at an employment tribunal against my employer, the Metropolitan Police Service.

I grew up in Southall in the 1960s, subjected to the ‘bussing’ experiment, where ethnic minority children were forced to attend schools away from their boroughs, meaning many hours of travelling. As a Sikh boy, my long hair was pulled regularly and I was beaten up for being different. The teachers often sided with the culprits. Influenced by my family’s police and military background, and feeling that the police service represented the fight for justice, I made up my mind to join at a very young age.

When the Race Relations Act came into force in 1976, I welcomed it. Even then, I could see the significance of the creation of the Commission for Racial Equality. The race riots of the following decades confirmed that the struggle for equality was going to be a difficult task for the CRE, as well as for the various communities of London, for employers and for the ordinary person.

After working for a few years in the private sector to please my parents, I made a decision, against the wishes of my father, to work for the largest employer in London. I joined the Metropolitan Police Service as a police constable in 1982. My first posting was not, as I expected, in west London, but in south London – I felt at the time that someone who did not appreciate community ties must have thrown a dart at the map of London! Racism and injustice were rife in the police service, which really opened my eyes. My main task was to patrol the rough estates, but things backfired on the postings sergeant (who deliberately gave me the worst jobs and set me up to fail) because the black community welcomed me, as an ethnic minority officer, and we worked together to reduce crime.

Although a successful thief-taker, I faced obstacles in my professional development. In comparison with my white colleagues, my career did not progress, even though I felt that I was working twice as hard as them. Despite 24 years’ service, I have made little progression, while white colleagues have reached higher ranks – even some of the probationary police officers that I trained are now of higher rank than me.

In 1997, non-white staff on Ealing division received racist hate mail. As the only non-white supervisor, I asked for an independent investigation, because younger ethnic minority officers were fearful about continuing their service, but my request was refused. At the same time, I was investigating the racially-motivated stabbing of two young Asian youths by five white youths. This incident had parallels with the Stephen Lawrence case, the main difference being that it was a non-white sergeant who gathered evidence, made arrests and saved lives. After raising concerns about the lack of commitment of my white colleagues to this investigation, I was arrested for allegedly sending the racist hate mail and was immediately suspended from the police service.

I felt that my treatment and my experience while investigating the stabbing showed that changes to police practices had to be made. Using my experiences of the stabbing incident, I made a submission to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, despite the objection of my senior officers. In 2000, I was unfairly dismissed from the police service by an internal disciplinary panel for sending racist hate mail – something I had not done. I had never dishonoured my uniform.

I took my fight to an employment tribunal, supported by Hounslow Law centre and the CRE. The nightmare that I, and my family, endured since 1997 finally ended in February 2002, with a letter of apology from the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens. This followed a previous ruling by the employment tribunal in 2000, under which I received the highest amount ever to be awarded for injury to feelings in a racial discrimination case. I had also finally received recognition for my work during the investigation of the 1997 stabbing, in the form of an assistant commissioner’s commendation in 2001.

The case was a landmark ruling, as it was one of the very few cases where the evidence was heard in the public domain. Today, law students study Virdi v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis (2000) as part of their employment law module. All police officers studying for the sergeants’ or inspectors’ examination are now expected to understand the case.

The decision of the employment tribunal led to the Metropolitan Police Authority’s inquiry, the Virdi report, which raised several serious concerns about

the investigation and disciplinary proceedings, the role of the police federation in supporting ethnic minority officers and the way grievances cases were handled. The police service has been under scrutiny for many years. During my service, I’ve seen recommendations made from at least five major reports. They have all been implemented on paper, but the reality is somewhat different. All these reports are in the public domain, but if you go to any Metropolitan police department, you will find their copies locked away in a cupboard gathering dust. Lip service, diversity departments and glowing written reports on equality are not enough.

Lord Scarman introduced the Police Complaints Board, which was replaced by the Police Complaints Authority, which has now been replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Changing titles does not bring about the justice that complainants seek. The CRE has contributed towards changes in the way police complaints are investigated, but has not flexed its muscles sufficiently to take enforcement action.

In 2002, going against my wife’s wishes, I returned to the police service after four years of suspension, because I still felt I had lots to do in the job I loved. When I first joined, I didn’t have anyone turn to for help or guidance. Now, young officers have staff associations and role models to help and guide them. I hope I am one of those role models. Recently, one of my projects has been helping young people away from crime by organising leadership and confidence building courses for them. The Metropolitan police, however, has still not recognised my work – there remains a sense of bitterness by a few who cannot move on. Although I hold a law degree and other qualifications, I feel I have not been allowed to perform to my full potential.

Successful policing relies on public confidence and mutual respect. But the airing of Mark Daley’s Secret Policeman , a programme which proved what ethnic minority officers had been saying for years – that institutional racism exists – shattered this. More importantly, it proved that racist officers are not tackled rigorously, as all those involved were allowed to resign rather than being sacked or charged with criminal or disciplinary offences.

Despite 30 years of the CRE carrying out groundbreaking monitoring and enforcement work, there is still much to be done. White people may feel they have differences with their ethnic minority fellow citizens, but we are all British. We should aim to make this country the best in the world by looking at what we have in common, rather than at what divides us.

A TRUE MERITOCRACY

Karan Bilimoria

Whenever I consider the massive changes that diversity and multiculturalism have wrought in Britain, I think of Samson. I started Cobra Beer in 1989, and by 1993 my partner and I were in a position to hire full-time salespeople. We put an advert in the Evening Standard and got an overwhelming number of responses. We narrowed the field down to three, and chose two – the unfortunate third was Samson.

A Pakistani Christian, he was working in a low-level job; he spoke little English; he was, literally, an asylum-seeker. But Samson – like so many people who have come to the UK and carved out their place here – was not easily deterred. He offered to work for us on a commission-only basis, and asked only that we give him the chance to prove himself. He asked us what targets we had set for our new sales staff, and we told him 100 cases of Cobra in four weeks. He did it in less than two. Today, Samson is sales director of Cobra Beer.

I remember that when I came to Britain from India as a 19-year-old, for my higher education, my family and friends were far from encouraging. It was the early 1980s, and they said to me ‘no matter how hard you work, you will never reach the top. There will be a glass ceiling.’ And perhaps at that time, 25 years ago, it was a fair point: I remember that when I was working toward my chartered accountancy qualification, there was only one Asian partner in the firm. Worse still, everyone joked that he only made partner because he had an English wife!

But in the 25 years since I came to the UK, I have seen great changes. I feel that Britain today is a true meritocracy, a country where people are free to succeed regardless of race, background or religion. I can speak best for my own community, the Asian community, and one need only look at British Asians to see the opportunities that Britain’s remarkable openness has provided, and the equally

remarkable success that British Asians have made of them. They have reached the top in virtually every field, from academia and politics to sport and business. If any more proof were required, it need only be said that British Asians make up only four per cent of the population, and yet contribute double that to the UK’s GDP.

Today, I think that whatever glass ceiling existed has been smashed to pieces. Although first-generation Asians arrived in Britain with limited resources, and faced a different and much tougher environment than they would today, through a spirit of sheer entrepreneurship and hard work they laid the foundations for the next generation. These were people who took one look at the socalled ceiling and simply said ‘no way!’

The contribution of Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the sea change toward openness and progress that brought them here, is not solely about hard numbers and achievement. I only have to look around the office at Cobra Beer to see the remarkable difference diversity can make. I am proud of the fact that the Cobra team comprises people from over 20 different countries, from Sri Lanka to Spain and from Columbia to Canada. I have always felt that our diversity gives us an incredible energy and a wealth of diverse opinions and experiences.

In 2003, I was a member of the Tyson Task Force on the Recruitment and Development of Non-Executive Directors. The name may be a bit dry, but our findings were very interesting. What we found was that, far from being politically correct or tokenistic, diversity conclusively improved decision-making. And I see that all the time, at Cobra and elsewhere, whether a blue-chip boardroom or the House of Lords.

Britain’s diversity is enriching in every way. Of course you can now get a curry on Brick Lane as good as anything in Delhi, but it goes far beyond that! It has given our country an unparalleled depth of experience and insight, and helps keep Britain competitive in a truly globalised, interdependent and integrated world. Immigration has given the UK strong ties to almost every country on earth, and these links are invaluable for trade, investment, politics, culture – and yes, even for curry.

I consider Samson’s story a brilliant illustration of the power of diversity, ambition and hard work: he went from political asylum to stock options worth seven figures in just over a decade, and all through his own hard work and determination. That is the moral of modern Britain. And even within Cobra Beer, his is not the only case of someone following their goals to great things. To give just one other example, in 1999 the South African girl who delivered sandwiches to

our office joined Cobra as a part-time telesales person. Six years later she became our HR manager.

These are just two among the thousands upon thousands of tales told since diversity and meritocracy took hold in this country. There will be many more. Our vision at Cobra Beer, which we live and breathe by, is ‘to aspire and achieve against all odds, with integrity’, and central to the story of so many of Britain’s immigrants are those qualities exactly.

Diversity, multiculturalism and opportunity will pave the way for Britain in the years to come, making us all the more resilient and ready for the challenges ahead. The glass ceiling lies in ruins, and from those ruins has emerged a country ready for the twenty-first century.

CLASHES AND CONFLICTS

Kenan Malik

What should be the limits of free speech in a plural society? It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency over the past 30 years. In the 1970s and 1980s, the main debate was about hate speech. Over the past decade, however, the questions that have come to the fore have not been so much about the fomenting of hate as the giving of offence. In a plural society, should it be incumbent on people to refrain from giving offence to other groups and cultures? And where people do not so refrain, should governments legislate to ensure that free speech is used responsibly? From the controversy over the staging of the Sikh play Bezhti in Birmingham to the furore over the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, some of the fiercest flashpoints over multiculturalism in recent years has been about whether a line should be drawn, and, if so, where to draw it.

Twenty years ago most liberals defended Salman Rushdie’s right to publish The Satanic Verses, despite the offence it caused many Muslims. Today, liberals have come to accept almost as axiomatic the idea that, while free speech is a good, speech must necessarily be less free in a plural society. For such a society to function and to be fair, runs the argument, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures and viewpoints. And we can only do so by being intolerant of people whose views give offence or take criticism too far. As the British sociologist Tariq Modood puts it, ‘If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’. One of the ironies of living in a plural society, it seems, is that the preservation of diversity requires us to leave less room for a diversity of views.

I believe the opposite is true. It is precisely because we do live in a plural society that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In a homogeneous society in which everyone thought in exactly the same way, then the giving of offence would be nothing more than gratuitous.

But in the real world where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society.

Ah, comes the response, but should we not also ensure that minorities are not deliberately denigrated? Is it not incumbent on a civilised society to protect the powerless and the vulnerable? Indeed it is. But who is it that benefits most from censorship? Not the powerless and the vulnerable, but rather those that possess both the power to censor and the necessity to do so. It is often said in making the case for multicultural censorship that the capacity for free speech resides in the hands of just a few – media barons or government ministries. The opposite is the case. The power to censor is in the hands of the few. But the capacity for free speech resides in all our mouths.

Far from aiding the powerless and the vulnerable, today’s growing culture of censorship helps silence critics of government policy, particularly in its war on terror. It also helps silence progressive movements within minority communities.

Take the controversy over the Danish cartoons. There is a general assumption that all Muslims were offended by the cartoons, and that all Muslims wished to ban them. Not true. Bünyamin Simsek is a Muslim councillor in the Danish city of Aarhus who helped organise a counter-demonstration to the cartoon protests. ‘There is’, he says, ‘a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society’. He is not alone. But such voices get silenced in the rush to censor that which is deemed to cause offence. The censors are helping to strengthen the hand of the most conservative elements, and to undermine those who want to challenge tradition and authority.

The notion of ‘giving offence’ suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. This is why free speech is essential, not simply to the practice of

democracy, but to the aspirations of those groups who may have been failed by the formal democratic processes.

Of course, many of those who give offence are not progressive at all, but bigots – racists or homophobes. But people must be as free to offend against liberal orthodoxies as against reactionary ones. Free speech for everyone except bigots is not free speech at all. The right to free speech only has political bite when we are forced to defend the rights of people whose views we despise.

In any case, you cannot challenge bigoted ideas by banning them. You simply let the sentiments fester underground. Free speech does not mean accepting all views. It means having all views in the open so we can challenge the ones we find unconscionable. Today, though, we do the exact opposite: there are certain views we ban because they are deemed too unpalatable. But there are other views we are too frightened of challenging because we don’t want to give offence to diverse cultures.

But you’ve got us all wrong, say the multicultural censors. We are not out to censor. All we want is to do is ensure respect for all beliefs and cultures. It is an argument that turns the notion of respect on its head.

In its traditional Kantian sense, respect requires us to treat every human being equally as a moral, autonomous being. Every individual possesses the capacity to express political and moral views and to act upon them. And every individual is responsible for their views and actions and is capable of being judged by them. The importance of free speech is that it is an expression of individual moral autonomy, the capacity of people to engage in a robust debate about their beliefs and their actions – and to bear the consequences.

The multiculturalist censor demands respect not just for the person, but for his or her beliefs. And in so doing they undermine individual autonomy, both by constraining the right of people to criticise others’ beliefs and by insisting that individuals who hold those beliefs are too weak or vulnerable to stand up to criticism, satire or abuse.

This approach treats people as incapable victims needing special protection. The result is an auction of victimhood as every group attempts to outbid all others. It is also a pick ‘n’ mix attitude to what is tolerable. When British Muslim leader Iqbal Sacranie’s derogatory comments about homosexuals led to a police investigation, 22 Muslim leaders wrote to The Times demanding the right to be able to ‘freely express their views in an atmosphere free of intimidation or bullying’. Those same leaders deny such a right to newspapers publishing cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. Many of those happy to see such cartoons

would draw the line at anything mocking the Holocaust. Gay rights groups want Muslims (and black ragga artists) to be prosecuted for homophobia, but want the right to criticise Muslims as they see fit.

The argument against free speech is really one in defence of particular sectional interests. The choice we face is between a plural society in which free speech provides the basis of engagement and dialogue between different parts of society and a sectional society in which restrictions on free speech help police the sections.

The reason that so many liberals do not recognise the necessity of free speech in sustaining a plural society is that they conflate two distinct notions of multiculturalism – multiculturalism as lived experience and multiculturalism as a political process. When most people say that multiculturalism is a good thing, what they mean is the experience of living in a society that is less insular and homogeneous, more vibrant and cosmopolitan than before. It is, in other words, a case for cultural diversity, mass immigration, open borders and open minds. Those who advocate multiculturalism as a political process are, however, talking about something different. Multiculturalism, they argue, requires the public recognition and affirmation of cultural differences. It means not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but that their cultural beliefs are treated as equally valid.

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about cultural diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That is all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.

Diversity is important only because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgments upon them, and decide which may be better and which may be worse. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgments, that multiculturalism as a political process attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’.

Multicultural censorship expresses a desire to have everything nicely parcelled up, free of conflict, all neat and ordered. It is time we stood up for a little less respectful order and a little more messy engagement. It is time we recognised that giving offence is a normal part of a plural society. And it is time we accepted that a plural society requires not less, but more free speech.

IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY DIFFERENCE

Marek Kohn

It all seemed so simple in 1976. Science had disowned the idea of race; antiracism had science on its side. History had shown that scientific racism was morally wrong, and biology confirmed that it was scientifically wrong. A minority of scholars might still speak of races, and claim that there were significant innate differences between them, but dealing with such talk was straightforward. It was sufficient to invoke the Nazis and to repeat the American geneticist Richard Lewontin’s insights about how the differences within populations far exceed those between them.

In many quarters it still is. Conventional wisdom on the subject remains at the position it reached in the mid-1970s, when Lewontin’s arguments were fresh and mainstream science had finally decided that race in any guise was a liability. Amid the ideological upheavals and the techno-scientific onrush of the ensuing years, this reassuringly simple formula endures. But the truth is that the relationship between science and race was never as simple as it seemed, even in 1976. Questions that were never fully closed are now being re-opened, one by one.

The fundamental question is that of whether human races exist in a biological sense. Our species undoubtedly varies from region to ancestral region, but scientists have struggled to agree upon whether and how this variety could be divided up. Boundaries based on external appearances were arbitrary to start with, and were then confounded by genetic information as it became available. In the wake of Nazism, scientists were forced to acknowledge the moral and political implications of an idea that they were also finding scientifically troublesome. Over the decades following the Second World War, race was gradually discarded, and by the mid-1970s had become suspect, even when it claimed to do

no more than detail patterns of variation in outward appearance. Science and society were in step as they dismantled their racial models. More than that, they were intertwined. The moral rejection of racism was guaranteed by assurances from science that race is biologically meaningless.

More recently, such assurances have been proffered in order to secure support for genetic research projects, which are promoted as exercises that will dispel racial myths and affirm the unity of humankind. At the White House ceremony held in 2000 to celebrate the completion of the first draft of the human genome, Craig Venter described how his company, Celera Genomics, had sampled five individuals identifying themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian and African- American. It had done so in order to ‘help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis’.

While Venter saw no racial distinctions between the individuals in his company’s survey, though, some scientists have seen old patterns in the new data. Neil Risch, a Stanford University geneticist, argued that race is a valid, and medically valuable, means to describe such patterning. Other scientists have seen patterns but rejected the old labels. They argue that the new data should be described in new ways, which acknowledge biological variation between groups but deny the concept of race.

Medical science has in any case had race thrust upon it, since it is obliged to use socially-defined racial categories to evaluate treatments. One result is the marketing of a drug combination known as BiDil for ‘heart failure in selfidentified black patients’. Leaving the definition of race to the patients is a neat device, which affirms race as biologically meaningful without getting caught up in the difficulties that arise from trying to formalise it as a scientific concept. The argument is that socially defined races can be associated strongly enough with genetic variation to be useful in some circumstances as a guide to disease susceptibility and appropriate treatment. Researchers look forward, however, to the day when rough racial guides are replaced by detailed genetic profiles for individual patients.

In a sense BiDil breaks no new ground, for certain diseases have long been associated with certain population groups. Examples such as the incidence of the inherited Tay-Sachs condition among Ashkenazi Jews, and of sickle-cell anaemia among various populations historically parasitized by malaria, have featured without controversy in the textbooks for decades. The intensity of the debates surrounding BiDil, whose medical value has been disputed by critics, may reflect fears that the climate of opinion may have become more favourable

to revisionist accounts of race. Claims seen to favour such accounts are hotly contested within science, and the moral or political dimensions of these contests are often readily apparent. Those who reject the idea that race has a place in science allude to the history of racial science and eugenics; like Lewontin, they regard race as a construct shaped by ideology. The charge is reversed on the other side, where those who favour the rehabilitation of race sometimes cast the issue as a struggle for truth in an intellectual climate distorted by relativism and dogma.

Anthony Edwards, a Cambridge University statistician and geneticist, performed such a table-turning manoeuvre in an article refuting what he called ‘Lewontin’s fallacy’. Race revisionism passed a theoretically and symbolically significant milestone with the paper’s appearance in 2003. Edwards argued that Lewontin’s rejection of racial classification was unjustified because his analysis had overlooked patterning within genetic variation. Observing that Lewontin had deplored racial classification for social reasons while arguing that its presence in science rested on ideological assumptions, Edwards remarked that ‘it is a dangerous mistake to premise the moral equality of human beings on biological similarity because dissimilarity, once revealed, then becomes an argument for moral inequality’.

By ‘dissimilarity’, Edwards clearly did not mean the kind resolved by the formula ‘different but equal’. He meant inequality of capacities. Underlying the debates about race and the capacity to resist disease is the fear that readmitting race to science, in one form or another, will strengthen the position of those who argue for racial differences in capacities that people really care about. Prime among these, of course, is intelligence. It is fundamentally an American issue. Just as the health of African-Americans is at the heart of the debates over race in medicine, the defining preoccupation of the controversies over race in science is the difference in IQ scores between white and black Americans. The core of contemporary racial science in its classical form, one that seeks to rank populations according to mental capacities, is a school of thought within psychology.

This school was young in the mid-1970s, having been inaugurated in 1969 by the publication of an article on IQ by the psychologist Arthur Jensen. Now it is mature, and has consolidated into a confident, assertive minority current that holds or entertains a wide range of notions about racial hierarchies in mental capacities and racial variation in temperament. Its most prominent, and sophisticated, publicist is the conservative social critic Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, the book that thrust arguments about racial differences

in intelligence into public debate in 1994. It is also able to claim that its methods, of measuring variation in mental traits and calculating how much of the variation is genetic in origin, are conventional in psychology. In the wake of The Bell Curve furore, the use of such methods to study intelligence was affirmed to be ‘mainstream’ in a statement carried by the Wall Street Journal ; it was signed by 52 professors, including two who had elaborated theories about how nature had selected for intelligence and discipline to create the northerly races.

Claims about racial hierarchy benefit in particular from the accumulation of findings in behaviour genetics that indicate substantial genetic influences upon the variation among individuals in just about any psychological trait that researchers care to name. It does not follow that if genetic factors underlie differences between individuals, then genetic factors must underlie differences between groups. But demonstrations of the power of heredity give confidence to ‘race realists’, as racial hereditarians like to style themselves.

A strikingly bold illustration of the theoretical tools now at the disposal of racial science appeared last year in a paper called ‘Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence’, which brought the two currently central themes of race in science together by arguing that the susceptibility of Ashkenazi Jews to Tay-Sachs and other inherited diseases is linked to intelligence levels that are substantially above the European average. Jews in Europe, it proposed, underwent genetic selection for intelligence because of the intellectually demanding occupations they practised.

In its import, this claim was identical to that aired in The Bell Curve : one race is intellectually superior to others. Yet it provoked no furore, and was discussed respectfully in serious publications. What if it had appeared in 1994 and The Bell Curve had come out last year? It seems improbable that the reaction to the latter would have been any less outraged. But it also seems unlikely that the Ashkenazi paper would have gained the notice or respect twelve years ago that it did last year. What it does confirm is that today a claim of racial superiority can win assent, or at least acquiescence, as long as it is suitably presented. The trick is to argue that one group is more intelligent than others, instead of arguing that one group is less intelligent than others. It really seems to be that simple.

FIT TO SERVE

Matthew Bennett

The British army has been judged as the top public service employer in terms of employment polices and practices on race since 2000, scoring highest in the ‘Race for Opportunity’ annual benchmarking assessment six years in a row. This is a remarkable achievement and one that is probably not well enough known, let alone appreciated, by the people the army serves.

Public attitudes to the army (and to the armed forces in general) still seem to reflect stereotypical ideas of the Second World War and national service filtered through the medium of situation comedies or reality shows, rather than an accurate understanding of the situation today. It is true that race relations in the army were far from rosy in the distant past. This year is the fortieth anniversary of the lifting of the colour bar for recruits into the British army. As late as 1961, the Army Council was expressing concerns about ‘unreliability’ and ‘dilution’ that were frankly racist. Just how misguided such fears were is shown by the Ministry of Defence’s ‘We Were There’ travelling exhibition, first opened in 2000 and re-launched in October 2006, one part of which records the experiences of ethnic minority services personnel since 1945.

Between 1959 and 1969, and against government policy, the army recorded ethnic backgrounds as part of a quota system that was designed to restrict ethnic minority recruitment to two per cent, later rising to three or four per cent. Parliamentary complaints about the employment of a ‘bogus racial doctrine’ led to the recording being abandoned. This caused another problem, as the army was then able to claim that since no figures were kept, the situation could not be monitored. The creation of the Commission for Racial Equality in 1976, under the Race Relations Act of the same year, was to have a profound effect on the development of equal opportunity and diversity policies in the army. Not that these came about immediately. To an extent, the army continued to live up to its

reputation as a traditionalist, and even bigoted, institution.

While ethnic minority soldiers began to be recruited more widely into the army as a whole, the Household Division stood out as somewhere where they were still not welcome. That this was the case came forcibly and embarrassingly into the public consciousness through the experience of Richard Stokes. Apparently, Prince Charles had commented on the absence of black faces in the ranks of the Guards. Stokes joined the Coldstream Guards in 1986, but found himself isolated and ridiculed from the beginning. Even while he was in basic training, he received hate mail from serving soldiers. He seems to have suffered racial abuse throughout his career, including while serving in Northern Ireland, and after three years he left the army. Despite the high media profile of this case, little was done to change attitudes until another well-publicised incident almost a decade later.

In 1994-5, another black soldier, Corporal Malcolm, had his attachment posting to the Life Guards changed because of his colour. An army inquiry board found that he had suffered discrimination and he later received compensation. He continued to serve. The CRE conducted an investigation into the matter, which reported in 1996. It found the Guards to be ‘riddled with racism’ and issued a non-discrimination notice against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as a result.

Clearly, this was a very embarrassing situation for the army, and action was finally taken to create a different atmosphere. In March 1998, the Household Division launched a highly-publicised recruitment campaign aimed at people from ethnic minorities. This included the heartening sight of Household Cavalry troopers jingling, in full fig, along the streets of Brixton, gazed upon with some amazement by the local population. The gesture was well meant though, and it was backed up by some solid policy as a result of a partnership agreement between the MoD and the CRE.

The Labour government of 1997 insisted on a proactive recruitment campaign and that the army should meet percentage quotas. This did indeed lead to a rise in the numbers of ethnic minority recruits: from less than one per cent (0.7) in 1996-7 to about two per cent in 1999-2000, and almost six per cent in 2002. The officer responsible for the recruiting programme over this period commented on the ‘culture change’ within the service and that a ‘strict policy of nondiscrimination in the Army and the appointment of equal opportunity advisors in every regiment had brought dramatic results’.

This year’s figures indicate that the proportion of ethnic minority soldiers has

now risen to almost eight per cent, bringing the army into line with wider society. However, young people from ethnic minority groups now actually constitute 20 per cent of 19–24 year-olds in Britain, so the army’s message of inclusivity may still not be reaching everyone.

More than mere numbers, though, is the genuine transformation of attitudes. In the words of the major who recently commanded the Diversity Action and Recruiting Team: ‘I personally believe that things have changed; the positive change goes very deep.’ Skin colour is no bar to high achievement nowadays, as can be seen from the award in 2005 of the Victoria Cross, the highest military award for bravery, to Grenadian-born Lance-Corporal Johnson Beharry of The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, for his gallant actions in Iraq.

The British army maintains its good reputation for race relations – not just as a top public sector performer, but also as a major employer which is committed to the principle of equality in all areas of its work. But despite the accolades, there is never any room for complacency, and the army will continue its efforts to remain at the vanguard of racial equality.

EQUALITY ON THE PLATE

Matthew Fort

First came the Romans, of course, although they were conquerors. Still, they left us with a better class of bread and wine and pheasants. And then the French came, and they were conquerors too, with their penchant for pancakes and blancmange.

Since then we may not have been conquered in a military sense, but we certainly have in terms of cooking. Over the centuries, and particularly in the last 30 years, Britain has become home for a stream of political refugees, economic migrants, folk running away from famine, frustration and families, or those who simply wanted a change of scenery and liked the weather. They brought with them their language, culture, customs, religion, and above all their food – ingredients, techniques, dishes – and added to that already here. The process has resulted in an eating culture of incomparable richness.

The history of any country is written in its food and dishes. Nothing arrives on your plate by accident. There is always history and a story behind it. Take the pork pie. What could be more British than a pork pie? But a little research shows that the development of the pork pie we know and love today owes much to German butchers who emigrated to Britain, from Bavaria in particular, to escape compulsory military service after 1871. Or kedgeree, the much loved standard of the old-fashioned breakfast or supper. That started life as kitchri , the Indian dish of lentils and rice. Don’t ask me where smoked haddock, the key ingredient in British kedgeree, came from, but the tradition of curing and smoking fish, such as the Arbroath smokie and the Yarmouth bloater, seems to have had its roots in Scandinavia.

I don’t want to decry Britain’s own cooking traditions for a moment. A country that has produced the Eccles cake (stuffed with currants and chopped peel, neither of which are exactly native to Britain), Belted Galloway cattle and the

Bath Chap (a small ham made from pork cheek), not to mention bara brith or the Belfast Fry, has nothing to fear in a globalised gastro-culture, and we lead the world in puddings. But it is to other countries we have always looked to revitalise our own culinary traditions.

There is scarcely a cooking culture in the world that is not represented in one British high street or another. We take for granted, too, that when we go out, we can choose from any number of national cooking styles. Today it will be Thai, tomorrow Moroccan, the day after Italian, with perhaps Ethiopian some time next week. Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, French, German, Greek, Turkish, Gujarati, South African, West Indian, Malay, Korean, Ghanian – leaf through the pages of any restaurant guide book, and you realise that you can travel the world, gastronomically speaking, without ever leaving these shores.

This is not the case in other countries. I have a brother who lives in Italy. When I visit him, I marvel at the dishes and the quality of the ingredients. How much rather, he says, he would eat in Britain. Wherever you live in Italy, you will find the food particular to it, the dishes of just that region. They will vary with the seasons, but the dishes you find this June, you will find next June and the June after that, for the rest of your life. And the same goes for all the other months of the year. There’s no variety. Britain, on the other hand, is the land of culinary opportunity.

Look at the ingredients that bring light and spice to our daily diet. Think of a Britain without curry, noodles, rice, basil, mangoes, lemon grass, mustard, marmalade, ketchup, chutney, ice cream, couscous, kebabs, pak choi … and on and on. The list might not be endless, but it is very long indeed. And these are all things we take for granted so we can stir fry, make curries, slice up raw fish, make noodles, soak chickpeas, chop chillies in a constant culinary journey. These are as much a part of our experience now, and so part of our heritage, as carving roast beef or spooning out sticky toffee pudding.

At one time there might have been a tendency to bend a knee to French culinary imperialism, and it’s true we owe our restaurant culture to them (in-house chefs from the aristocratic households who suddenly lost their jobs when their employers lost their heads during the French Revolution), as well as many of the cooking techniques that have since become standard. But now we have established a true gastronomic democracy here. All cooking cultures have equal status.

Any nation’s food is a keystone to its sense of identity. Food is edible history. It defines us. It is the most enduring of all cultural identifiers, and the most

accessible to others. However, there is no such thing as a truly indigenous cooking culture. Fusion cooking was once fashionable, until it became fashionable to decry it. The truth is that all cooking, all dishes, are fusions. All cooking cultures owe debts to others, whether the cooks know it or not. In a real sense, food is a mark of integration. All nations, races and religions meet peacefully and equally on the plate. And please pass the goat curry while you're about it.

THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Michael Banton

It was in 1976 that two human rights covenants came into force: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Civil Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In ratifying them, most of the world’s states have undertaken to guarantee that those within their jurisdiction will be enabled to exercise these rights ‘without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. The Covenants are supported by more specialised treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

The struggles to protect and promote human rights in international relations and within states – like those over the UK’s ill-named Race Relations Act 1976 – have moved together for over fifty years. Two starting points were the United Nations’ proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the attempt in 1951 to persuade the Westminster parliament to enact a Colour Bar Bill. While commentators in Britain tend to concentrate on the national story, it is better placed in a wider context, for if it had not legislated when it did, the UK would have come under pressure in the UN. State representatives there are keen to demonstrate that their governments fulfil their treaty obligations. Because they value their reputations, many states have legislated in response to such pressure.

A pioneer: the UK

The wide scope of its legislation, together with the means for its enforcement, moved the United Kingdom into a leading position internationally. Three features of the UK’s actions stand out in comparison with action elsewhere. First, while many states included prohibitions of racial discrimination in their constitutions, those protections were not easily invoked by ordinary citizens. Many states

made racial discrimination a criminal offence, yet to prove that an offence had been committed, a person had to prove that there had been a criminal intent, and in matters of discrimination that can be very difficult. The UK government settled on a distinctive and more rewarding course when it provided remedies for discrimination within its labour law, using civil rather than criminal procedure. Second, in persuading its public of the need for such laws, the UK pioneered the application of experimental method. Situational tests measured the incidence of discrimination against particular classes of person in given situations (the CRE’s 1990 study, Sorry, It’s Gone , of discrimination by estate agents, was a model of its kind). Third, the UK pioneered the use of ethnic monitoring as a means of measuring progress towards racial equality.

One of the main arguments against legislation has always been the advocacy of colour-blindness. It is better to perceive the individual than to treat him or her as a member of a separate class of persons. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was clear that there was no scientific justification for invoking a pre- Darwinian concept of race to identify such classes. Yet in the 1950s the political elite in Britain, alone among the nations of Europe, nevertheless authorised use of the racial idiom. They had reasons for doing so. To counter the less favourable treatment of persons who could be distinguished by physical characteristics (or, in the case of Jews, persons sometimes believed to be inherently different), it was necessary to employ words that would be understood by the general public. So the title of ‘Race Relations’ was chosen for the 1965 Act and has continued to be used. When it considered the 1976 bill, the Standing Committee of the House of Commons recognised the objections to the use of the word ‘race’ in the name of the proposed commission, but the then home secretary came down in its favour in order to counter mistaken popular beliefs. At the same time, parliament was concerned that the new law and the commission should not be seen as benefiting a special group. They were to be for the whole population.

The choice of the name ‘Commission for Racial Equality’ highlighted a problem of definition. Equality, like integration, is a mathematical expression used metaphorically. Like the idea of liberty, it has great rhetorical value. Isaiah Berlin famously contrasted positive and negative conceptions of liberty: the freedom to do certain things and the freedom from certain things. Whether there can be a positive definition of racial equality is doubtful. True equality, it may be argued, has to transcend any ascription of individuals to categories not based on essential differences. The overriding objective is surely the protection and promotion

of human rights. Racial equality can best be defined negatively, as the elimination of one form of discrimination.

At the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, EU member states submitted an agreed statement that ‘the acceptance of any formulation implying the existence of separate human “races” could be a retrograde step as it risks denying the unity of humanity’. The problem of definition has been sharpened in many European countries by the establishment of groups of physically distinguishable persons who identify themselves by religion rather than by appearance or culture. An ideal of racial equality may not match their circumstances. Because racial nomenclature does not fit, and because shared religion is often associated with ethnic origin, some prefer to speak of ethnic relations and ethnic equality.

Evaluating the 1976 Race Relations Act

The 1976 Act has not eliminated racial discrimination in employment, but neither have other laws eliminated robbery and burglary. When I compared the figures for 1990, taking account of cases mentioned in victimisation surveys, as well as the number of officially recorded cases, and the outcome of proceedings, the outcome indicated that the success rate of the law against racial discrimination was a little higher than that for the law against burglary and a little lower than that against robbery. No one should expect more of anti-discrimination law than of other kinds of law.

The path up to and on from the 1976 Act was marked by constant struggle: in parliament, in government departments, in public education, in the legal profession, and in the general public. Many victims of racial discrimination in employment were ordinary people easily discouraged by the technicalities of legal proceedings and at a disadvantage when defending their interests in their dealings with officials and lawyers. Even if they obtained financial support from the CRE, they needed emotional backup.

Training has been another area of struggle. In the 1970s, as I can testify from personal experience, it was a thankless task to talk to the police about the implications of ethnic and racial differences for their work. It took the riots of 1981 to make most police officers rethink their assumptions.

However, many organisations in both the public and private sectors have undertaken major training initiatives. For example, the Judicial Studies Board established an Ethnic Minorities Advisory Committee (now the Equal Treatment Advisory Committee), which ran seminars for Crown Court judges

and arranged training for magistrates and chairmen of tribunals. Though it is impossible to prove such things, my impression is that the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 have been of immense educational value in establishing national standards. They have not worked alone, but have benefited from press and TV publicity in transmitting lessons to a much wider audience.

Modern city dwellers would know little of law enforcement were it not for the media. The procedures of the courts and tribunals are familiar only to specialists. In recent years, some magistrates’ courts have tried to bridge the gap by holding open days and encouraging visits from schools, but the trend is to make the law an ever more specialised function. Smaller courts and police stations have been amalgamated into bigger and more forbidding buildings.

If, in the twenty-first century, anti-discrimination law is to serve its educational function, its outcomes need to be better publicised and its procedures better explained. Ironically, these too have become tasks for specialists. So the cultivation of a culture sensitive to human rights will demand new initiatives.

The public mind

Some opinion polls have found that when members of the public are asked to evaluate the state of community relations, they judge relations in their own neighbourhoods more favourably than they judge relations nationally. This may be because their local judgments derive from personal experience, whereas their national judgments stem from impressions conveyed by the mass media. The way in which matters are presented may determine whether someone concludes that relations are getting better or worse. A more optimistic vision can help morale in community relations activities, as most people will work harder at a task when they believe that they are achieving something worthwhile.

The UK could also learn from France. There, the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme publishes its annual report every 21 March, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Its chairman presents this report to the president at a ceremony that attracts public attention. It might likewise be an annual event here, for the home secretary to make a speech reviewing governmental policy in the field, highlighting the more important elements in various reports, all of which could be published on the same day. These could include the annual report on progress in implementing the action plan, together, in alternate years, with ICERD reports, and annual

reports from the forthcoming Commission for Equality and Human Rights. The thirteenth ICERD report in 1995 declared:

It is a fundamental objective of the United Kingdom Government to enable members of ethnic minorities to participate freely and fully in the economic, social and public life of the nation, with all the benefits and responsibilities which that entails, while still being able to maintain their own culture, traditions, languages and values. Government action is directed towards addressing problems of discrimination and disadvantage which prevent members of ethnic minorities from fulfilling their potential as full members of British society.

Clearly, many of those problems have not yet been solved. Discrimination and disadvantage persist and assume new forms. The Commission for Equality and Human Rights will inherit the dilemmas of how best to present the issues of success and failure. It will have the major task of educating the public in the nature of human rights. It will surely want the UK to celebrate the International Day of Human Rights, 10 December, as a focus of activity. It has to hammer home the message that human rights are international.

THE ART OF THE UNEXPECTED

Nicholas Serota

Thirty years ago, shortly after the Commission for Racial Equality was founded, I was the newly appointed director of Whitechapel Art Gallery. I was familiar with that part of London: my family first settled in Whitechapel when they came to this country early in the twentieth century, and my grandmother used to run a shop opposite the gallery. The rapidly changing ethnic diversity of the local audiences encouraged us, at the Whitechapel, to develop a programme of exhibitions that included such highlights as The Arts of Bengal in 1979. This show, among others, allowed us to contribute to national debates about intercultural understanding, an issue that was pressing then and which has distinct and immediate relevance today.

As ever, I was learning from artists at this time and, before leaving Whitechapel for Tate, I benefited from working with Sonia Boyce, Gavin Jantjes, Zarina Bhimji and Veronica Ryan among others, on the 1986 exhibition From Two Worlds: Sixteen artists of non-European background . This show focused on contemporary art, exploring cultural plurality. Our ambition was to challenge the limitations that ethnic labelling may impose upon visual thinking. Shortly afterwards, one of the artists with work in the show devised a landmark exhibition that brought historical perspectives to these concerns. The Other Story: Afro- Asian artists in post-war Britain , curated by Rasheed Araeen, opened at the Hayward Gallery in 1989.

It is telling that only two works in this major survey were loans from Tate’s collections. These paintings, by Avinash Chandra and F N Souza, had been acquired at the time of their making in the 1960s. Work by Frank Bowling, another artist in the exhibition, was likewise purchased in the 1980s, when significant early acquisitions were also made of works by young artists such as Anish Kapoor and Shirazeh Houshiary. It was not until the early 1990s,

however, that we purchased major historical works by Aubrey Williams, and the elm carving by Ronald Moody, the intensely heroic Johanaan from 1936. A serious reappraisal of Tate’s collections had been prompted, and belated acquisitions were made in acknowledgement of the fact that the visual culture of Britain was much richer than was reflected in the collections at the time. Historical review is ongoing, of course, and motivated by various concerns, resulting in the purchase of works in previously neglected media, such as photography, film and video, as well as pieces from previously neglected artists.

The 1990s saw major institutional shifts at Tate, as we moved away from the monolithic museum built on an imperial past. One of the motivating factors in Tate’s physical re-establishment across four distinct art centres, operating from Liverpool and St Ives as well as London, was our wish to present many more stories – to complicate the historical picture with multiple views while encouraging our visitors to participate in finding their own. This approach was rooted within the original Tate Gallery at Millbank, through the long-established work of the education department. Tate Liverpool’s education initiatives have been pioneering. With changing displays, temporary exhibitions and sustained educational initiatives, we have, at all our galleries, followed the lead of contemporary visual art in aiming to prompt thought, enable debate and energise the imagination of all.

In 1994, Tate was proud to host the launch of inIVA, the London-based agency established to bring the work of artists from culturally diverse backgrounds to the widest possible public audience. We were simultaneously fortunate in hosting the inaugural symposium organised by inIVA, Global Visions: Towards a new internationalism in the visual arts . As we announced our plans to convert Bankside Power Station at this time, the debates raised by Global Visions provided a strong theoretical context in which to shape Britain’s new forum for international art. Internationalism and Tate’s role in a world that extends beyond North America and Western Europe are matters which were highlighted in the exhibition Century City , shown at Tate Modern in 2001, and which we continue to discuss with intensity today.

Since the millennium, Tate has begun to take a more strategic view of the diversity of its workforce, acquisitions and programming. Following the appointment of an associate curator of Latin American Art, for instance, we have made major international additions to the collection, significantly enhancing our capacity to address the history of modernism. The appointment of a Curator of Cross Cultural Programmes at Tate Britain has also had a strong influence.

Tate Encounters, for example, is a research project with London South Bank University, working with first generation students and their families to investigate how they might influence Tate Britain’s programmes and collections.

Recent exhibitions at Tate Britain have sought to re-examine our historical collection from earlier periods, with the aim of allowing fresh and expanded narratives to resonate. East-West: Objects between cultures aims to open up five centuries of Christian art in this country through encounters and interactions with Muslim art. Last year, Joshua Reynolds: The creation of celebrity allowed the fruitful reconsideration of Omai , the spectacular portrait of the Polynesian man who came to England with Captain Cook. Working with young audiences in a sustained way, we are beginning to create opportunities for people to move from being interested audiences to pursuing careers in the visual arts.

As the shifting network of social and cultural beliefs in Britain has changed over the past 30 years, we have been able to rely on our contemporary artists to share their visions of what is at stake and what the possibilities might be. Recent acquisitions from artists, including Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Zarina Bhimji, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, Phil Collins and Rosalind Nashashibi, all draw productively upon past events and narratives of international conflict, exchange and migration; they each bring force of conviction and a lightness of touch to the different and multiple issues they address. The national prominence of the Turner Prize exhibition has helped to broaden public debate on British contemporary art, while other, less high-profile, initiatives, such as the programme of exhibitions by international artists in Tate Modern’s Untitled series and the Art Now exhibitions at Tate Britain, explore the dialogue between practice in this country and elsewhere.

Tate’s remit for its galleries and its programming online and at large may sound simple: to present British art within an international context, and international art within a British context. More complicated, of course, is the need to work with an evolving strategy that serves both the shifting nature of art practice and the shifting nature of our potential audiences, maintaining Tate’s specific purpose and integrity while adapting to a global plurality. In response to changes in art and in society, we are planning to transform Tate in the next decade.

Our vision for the future of Tate demands a shift towards what could be described as editorial operation: we will develop as a creative ‘publisher’ of many ideas drawn from inside and beyond the organisation, whereas, in the past, we tended only to act as the author of our own. While sustaining and continuing to

share our traditional expertise, we need to open ourselves up to new expertise through partnership and collaboration, in a process of exchange. In this way, we will be able to serve more people, in more ways. We need to make space for new ways of working that may create a more diverse workforce, programme and collections and a different institutional model, in keeping with highly mobile and diverse communities in a digital and global age. We are, at present, able to offer shared experiences that inspire collective vitality, allowing encounters with visual art that enrich a lifetime. We need to develop the potential to enrich every life, in ways that may be unexpected, and always with room for the unpredictable.

SOUNDS OF THE TIMES

Nitin Sawhney

I remember October 1976 quite vividly. It was a time when the same eight white kids regularly attacked me before my class registration, goading, prodding, pushing and kicking me to the floor. It was a time when National Front members would stand with intimidating resolve outside my school gates and hand leaflets to impressionable young pupils on their way home. I can perfectly recall the feelings of isolation and fear that followed me back to my driveway in the form of a dirty white van spitting racist abuse from a loud haler tossed carelessly over the roof. I was a twelve-year-old brown-skinned anomaly walking home with his head lowered before the scowling faces and derisive laughter of my white counterparts, incited to mockery by racist slogans that cut bitterly through the autumnal chill. There were no other Asian or black kids in my school that I can recall, except for ‘Steph G’, who I think was of mixed heritage.

When I got home I would play the guitar or piano for up to six hours without a break, only occasionally distracted by food, the bathroom, or the distant sound of my family discussing the news in our living room.

It was in the winter of that year that the Rock Against Racism campaign was set up by Red Saunders, Roger Huddle and others. It was founded in response to allegedly racist comments and gestures made by David Bowie and Eric Clapton. Clapton had said at a concert that England had ‘become overcrowded’, and implored the crowd to vote for Enoch Powell to stop Britain from becoming ‘a black colony’. David Bowie caused controversy by stating ‘Britain is ready for a fascist leader’ in an interview with Playboy magazine, and by allegedly making a Nazi salute at one of his performances.

When I mentioned the Bowie controversy during a school break to Steph G, he defiantly muttered that he didn’t care and that the man was a genius, although his eyes betrayed him.

The Race Relations Act 1976 stated that public authorities had a legal duty to promote racial equality by eliminating unlawful racial discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity and good relations between people of different racial groups. This meant very little to Steph G as he pulled an air pistol out of a paper bag and shot our new Indian physics teacher in the leg. On the back of his subsequent popularity, he joined a punk band the following year.

Punk was such a breath of fresh air. It instilled everyone with a new sense of hope and defiant community, regardless of their background. This new sound was a great leveller – music for the common people. In 1977, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee was ruthlessly undermined by the Sex Pistols’ lyrics denouncing her as ‘a moron’.

The Rock Against Racism movement was quick to seize the opportunity to capitalise on the socialist ethics of punk, organising two major music festivals with the Anti-Nazi League in the spring and autumn of 1978, to fight the growing wave of racist attacks throughout the UK. Over 100,000 people marched six miles from Trafalgar Square to East London (a National Front hotspot) for an open-air concert featuring The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, The Ruts, Generation X and the Tom Robinson Band.

A year later, the events of 1979 had a profound impact on race relations, when an initially peaceful demonstration by the Anti-Nazi League in Southall erupted into violence, culminating in the death of one of their members, Blair Peach. It was alleged at the time that he had been the victim of a severe police truncheon blow to the head (an accusation which remains vehemently denied by the police). Such conflict in Southall was the precursor to many clashes between local Asians and skinheads, preceding a whole wave of music that became the emblem of disillusioned Asian youth in the area: Bhangra.

The ‘Holy Smokes’ and the ‘Tutti Nungs’ were two gangs of young Asian people who had initially formed to combat the influx of violent skinheads into Southall, but who subsequently became the perpetrators of inter-gang warfare when racist violence subsided in the 1980s. Originally a form of folk music from the Punjab, Bhangra spawned many iconic bands of the time, most notably Alaap and Heera. Second generation Asians now had a musical focal point for their emerging sense of personal identity, eventually evolving, through the drum’n’bass movement of the 1990s, into what was termed by the media as ‘Asian Underground’ music.

Having been placed in this category myself throughout the 1990s and the early part of this century, I feel that the media and record companies in general,

although often with good intent, were keen at the time to reduce cultural change to a fashion or a fad. I personally feel it is hard to disassociate the factors which led to the implementation of further anti-racist legislation in 2001 from the over-simplification and media condescension of that time towards Asian identity in Britain.

These days I constantly find myself searching for the voices of radical dissent that spawned music of such profound cultural change in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. When Jack Straw betrays disturbing intentions by specifying that the wearing of the veil by Muslims is a mark of difference, as if that is in some way negative, he undermines the work of the Commission for Racial Equality over the last 30 years and the intention behind all race legislation since 1968. The clear motivation behind the 1976 Act was to entrench values of equality, anti-racism and cultural diversity in modern Britain. It seems self-evident that Jack Straw is directly contradicting these values at a time when Islamophobia is particularly rife and in the wake of an unprovoked invasion of a defenceless Muslim country.

Following the angry neo-punk Muslim voices of bands such as Asian Dub Foundation and Fundamental, whose sounds perfectly exemplify the frustration of the Bradford riots, who knows what music such continued provocation from trusted politicians will engender?

SEPARATE IS NEVER EQUAL

Oona King

When people ask if multiculturalism has a future, the short answer is yes. But the question of how we secure that future is more complex than anyone imagined during the passage of the Race Relations Act 1976. At one level, multiculturalism is merely a statement of fact: many cultures living side by side. But minority groups also view multiculturalism as a bulwark against assimilation, a rejection of the cultural blancmange that inevitably discards their heritage in favour of pearly kings and queens.

Multiculturalism asserts the rights of minority groups to celebrate and maintain their own cultures and, more importantly, to access resources from a state historically riddled by institutional racism. Minority groups should view with fear and trepidation the backlash against multiculturalism, and the move away from identity politics. Or should they? In fact, a move away from identity politics may actually help some minority groups escape the segregated backwaters – or inner city sink estates – that confound attempts to achieve meaningful integration.

But moving away from identity politics requires a rethink of Britain’s approach to race over the last 30 years. During that time, people from ethnic minorities often found it helpful to identify themselves exclusively in terms of race or ethnicity. The British approach was largely successful insofar as ethnic minority groups, despite widespread racism, integrated more meaningfully than in most other European countries. And yet British multiculturalism is in desperate need of modernisation. It faces a sustained attack as mainstream white culture becomes more insecure, and as poverty among some minority groups, especially Muslims, becomes more entrenched.

So what might modern multiculturalism look like? It must change in two key respects. Firstly, it must recognise that our identities are more complex than

ever before. On a basic level, cultural complexity means that the traditional multicultural approach (epitomised by a community centre for each group) is no longer practical. Nor is it desirable. Today, government spends money on bringing communities together, not keeping them apart. This means that voluntary sector funding will move from single-identity groups to (wait for it) multicultural groups – organisations that bring people with different cultural identities together under one roof.

Secondly, modern multiculturalism must do more than actively ‘promote racial equality’, as required by the Race Relations (Amendment) Act. It must also actively promote community cohesion. Some would argue that this is a get-out clause for public authorities who have yet to make good on the promises made when the legislation was passed in 2000. But this would make the best the enemy of the good.

We can’t put our heads in the sand and pretend that British multiculturalism doesn’t need modernising to reflect today’s realities. For example, marginalised young white men cannot be absent from our thinking about equality of opportunity and cultural identity, or tackling racial violence. What are we saying to them? Or does multiculturalism ignore mainstream culture? This would be foolish at a time when the latest Home Office figures show that nearly half the victims of racially-motivated murder are white. Celebrating minority identities cannot mean ignoring the majority. If it does, the majority will reason that multiculturalism is harmful to them, and this in turn harms minorities.

The outcome we all aspire to – the reason Labour governments put legislation in place – is that life opportunities are not governed by race or ethnicity, or any other facet of a person’s identity. The bottom line for multiculturalism has been, and will remain, promoting equality of opportunity. There is a growing recognition that Martin Luther King was right first time around: separate is never equal. Where multiculturalism has encouraged separatism, it must change. But where other government policies have encouraged separatism – for example, housing and schools admission policies – they too must change.

This requires a huge shift in thinking. When I first made a BBC documentary in 1998 raising the issue of ethnic segregation in schools and the need to consider ethnicity quotas (to keep a school population integrated rather than segregated), it was viewed as outlandish. Today, the need to integrate schoolchildren from different ethnic and religious backgrounds is seen as one of the most pressing problems in areas with high racial tensions. I recognise the difficulties associated with quotas, the frightening spectre of ‘bussing’ children, and the terror of

any politician at the prospect of interfering with the fiction of parental choice in school admissions. But the social problems associated with a generation of ethnically-segregated children are greater than all these other problems combined, and must be urgently addressed.

One solution is for neighbouring schools to integrate at a much more fundamental level when delivering curricular activity (say through joint abilitystreaming of core subjects), rather than coming together for just one hour’s citizenship education per week.

These are the sorts of solutions that a modern multicultural society must develop. We can celebrate whatever we want, from Chanuka to Eid, Christmas and pearly kings and queens. But we must do so within a society that promotes the integration of many cultures, not one that manages their separation.

THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Rabinder Singh

I would like to congratulate the Commission for Racial Equality on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary for the valuable work it has done in promoting racial equality in this country. Inevitably, my perspective is that of a lawyer, but the principle of equality is too important to be left solely to the courtroom, and the CRE has always recognised that in its educational work.

One of the reasons for the Race Relations Act was for it to be a ‘speaking act’. It is often cited as a major example of such an act of parliament: a law which seeks to do more than just lay down legal rules, which speaks to society and tries to influence behaviour by laying down a fundamental principle and setting out a vision of what we could become.

Yet there was always a latent, but fundamental, problem with the structure of the Act which prevented it from achieving its full purpose as a speaking act. It did not clearly apply to the public functions of public authorities. In a case called Amin in 1983, it was held by the House of Lords, the highest court in this country, that the Act’s prohibition of racial discrimination did not apply to the exercise of statutory powers by public authorities because it only applied to the kind of services that might also be offered by a private person. This meant that the Act did not apply to such functions as immigration control or policing. So the law took a critical turn away from the fundamental principle of racial equality; while many important parts of social life were covered – notably employment, housing and education – many others were not. Most of the things that the state does were outside the scope of the law. It was therefore difficult for the state to lead the rest of us by example, given that racial discrimination by the state was, by and large, lawful.

It was, in part, this gap in the law which led to the findings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report in 1999 that the Metropolitan Police had been guilty of

‘institutional racism’. One of the main recommendations that followed was that the Act should be amended to cover the work of public authorities. This was duly done by parliament in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. This has had a salutary effect on public authorities, including central government. With a few limited exceptions, it is now unlawful to discriminate on racial grounds when public authorities exercise their public functions.

The Home Office was found to have breached the new law in its immigration functions, following a case brought by the European Roma Rights Centre; the House of Lords held that the immigration authorities at Prague Airport had unlawfully discriminated between Czech citizens of Roma origin and those of other origins. One of the judges, Baroness Hale of Richmond, emphasised the fundamental importance of the Act: that it requires society to treat each person as an individual on their own merits, not on the basis of stereotypes associated with a racial group to which they happen to belong.

In the recent case of Elias , the Court of Appeal held that the Ministry of Defence had unjustifiably discriminated on grounds of national origins when it devised a scheme to give ex gratia compensation to civilians who were interned by Japan during the Second World War. Mrs Elias was a British subject at the time of her internment and appalling treatment and she was now a British citizen living in the UK. Nevertheless, she was refused compensation because she was not born in the UK, and she did not have a parent or grandparent born in the UK either. As she told the Court in her witness statement, she was regarded as British for the purpose of her detention but not British enough to be compensated for it.

The 2000 Amendment Act made another fundamental change to the law, again in response to a recommendation in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report. It introduced section 71, which imposes a positive duty on public authorities to have due regard to the need to eliminate racial discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity and good race relations. Two ways in which public authorities help to fulfil this positive duty are to have race equality schemes and to carry out race equality impact assessments when formulating policies. It is important that these exercises should not become merely ritualistic and bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is important that they should be carried out at all. In the case of Elias , Lady Justice Arden stressed that it was important that public

authorities should carry out their section 71 duty before they develop policies: perhaps an obvious point, but one that was missed in that case itself, where the High Court held that the Ministry of Defence had breached section 71.

Great strides have been made in the last 30 years, but both the law and practical reality have a long way to go before we can say that the purpose of the Race Relations Act has been achieved. Nevertheless, there is reason to be hopeful. The recent changes to the law offer the promise of taking the law in a more positive direction: not confined to the important but limited purpose of securing justice for individuals who are the victims of racial discrimination, but trying to tackle basic structural inequality – particularly when the state exercises power over the individual.

LEADERSHIP AND LEGACY

Rodney Bickerstaffe

With debates on multiculturalism, segregation and integration currently raging in the media, it is timely to reflect on the state of race relations in Britain today, and to remind ourselves of how far we have come as a nation in tackling racial discrimination in the last 30 years. Looking back now offers a poignant reminder of how far, as a nation, we still have to go in challenging the growing levels of xenophobia and intolerance in our society towards groups who are seen as minorities, particularly asylum seekers and refugees, migrant workers, Gypsies and Travellers and Muslims.

If there is one measure of progress to mark the last 30 years, it should be how far we have managed to rid Britain of the blatant, naked and overt forms of racism that greeted immigrants from the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent and Africa to these shores in the 1950s and 1960s. We have certainly come a long way. Racial discrimination in Britain today is not what it was 30 years ago. Black people may no longer be denied services, jobs or housing because of their race or skin colour. The daily abuse endured by many of the post-war generation of black workers in Britain is no longer acceptable, although that does not mean more covert forms of racism do not still exist.

But this is still not the case for Gypsies and Travellers, for example. The Commission for Racial Equality’s recent inquiry into equality, race relations and Gypsies and Irish Travellers revealed that ‘No Travellers’ signs are widespread, media coverage is hostile, proposals for authorised sites attract strong local opposition and, more seriously, Gypsies and Irish Travellers have the poorest life chances of any ethnic group today.

While there have been many examples of individual symbolic and historic achievements over the years, the majority of people from ethnic minority groups, including Gypsies and Travellers, remain impoverished by the lack of

life chances and opportunities enjoyed by many of their fellow citizens. Life expectancy for Gypsies and Travellers is 10 years lower than the national average, and women are 20 times more likely than mothers in the rest of the population to have experienced the death of a child. Less than a quarter of Gypsy children achieve five GCSEs at A* to C grades, compared with a national average of just over half.

Research published by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 2005 shows that people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are among the most deprived in the UK: 69 per cent of Britons of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are poor, compared with 20 per cent of white Britons; and their employment rate is 43 per cent compared with 76 per cent for whites. Meanwhile unemployment rates for black people remain over twice the national average.

Through anti-racism campaigns particularly, the trade union movement has made a huge contribution towards the transformation of Britain into a much more tolerant, diverse and multicultural society. One of the unions’ early strategies was to expose the exploitation of ethnic minority and migrant workers, which sadly has still not been eradicated. The Transport and General Workers’ Union championed the need for a licensing act for gangmasters, in the wake of the deaths of Chinese cockle pickers in 2004, and the bad treatment of agricultural workers. The TUC played an important role in setting up the Stephen Lawrence Task Group, helping to make sure that tackling discrimination was an important part of the trade union movement. At its last Congress, the TUC – led by their first ever black female president, Gloria Mills – signed a protocol with the Muslim Council of Britain to look at a range of mutually concerning issues, including Islamophobia.

There is increasing evidence that the work of unions in these areas is beginning to bite. One example is the way unions have challenged the activities of extremist political parties in the workplace, in local areas and in the courts. We have worked innovatively on campaigns with local trades councils and community groups, organising and supporting vulnerable workers, particularly migrant workers from the new European Union member states.

When I was part of the leadership of the National Union of Public Employees and of the public services union, UNISON, we promoted racial equality through a range of groundbreaking projects. We campaigned against the exploitation of Phillipino domestic workers; we ran successful anti-deportation campaigns; we promoted anti-racism and equal opportunity policies; and we supported legal challenges to establish key legal precedents. At the heart of our work was the

desire to tackle inequality and to give disadvantaged groups dignity and respect at work and in society. We championed the campaign for a minimum wage within the trade union movement to help thousands of workers, particularly women and ethnic minority workers.

Two things strike me as particularly important, when considering the legacy the CRE will leave behind after 30 years of work. One is the creation of and the role played by racial equality councils up and down the country. Their work over the years has been taken for granted, and sometimes undervalued, but they remain crucial for communities, local councils and public authorities, bringing people together to provide support, resolve conflicts and defuse tensions.

The other is the creation of the race equality impact assessment – a potentially powerful tool and legal instrument which public authorities must use to make sure that their policies are not discriminating against any ethnic group. But it is not enough simply to have the tools in place: failures by many authorities actually to carry out their assessments, or to support their race equality schemes with follow-up actions, mean that we cannot be complacent. As the CRE prepares to enter the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights next year, we must concentrate on how to close the gap between policies and practice.

Race relations will be the dominant story of this decade, if not this century. Celebrations will take place in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. It will also the year when the new Commission on Equality and Human Rights comes into being. There are high expectations, but also uncertainty about what will happen in the future.

I am not entirely confident that the racism which blighted the aspirations and ambitions of early immigrants was particular to that period. Structural disadvantages in the labour market and our educational system remain persistent barriers that continue to hold back many of our fellow citizens at the start of the twenty-first century. But as a society, we can set the standards for others to follow. I am impressed in London and elsewhere by the cosmopolitan nature of our society: in a vibrant celebration of humanity, new generations are growing up together, and they are learning how to deal with racism.

A TOTAL TRANSFORMATION

Ross McKibbin

In the last 30 years, Britain’s social and ethnic structure has changed faster than ever before. In the 1970s, over 60 per cent of the British population were ‘manual working class’. Today that figure is less than 40 per cent. The main reason for this has been the decline of British manufacturing and the concomitant growth of the service sector. British manufacturing began to struggle in the 1950s, but the dramatic decline in the early 1980s, when some industries almost collapsed, was the unintended consequence of anti-inflationary policies. Eventually a very diverse service sector, which included, for example, both highly sophisticated banking networks and fast-food chains, took up much of the slack, but with a very different workforce. A large proportion of service-sector workers are women, and indeed more women are now employed than men. But many are in either part-time or low-paid occupations and their overall earnings are significantly lower than men’s. Equal pay and equal opportunities legislation has been of only limited success. In the last 30 years, therefore, British society has become – by occupational criteria – predominantly middle-class and its workforce predominantly female. It has also become much richer, but its wealth is much more unequally distributed.

Changes in Britain’s class structure have been accompanied by marked changes in its ethnic structure. In 1950, there were about 20,000 ‘non-whites’ living in Britain. By 2000, there were nearly four million. Post-war immigration has created something new to Britain: large ethnic minority groups. But British migratory patterns are complicated. Historically, more people have left Britain than have come. It is only since the mid-1990s that Britain has become a large net importer of labour. And the pattern of immigration is now very different. In the 1950s and 1960s, most migrants came from the Caribbean, East Africa and South Asia (and, of course, Ireland). Today, most come from the United States and the

Old Commonwealth, from West Africa, the Middle East and from those Eastern European countries who have joined the EU. Migration from Ireland has virtually ceased. Furthermore, this migration operates at all levels of British society, so open is it – from the Royal Ballet to the universities to football’s premier league. Where earlier immigrants tended to become permanent residents, many newer immigrants, whether Americans or Poles, will return home.

The immigrant workforce has also in the last 30 years become more diverse. While the first wave of immigrants worked in transport, manufacturing (especially textiles) and the NHS, more recent immigrants work in the highest levels of the service sector (the City of London is a huge importer of skilled labour) as well as the lowest, in education and in skilled trades, like the famous Polish plumbers, together with more traditional occupations such as working for the NHS. The decline of manufacturing, however, has left some immigrants, like those in Lancashire, marooned. Much of the more recent migration has been to greater London, which is now literally a world city. But London is not typical. Between one-quarter and one-third of London’s working population was born overseas, but less than one-tenth of the total British workforce. By the standards of the other major English-speaking countries, Britain is not unusually ‘ethnic’, something often overlooked.

The political and social effects of these changes to Britain’s occupational and ethnic structure have been important, if sometimes unexpected. Politically, the most important change has been the break-up of the two-party system, which dominated British politics from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the 1951 general election, the Labour and Conservative Parties together won 97 per cent of the votes; in 1979, 81 per cent; in 2005, only 68 per cent. This is partly the result of an emerging ‘nationalism’ in Scotland and Wales, but even more of the decline of the ‘old’ working class and (as noted) the rapid growth of a diverse middle class less strongly attached to inherited political allegiances. Paradoxically, this has probably favoured Labour more than the Conservatives. It was always assumed that a population of which 70 per cent are owner-occupiers and do not belong to trade unions would be natural Conservative voters. In practice, the weakening of Labour’s relationship with the trade unions (something which had alienated many potential voters) allowed Labour to adjust to these social changes better than anyone anticipated. Furthermore, the big fall in electoral turnout suggests that for many people old electoral allegiances are weak indeed. In 1979, 78 per cent of the electorate voted; in 2005, it was 61 per cent. To some extent, such

allegiances have been decanted into single-issue movements like ecology, but for many it has simply been a withdrawal from formal politics altogether. Politicians, however, have been less sensitive to this than to the possible political consequences of immigration. It is now difficult for anyone born in Britain since 1976 to imagine what it was like in 1950, so disproportionately important to British life has immigration been. Popular culture, sport, eating and ‘lifestyles’ have been almost transformed. So has Britain’s entrepreneurial culture. East African Asians have been conspicuously successful, but they are not alone. A striking feature of modern Britain is the extent to which its richest inhabitants are not of British birth; they are people attracted by Britain’s cultural and economic openness, and favourable tax laws.

The political response has been ambivalent. Many politicians undoubtedly assumed that immigration would be unpopular with the host community: the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was the first of many pieces of legislation designed to keep outsiders out. This was, however, done within a comparatively liberal framework. The exclusionary legislation was accompanied by race relations legislation whose aim was to end discrimination against those who had actually made it to Britain. Furthermore, the framework was multicultural. Although politicians were worried that immigrants might appear un-British, no attempt was made to force assimilation via a single concept of citizenship. Immigrants were largely left to themselves to decide how ‘British’ they would be; though this is something that might well change.

In fact, the attempts at tight immigration control have mostly failed. It is difficult for any liberal democracy to prohibit immigration effectively and, furthermore, Britain has developed a demand for labour of all sorts which could only be met by immigration, while the end of the Cold War and political upheaval in much of Africa and the Middle East rapidly increased the number of people who wished to come to Britain one way or another. In practice, this weak exclusionary- cum-liberal regime has worked reasonably well. Britain’s race relations are by international standards comparatively good, and attempts to use immigration for electoral purposes have hitherto mostly failed. But this regime has in the last couple of years come under strain, and politicians are increasingly attracted to an assimilationist rather than a multicultural model. Assimilationst policies are, however, difficult to devise and are unlikely to work better than the loose multiculturalism practised so far.

REFLECTIONS

Trevor Phillips

One door closes. Another opens. As the Commission for Racial Equality hurtles towards what the red tops might call ‘a date with destiny’, it would be tempting to regard this penultimate year as the closing chapter of a turbulent 30-year war against racism. Far from it. The passing of the torch from the CRE to a new, full-spectrum equalities authority – the Commission for Equality and Human Rights – really is a new beginning for the struggle for racial equality and dignity. It also marks some profound personal milestones for people who have lived through the period, many recounted elsewhere in this volume. For me, one way to describe the period in race is as a series of openings and closings, which mark the steps, sometimes faltering but always progressive, towards greater racial equality and understanding in the UK.

As it happens, the last 30 years almost exactly brackets my own working life. As the CRE came into being, I was closing an academic chapter, leaving the chemistry laboratory to become a £20-a-week student union official, a paid agitator funded by the public, as one of my relatives wonderingly pointed out. In 1976, the National Union of Students (NUS) staged a long hot summer campaign of demonstrations and occupations in support of overseas students who were being required to pay discriminatory tuition fees: the first time a mainstream organisation of any kind had put anti-racism at the head of its agenda.

At the same time, at the Grunwick film-processing factory in north-west London, a group of Asian workers, led by a formidable woman called Jayaben Desai, were embarking on what was to become one of the longest and most bitter disputes in British industrial relations. It was one to which the unions came reluctantly. In those days, women were not the force they are now in trades unions, and action by Asian women was almost unheard of: Grunwick was probably the first of its kind and scale. For the first time in this country, an

essentially male, white trade union and labour movement came to the aid of a group of non-white women workers. The students turned out too. The deal was that, as the London organiser for the NUS, I brought the bodies, while the Transport and General’s local man (Jack Dromey, now the union’s deputy general secretary) brought the megaphone.

The firsts weren’t all happening in politics, of course. Today, with just over a third of the Premier League’s footballers from ethnic minorities, it is hard to think back to a period when there were fewer than half-a-dozen non-whites in the top division. They were routinely subjected to racist barracking and, more woundingly, to bigoted criticism by fellow professionals: they were artistic but afraid of physical challenge, they were fine in summer but no good in the mud, they were flashy but inconsistent. In the end, the pressure was too great for the few who bore the lonely mantle – young men like Clyde Best of West Ham, and Albert Johanssen of Leeds, never asked to carry the burden of expectation that everyone of all races placed on them.

But in the year that followed the establishment of the CRE, and just after it opened its own doors in 1977, a leading football club, West Bromwich Albion, regularly started to field three black players – Brendan Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis, who inevitably became known as ‘The Three Degrees’. They paved the way for three generations of black footballers; and even for a famous reversal of stereotype. David Beckham’s love of ‘bling’ led to his being named in 2003 as a black British icon. Today, teams such as Chelsea and Arsenal regularly field sides which are at least a third non-white. From being driven out of the national game, black players have come to dominate its culture. One door closed. Another opened.

The 1976 legislation itself helped to force new doors open, and not before time. The pernicious practice of ‘at-the-gate’ recruitment, for example, in which jobs were handed out without advertisement, was made effectively unlawful by the 1976 Act. For years, the practice of casual hiring was used to shut non-whites out of work. Jobs were passed down from father to son, and anyone who wasn’t connected wouldn’t even know that jobs were available. It took some years to drive the practice out of the workplace (it was still common enough to provide material for the first TV investigation I did, back in 1980), but to all intents and purposes, this era was over. One door shut for bigots, but another opened for minorities.

Some new doors offered minority Britons the opportunity to step from the shadows into the limelight. In the industry where I eventually made my living,

except for the odd much-loved entertainer – Shirley Bassey, the calypsonian Cy Grant or the late comic Charlie Williams, for example – the British public had always kept non-whites firmly locked in the box marked ‘exotic’. The distinguished careers of Sir Trevor MacDonald and his BBC counterpart, Moira Stuart, changed all that. Sir Trevor at one point became, statistically, the most frequently seen face on British TV. His example opened doors to so many others that Sir Ludovic Kennedy was moved to complain (incorrectly) a few years back that no one white read the news any more.

Of course, the last three decades have not been the story of the irresistible ascent to greater equality and dignity. I wish that many of the doors which did open had remained shut. In the early 1980s, like many people I hoped that the demise of the National Front meant that we had put a lid on the organised far right in Britain. But the rise of the British National Party (BNP) in the past decade has opened the door to a more persuasive version of political racism. As slimy and despicable as the BNP is, it has garnered nearly a million votes in elections. That door reveals a dangerous prospect, which we are seeing in its full, stomachchurning horror in continental Europe, where far-right parties in countries such as Belgium, France, Austria and Italy hold the reins of power in several regional or city governments.

It is, in my view, right for governments to open the door to greater choice for ordinary people. For those who grow up without money, the greatest restriction isn’t always a lack of money to buy what you want. Often it is not even knowing what might be available if you had the money. If, for example, you have never travelled more than a mile from your home (I grew up in north London, but never saw the Thames until I was 17), how can you possibly be expected to take advantage of the many choices available in a great city? For many, the real denial of richness in our lives is not material, but mental. So even as the door marked ‘choice’ is opened, others close. We know that greater choice over schools, for example, is leading steadily to greater racial polarisation among students. This is not, as is so often alleged, a consequence of faith schools: it is principally a problem in the 17,000 or so non-denominational schools. In practice, while choice has opened doors for some, it is closing doors to others.

Over the past three decades, so much has happened in so many fields that it would be absurd to try to summarise them in one volume. However, we do know, and can say without fear of serious contradiction, that much has improved in race relations and racial equality. The CRE and its partners have, without doubt, changed British life for the better.

But every year we face new challenges. Globalisation has increased the diversity in our towns and cities to the point where we now speak of hyper-diversity. Immigration from over 100 countries means that as a society we are not just less white, but many shades of whites, blacks, browns and yellows. All of this has added immeasurably to the vigour and energy of Britain – but it has also created more friction and more tension. In an ageing society, diversity can be our salvation, but only if we want to make it so. The good news is that, as I write, it is becoming clear that all parts of the political spectrum, bar the racist extremists, are coming to accept this conclusion.

I started my working life as a racial equality activist; today, I am what I would then have called (in my more polite moments) an equality bureaucrat. No matter; we bureaucrats have our place, and the line of pen-pushers, of which I happen to be the latest, has some victories to be proud of. After 30 years, I would say that the CRE and its allies have won the hardest of its battles – to get the nation to accept that our diversity is an inevitable, inexorable, joyous aspect of our Britishness. But now we – citizens, activists, bureaucrats, politicians – face another formidable task. We must work out how, in an era of hyper-diversity, to meet the two great challenges of the twenty-first century: how we live with our planet, and how we live with each other.

That is why we now, more than ever, need robust and courageous leadership from the CRE and its partners – and our successors. The CRE may be changing, but there is no question that racial equality, race relations and immigration matter more than they ever have. Recent surveys show that this group of issues are, for the first time, more significant to Britons than the NHS and taxation, and rival crime for the top spot. They also show that the task of integration is more multi-dimensional than ever, as new communities emerge and new sources of division erupt. But we’re used to it: for three decades, nothing has ever stood still. Every time we move forward, we find a new challenge. As one door closes, another opens.

THE INSIDE STORY

Wasfi Kani

I work in and with an art form which is famously ‘white’: opera. And why shouldn’t it be? It was created in 1600 in a white, western Europe. I may not have a milligram of genetic whiteness, but opera is my life.

I haven’t changed the art form, but I have done one thing with it that hadn’t been done before and it has had an impact: I took opera into prison. And then I used that as a pretext to get the public to go into prison to think about what happens in this dustbin of society, and about how prisons might better serve society. Prison is the Dr Jekyll side of my opera life; as Mr Hyde, I entertain life’s winners at Grange Park Opera.

Opera is what it is and I don’t change it to make it more appealing to anyone: not poor people, those from ethnic minority groups or the young. I know some people do projects with that in mind, but often the result just isn't the art form. We didn't change any part of the opera we produced in prisons, and prisoners of all types just ‘saw that it was good’, to coin a phrase. People respond to quality. Even if they are in prison.

How did I get to be able to do any of this? Well, this is what happened to me. My Muslim parents left India at Partition and, after a brief spell in newlyformed Pakistan, came to England, where there was free education. I was born in 1956 in that cradle of race riots, Cable Street in Stepney (now Tower Hamlets). Five children and my mother lived in two rooms at the top of a dodgy Georgian house – dodgy because the house next door had been bombed and we were held up by wooden buttresses. One room was where we slept and played and where my mother operated a sewing machine to earn money. The other room was known as ‘the other room’: in fact it was a kitchen. Once a week we each stood in the kitchen sink and had water poured over us and our hair washed. I didn’t have a bath until I was six.

The next 20 years were those that led to the founding of the Commission for Racial Equality. The state seemed very generous: it gave me free schooling, piano and violin lessons, an Oxford education. It was also during those 20 years that Enoch Powell made his famous speech, and overnight my white, working-class playmates decided to call me ‘Paki’ and told me they didn’t want to be my friend.

By the mid-1980s, I was finishing a stint in the City and had realised that if I didn’t involve myself with music I would, at the end of my life, regret it.

A bit of a dreamer, I had a few ideas about taking opera to places other than regular theatres and I started a little company which wandered about the place. Our clientele consisted of the usual suspects and, to break away from the expected, we broke into a prison – Wormwood Scrubs. At first, we just performed to the prisoners. We took with us an orchestra, lights, a set, costumes and, though we performed The Marriage of Figaro in Italian (without surtitles), it went down a storm. Why shouldn’t ‘they’ whom society has found wanting enjoy opera? Step two was to get the prisoners – murderers in the first project – to participate and perform. I chose Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd . Apart from the obvious team-building, educational and rehabilitative elements of the project, we’d realised that it was also necessary for the public to come into prisons to see that prisoners are just ordinary people whom prison must return as good and useful members of society. Systematic humiliation seemed an unlikely route, and I thought that this was worth a try.

I was certain our project wouldn’t last, and that definitely by the year 2000 it would be dead: prisons were bound to improve, prisoner numbers would fall and there wouldn’t be enough baritones for the chorus of Les Mis´erables . Well, prisons might have got better, but prisoner numbers continue to increase. Somewhere, something is not going right. As I write, there is another hoo-ha about using police cells because prisons are full.

I am amazed that home secretaries of all complexions don’t see prisons as a priority. Headlines of ‘let’s be tough on crime’ and ‘keep crime off the streets’ are more likely to win votes than, say, a proclamation like ‘let’s turn offenders into useful members of society’. It seems very obvious that people are in prison largely because of a poor education. Short of legitimate means of acquiring all those lovely things that we are told are desirable, they step outside what is legal.

Since 1991, our little company, Pimlico Opera, has taken more than 30,000 members of the public into prison, and the project is now quite famous as an annual event. Would this work have been possible 30 years ago? In many respects, I feel society was in fact more open back then. Or perhaps I was naïve, and just didn’t notice that at the opera one is now, and was then, usually one of a handful of non-whites in the audience.

This summer, I was stopped at the opera by a woman who had come across me before. She admired my fake tan and asked me if it was the new Johnson’s product. But that isn’t opera’s fault. Opera is here to tell us about ourselves and the world we live in. That day, it carried the message both on and off the stage.

CONTRIBUTORS

Lord (Adair) Turner of Ecchinswell is a non-executive director of Standard Chartered plc, former chair of the UK Pensions Commission, and is an independent peer
Adrian Mitchell is a pacifist, and a poet and playright for children and adults
Ajab Singh is creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi
AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Lord (Anthony) Lester of Herne Hill QC was an architect of the Race Relations Act 1976. His Single Equality Bill is a model for lawmakers in creating workable legislation that is effectively enforced
Lord (Bhikhu) Parekh of Kingston upon Hull is professor at the University of Westminster, a Labour peer, fellow of the British Academy, and president of the Academy of Social Sciences
Lord (Bill) Morris of Handsworth was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union from 1991 until his retirement in 2003
Bonnie Greer is a playwright and critic. She sits on the boards of the London Film School and the Theatre Royal Stratford, and is chair of writernet, the playwrights’ organisation
Brendon Batson is former deputy chief executive of the Players Football Association and former managing director of West Bromwich Albion FC. He is now a consultant to the Football Association
Callum Brown is professor of religious and cultural history at the University of Dundee, and author of Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Longman Pearson, 2006)
Courttia Newland is the author of five books. His latest is Music For The Off-Key (2006)
David Edgar ’s plays include Destiny (Royal Shakespeare Company) and Playing with Fire (National Theatre), which will be broadcast on Radio Four in January 2007
David Goodhart is the editor of Prospect magazine and the author of Progressive Nationalism: Citizenship and the left (Demos)
David McCrone is professor of sociology, and co-director of the Institute of Governance, at Edinburgh University
Fiona Millar is a journalist specialising in parenting and education issues, and a campaigner for comprehensive education
Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, and a commentator on contemporary cultural issues
Gurpal Singh Virdi is a detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Service

Gwyn Thomas is emeritus professor of Welsh at the University of Wales, Bangor, and the present Welsh national poet
Lord (Karan) Bilimoria of Chelsea CBE DL is the founder and chief executive of Cobra Beer Ltd. He is UK chair of the Indo British Partnership and of the Indo British Partnership Network
John Agard is a poet, performer and anthologist who was born in Guyana and came to Britain in 1977. His latest book is We Brits (Bloodaxe, 2006)
Kenan Malik is a writer and broadcaster, and author of The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Palgrave Macmillan)
Marek Kohn is a writer, whose most recent book is A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination (Faber)
Matthew Bennett is deputy head of the Department of Communication and Management Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Matthew Fort is Guardian food editor and author of Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa (2004). His new book, Lunching with Leopoldo , will be published in 2007
Michael Banton is a former member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and its chair from 1996-98.
Sir Nicholas Serota has been director of Tate since 1988, and was previously director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery
Nitin Sawhney is a film composer and recording artist
Oona King is a writer, broadcaster and political campaigner
Owen Sheers ’s first novel, Resistance , will be published by Faber in Spring 2007
Rabinder Singh QC is a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers in London
Rodney Bickerstaffe is a former general secretary of NUPE and UNISON. He is now president of War on Want and vice president of SOLIDAR
Ross McKibbin is an emeritus research fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and the author of Classes and Cultures (1998)
Simon Armitage is a poet, freelance writer, broadcaster and playwright, whose most recent collection of poetry is Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid (Faber and Faber, 2006)
Sophie Hannah is a poet and author whose first crime novel, Little Face , is published by Hodder
Trevor Phillips is the current chair of the Commission for Racial Equality and the first chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights
Wasfi Kani OBE read music at Oxford, worked with computers in the City, and then decided to pursue a career in music