nm1166: in the previous lecture to today we er on British politics we explored 
er the issue of immigration and saw how immigration was the prism through which 
er the politics of race has played itself out but we also saw how the central 
importance of immigration didn't just lie in the need to control numbers 
entering the country per se but was m-, more specifically and centrally about 
establishing a coherent conception of British identity in the post-war context 
er we also saw how the discourse on immigration er and within that discourse on 
immigration race was perceived to be a problem from the very start so the 
importance of immigration is not simply about numbers it has a subsidiary 
possibly even a primary er purpose that goes beyond that which is in terms of 
defining the conception of Britishness where numbers does come into play the 
issue of how many black people live in Britain is with respect to the need to 
ensure good race relations because much of the 
discourse around immigration was premised on the notion that if numbers were 
limited then one could ensure that race relations m-, would remain in some 
sense good or taking it from the other side if numbers were unlimited then 
there was a threat to good race relations and stable race relations and that 
whole notion was premised on the idea that allowing too many people into 
Britain from the new Commonwealth would cause problems in terms of the ability 
of British society to assimilate or integrate those numbers and what we see in 
the post-war period at a time when immigration er is the primary discourse is 
the emergence of a secondary subsidiary discourse around the notion of race 
relations very specifically and in particular articulated by the question of 
how to integrate specifically black minority groups into Britain and into a 
British way of life and as i mentioned last week there were already perceived 
problems emerging betw-, in relations 
between blacks and whites in Britain from an early stage whilst they reached 
their pinnacle er in nineteen-fifty-eight in the social unrest in Notting Hill 
and in Nottingham one should also note that the first acknowledged racist 
murder in Britain in the post-war period er occurred in nineteen-forty-eight in 
Camden in London there was also a historical legacy of recognizing the problem 
of race relations as we saw in last week's lecture in terms of the antagonisms 
that had existed between earlier minority groups like the Irish and the Jewish 
communities and the indigenous white community in Britain but the specific 
issues er around which questions of race relations er focused in the post-war 
period were distributional issues and distributional issues in the context of 
post-war reconstruction and more specifically it hinged around the idea or the 
perception and a widespread perception that the arrival of black immigrants 
into Britain was 
threatening the allocations of goods and services and jobs for the indigenous 
white population those goods and services included immediate welfare provisions 
but also housing and more directly issues of employment and from a very early 
stage in Britain and remember we're talking about a context within which there 
is no legis-, l-, legislative redress for ethnic minorities at this stage that 
from an early stage there were colour bars operating in almost every area of 
the provision of goods and services and jobs in Britain in every area in the 
public sector and the private sector they were colour bars that were often 
explicit and sometimes were more de facto in operation implicitly now 
unsurprisingly the realities of discrimination in Britain intensified the 
disaffection of black people who had arrived unsurprisingly er black people 
were not especially enamoured to a situation in which in often incredibly 
explicit terms they were denied access to 
goods services and jobs more especially er there was growing concern within 
black communities from a very early stage that in the face of that sort of 
discrimination they were offered no protection under the law now in that 
context one has on the one side white antagonisms to the black community 
because of white fears over distributional concerns and on the other side one 
has disaffection in the black community because of the de facto realities of 
being discriminated against as a result almost of those concerns within the 
white community and in that context through the nineteen-fifties and early 
nineteen-sixties there was an increasingly clear view within the British state 
that there was an acute danger of social conflict arising out of the problems 
of black and white relations now even though the problem of race relations 
[sniff] as we saw last week er can be traced back to the very earliest stages 
of post-war black immigration in general despite the acknowledgement 
of the problem of race relations [sniff] the state's attitude in general was to 
hinge policy attempts at resolving those issues around the one basically hammer-
like implementation of policy around immigration immigration control for 
fifteen-odd years was generally regarded as the only possible way of ensuring 
good race relations there was effectively no other policy input at the level of 
the state [sniff] and it isn't until the mid to late nineteen-sixties that 
there's any attempt by the state in Britain to actively intervene in tackling 
discrimination against black British people [sniff] now in lieu of the state's 
involvement what sort of protective mechanisms did the black community have 
well immediately after the Second World War there were various groups and 
movements that did begin to grow around the issue of immigrant welfare [sniff] 
and as i suggested these emerged as a result of an absence of s-, any organized 
provision in law by the state now the majority of those voluntary 
organizations were white led and were philanthropic in nature and their aim was 
most often to advance the effective integration of black people into the host 
society and on the whole those voluntary groups didn't receive state support 
until well into the nineteen-sixties so what causes or what is the impetus for 
state intervention during the nineteen-sixties well most obviously by the mid-
nineteen-sixties there are strict immigration controls in Britain however the 
problem remains that there are still black people in Britain and the problem 
remains that those black people are now unless repatriated going to be a 
permanent feature of British life and in that context and the recognition of 
the permanent presence in the context of endemic discrimination and in the 
context of widespread hostility towards that permanent black presence there was 
increasingly perceived to be a need to actively intervene at this stage there 
was increasingly a 
perception of the need for the state to actively intervene in the relations 
between blacks and whites in Britain in order to allow for the effective 
integration of black people into the host society and moreover external events 
held a double emphasis 'cause of course during the nineteen-sixties and the mid-
nineteen-sixties the British public is witnessing some of the most tumultuous 
events in American society namely the height of the radical end of the civil 
rights movement it isn't just the laudable claims of Martin Luther King to end 
discrimination in the South that is being witnessed at this moment but is also 
a recognition of massive violence and upheaval across the north of at-, the 
United States from around nineteen-sixty-four to sixty-eight the every summer 
of in the United States there is massive urban unrest massive urban unrest 
centred around the issue of race that focuses attention and fears and concerns 
of the British public as for the 
possibility of such tensions emerging here and of the necessity to avoid those 
tensions now in the earliest periods er where the state is concerned to 
intervene in race relations er its main concern is to find ways of overcoming 
differences between immigrant and indigenous populations differences it regards 
as primarily those of culture and identity and again we can see how that ties 
in quite centrally to questions of Britishness of what is to be British during 
this earliest period there is a perception that the only way in which to ensure 
good rel-, race relations is to integrate actively that immigrant population 
into broader conceptions dominant conceptions of British national life and 
British national identity now one needs to think through what underlies that 
sort of conception it is a conception which requires one to think of ways in 
which black people can be made to fit the model of Britishness and as soon as 
the problem is identified to be one of 
difference in culture and identity then the solution to that problem is to find 
ways of is to find ways of undermining those differences of culture and 
identity or lessening their problematic nature the view at the time the view f-,
w-, during the nineteen-sixties was that those differences of culture and 
identity were only temporary differences they were temporary differences that 
could be ironed out of the immigrant population cultural differences could be 
flattened in a way that would allow for the effective integration of black 
people into white society linguistic differences were regarded linguistic 
differences were regarded as a central feature of that one of the major 
problems between black and white societies was one of language ironing out 
those sorts of differences would allow for effective integration now it follows 
pretty obviously if you take that view that the easiest way to pursue 
integration is to get the black 
population to be like the white population to make the cultural significance of 
the black population less significant and during the nineteen-sixties there 
were very deliberate attempts to pursue exactly that concern cultural 
cohesiveness amongst the black population was regarded to be a feature of its 
concentration in particular areas the fact that the black population was 
concentrated in certain large cities meant that it was always going to be able 
to protect a culture that was regarded as problematic therefore a way of 
overcoming that problem was to distribute the black population deconcentrate 
the black population in a way in which its cultural identities and cultural 
bonds would not be able to be maintained the most notorious example of this was 
a policy pursued by most major metropolitan local authorities throughout this 
period and it was the active intervention of local authorities to distribute an 
ethnic minority population 
into white society so one got for example in terms of public housing in cities 
like Manchester and Birmingham the attempt to establish housing ratios of 
ethnic minorities to deconcentrate ethnic minorities councils would establish a 
particular ratio that they it regarded as an optimum one for the concentration 
of black people within white society so in Birmingham for example every every 
housing estate had a particular ratio inputted on it there would be thirteen 
white families for every one black family in Manchester the figure was one in i 
think nine in the education sector ethnic ni-, minority children were required 
to be taught only in English with no move to integrate them slowly into that 
process the idea was if they were made to speak English they would just be 
forced to speak English whether they could or not they'd have to learn but 
these were generally ad hoc measures during this period but they are ad hoc 
measures that are perceived to be the right 
way forward in terms of integrating ethnic minorities and they are a stimulus 
and a pressure for the state to advance a more coherent and deliberate response 
in the form of race relations protection for ethnic minorities because what is 
clear is that despite attempts to integrate the black community there is still 
hostility from the indigenous white population and there is no guarantee of how 
long it will take purs-, pursuing policies like distributing black populations 
et cetera for them to be integrated effectively into British society there is a 
recognition that without protection in law the black community in Britain is 
utterly vulnerable to the prejudices of white society and the attempt by the 
state to offer black people protection in the law come to fruition in the mid 
to late nineteen-sixties in the form of the nineteen-sixty-five and nineteen-
sixty-eight Race Relations Acts now the nineteen-sixty-five Race Relations Act 
was to say the least 
limited in its effects and even the potential of its effects the nineteen-sixty-
five act established no criminal sanction for those guilty of racial 
discrimination [sniff] and the Race Relations Board was set up as part of the 
act to deal with cases of racial discrimination but the Race Relations Board 
had a very narrow remit and in practice was unable to deal with the vast 
majority of complaints it initially received [sniff] the nineteen-sixty-eight 
act was tougher before detailing some of the aspects of that let's just 
remember what's going on in nineteen-sixty-eight and this is part of the 
state's dual strategy with respect to race relations because it isn't just 
about protecting ethnic minorities it's also still about maintaining that need 
to be tough on immigration it's about maintaining the need to define absolutely 
what being British is about because remember in nineteen-sixty-eight there is 
the perceived flood of Kenyan Asians into 
Britain escaping persecution in Kenya nineteen-sixty-eight is the pinnacle 
moment of Powellism and of the concerns expressed about the presence of ethnic 
minorities in Britain so the state's response to ethnic ni-, minorities is not 
simply a protective one it's a protective one on one side and a tough 
uncompromising one on the other the nineteen-sixty-eight Act made it unlawful 
in explicit terms made it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race 
colour or ethnic or national origin and it specifically highlighted 
discrimination in the areas of employment and of housing and of the provision 
of goods and services [sniff] and the nineteen-sixty-eight act banned 
discriminatory notices and adverts and it also expanded the remit of the 
original Race Relations Board offering it firmer legal sanctions so far so good 
but the problem with both of those acts in nineteen-sixty-five and nineteen-
sixty-eight was that they represented a very specific way of 
understanding what racial discrimination amounted to in both of those acts 
racial discrimination was primarily understood in fact that's wrong i-, they 
were exclusively both acts understood racial discrimination to be a matter of 
active and purposeful discrimination that is to say any attempt to establish 
that racial discrimination had occurred required one to prove that there had 
been explicit intention to discriminate against ethnic minorities in some way 
unsurprisingly under n-, either of these acts very few people were successful 
in making claims and indeed even fewer were particularly successful at 
prosecuting successfully those initial claims and it's here we can see quite 
centrally why it's important we understand the nature of race and racism 'cause 
if we u-, if we understand racism for example in terms of individual activity 
if we understand racism as identifiable within the locus or the origin of a 
particular intended activity then of course we 
have the advantage of knowing what we're looking at when we're trying to put 
legal sanction against it if somebody's explicitly saying no i'm a racist i 
think black people are not as good as white people i'm not going to employ them 
you know what you're looking at you know that you can say that's against the 
law you're not allowed to do that the problem though is how much racism is like 
that because as we discussed earlier in the course if you understand racism in 
a different way if you understand it in some institutional sense or if you 
understand it as something systemic rather than something that just happens to 
be what people believe if you believe that racism is reproduced through 
operations in the economy and in society and in culture then does it have to be 
intentional does it have to be about the deliberate actions of a set of 
individuals who make their deliberate intentions explicit so racism may in fact 
be something more general and less 
deliberate in those ways but then the problem immediately arises as that if 
that's the case then how do you begin to legislate against it 'cause what are 
you identifying if you can't find people who are saying i'm being a racist and 
i'm not going to employ you then what are you looking at moreover how do you 
begin to conceive of how whatever that racism amounts to at an institutional 
level how do you begin to understand its relationships with other forms of 
discrimination gender discrimination discrimination with respect to sexuality 
at this point are we not moving into the realms of some vague notion that 
people are just not treated very fairly h-, m-, and at that point if we are how 
do you get any sense of precise legal definition over that that is a core 
concern for the state during this period but it's the recognition that by 
focusing on individual explicit intentions it's the recognition that by 
focusing on that th-, there is no effective or particular 
legislation aimed at that is not effective in overturning discrimination it's 
the recognition of that that leads to the state during the nineteen-seventies 
leads to the state's rethinking of its approaches to race relations which comes 
together in the codified Race Relations Act of nineteen- seventy-six [sniff] 
the Race Relations Act of nineteen-seventy-six follows close on the heels of 
the Sex Discrimination Act of nineteen-seventy-five and in both cases these 
were legislation that emphasized not only the illegality of intentional acts of 
racism but also made illegal those procedures and activities that systemically 
produced or reproduced discrimination what we otherwise refer to as indirect 
discrimination and it's in the nineteen-seventy-six Race Relations Act where 
the emphasis shifts from intentional acts that discriminate in explicit ways to 
a focus instead on the outcomes of procedures that in practice discriminate 
whether they explicitly intend 
to or not so the focus goes to outcome rather than focusing on intention what 
that allowed for therefore was that even where policies and procedures were 
equal in a formal sense what mattered was whether the outcome of those 
procedures was to discriminate against certain racially designated groups and 
if they could be shown in their outcomes to discriminate whether they meant to 
or not whether they explicitly denied that that was the case or not then they 
were deemed to be illegal that came under the remit of the Commission for 
Racial Equality which was set up specifically to streamline the administration 
of this particular area of the law now you can read about the Commission for 
Racial Equality in your reading i would make a few comments however these are 
that despite what i think is an enormous shift in emphasis in the race 
relations perspective on behalf of the state despite that enormous shift in 
emphasis from intention to outcome the 
Commission for Racial Equality in practice has not been effec-, as effective as 
i suspect was once hoped because even today twenty years later what is clear is 
that its definitions of discrimination and its attempts to impose those 
definitions in judgements of discrimination claims are still incredibly vague 
it isn't clear how general definitions of racist outcomes still get put into 
practice as the criteria for judgement of discrimination cases moreover the 
Commission for Racial Equality is administratively cumbersome and incredibly 
time-consuming for those engaged in trying to make claims and further the 
Commission for Racial Equality does not have a particularly harsh set of 
sanctions in practice for those it finds guilty of discrimination and the one 
thing that the Commission for Racial Equality doesn't have in any way at all is 
any form of positive sanction to reverse what it regards as discrimination it 
does not have the ability to positively 
discriminate to reverse what it regards as discriminatory practices it has the 
ability to stop discrimination at the moment it finds it but it does not have 
the sanction of of requiring an employer or the provider of goods and services 
to actively redress that balance but the nineteen-seventy-six act a-, also 
represented something much more well much less tangible but perhaps more 
important nevertheless than simply the view of a way in which race relations 
could be thought of in terms of integrating and assimilating black people about 
helping black people overcome their problems the nineteen-seventy-six act 
reflected something very different again in the thinking about race relations 
more generally because the seventy-six act recognized even in a half-hearted 
way it nevertheless recognized that conceptions of good race relations could 
not be premised on the idea of simply needing to assimilate black people into 
dominant white society it recognized in 
very explicit ways in terms of what it regarded as a remit of the Commission 
for Racial Equality what it regarded as the context within which the nineteen-
seventy-six act would take its course it recognized that Britain was explicitly 
and permanently a multicultural society a pluralistic society and it 
presupposed that in the context of being a multicultural and pluralistic 
society Britain would r-, or British society would need to include and 
encourage those people it had previously designated as different in their 
difference the aim was not now to iron out differences it was about encouraging 
the positive articulation of those differences in helping to shape in an active 
way the nature of British public life and British social life now of course the 
reality despite that rhetoric and despite that recognition the reality was 
actually quite different er in many ways or the reality was w-, at least more 
begrudging than that rhetoric would presuppose because 
of course during the nineteen-seventies there were further restrictions placed 
on black immigration into Britain again sending out a rather different message 
about the nature of that pluralism the nature of that multiculturalism the 
nature of the boundaries that were being drawn around British identity 
nevertheless there was something pragmatic in this approach in regarding 
Britain as multicultural in regarding Britain as pluralistic the pragmatics of 
this were that it simply was not possible to look at British society and 
pretend there weren't black people there and to pretend that those black people 
suddenly become white culturally or become white in their identifications 
politically and socially there was a recognition that there was there were 
differences that were important differences that couldn't be whitewashed and 
that black communities in Britain would not take an active participatory role 
in British life unless those 
differences were acknowledged in some sort of positive way now the nineteen-
seventy-six act was the last major state inspired initiative in this area 
twenty years later more than twenty years later there has been no state 
legislation at the national level in the area of race relations for the most 
part therefore for the last twenty years it hasn't been at the national level 
where the issue of race relations has for the most part played itself out over 
the last twenty years the main focus for debate and moves forwards and r-, 
regressive moves backwards in this area have almost entirely been played out at 
the local level [sniff] now of course the local level is important because the 
local level is exactly where the politics of race and racism get played out 
it's exactly at the local level that we see notions of community coming 
together it's exactly at the losh-, local level that we see the importance of 
the identities those communities assume i mean 
you're thinking of it in thinking of it in the most simple terms it's at the 
local level that we think about what our neighbourhoods are like it's at the 
local level we think in the most explicit terms about who our neighbours are 
and it's at the local level that we will er or we have seen that those tensions 
operate those tensions operated in Notting Hill because Notting Hill was a 
local area where there were black people living in antagonistic relationship to 
white people on the ground it was at the local level that Peter Griffiths in 
Smethwick in the mi-, mid-nineteen-sixties could make his appeal about h-, if 
you want a nigger neighbour vote Labour because it was at the local level that 
the politics of race was articulated in such a frenzy and such intensity during 
the sixties and seventies local authorities became actively involved in the 
process of intervening in race relations at the local level after and very much 
as a direct 
consequence of the urban unrest in the nineteen-eighties the most violent and 
frightening manifestation of local antagonisms between blacks and whites it's 
in this context the first deliberate and actively empowering moment in black 
political life as i will argue later in the course it's at this very moment 
that the black community begins to exert pressure on local authorities to 
address problems that are not being addressed effectively at the national level 
of discrimination in employment in housing in service provisions in education 
in the social services et cetera et cetera and it's here we see the shift from 
a national level recognition of the multicultural society to a a rather 
different emphasis at the local level towards anti-racism here it's not simply 
about Britain's a multicultural society lots of different groups live together 
in we're going to try and make it harmonious this is about addressing the 
specific problem of racism 
and as a consequence of the idea that what needed to be addressed here was not 
simply how to make life for black people in Britain harmonious how to make race 
relations harmonious but was actually about actively intervening to address the 
problem of racism the consequence of that realization was the emergence of a 
number of initiatives that were pursued by local authorities across the country 
these included the active monitoring of outcomes of service provisions in order 
to identify discrimination councils would increasingly monitor their services 
to see whether there were differential benefits going to one group or another 
there was also an active pursuit of more ethnic minority recruitment within 
local authorities whether they be teachers or local authority council workers 
of whatever sort or council officials themselves and moreover large numbers of 
authorities took the initiative in trying to consult in a much more friendly 
manner with the 
ethnic minority communities and these ranged with all sorts of er initiatives 
but the most obvious one now is that almost every local authority in Britain 
now has translation services for all of its information i mean just a little 
example that's now a standard practice now all of that those sorts of policies 
were initiated by and were led by radical left local authorities during the 
nineteen-eighties authorities like Haringay in London Brent in London 
Manchester City Council Liverpool City Council now we all of course know that 
it was exactly those same authorities during the nineteen-eighties that were 
vilified at the national level in the press and by political parties as being 
the loony left the intense media focus on this these groups of local 
authorities focused absolutely centrally on the question of what they were 
doing for our ethnic minorities the whole discourse was pitched in terms of 
special treatment for ethnic minorities some of you may 
recall or will have read about the apparent bans on things like golliwogs in 
nursery schools all of this stuff became equally pitched in terms of the overt 
and unnecessary and debilitating consequences of political correctness where in 
education authorities like the London Inner London Education Authority began to 
promote explicitly anti-racist curricula they were accused of brainwashing 
children we will remember that there were active pursuits of policies around 
adoption where local authorities would try and encourage same race adoptions 
this again was regarded not only as political correctness gone too far but 
actually reverse discrimination [sniff] a central focus of local authority work 
in this area became contract compliance local authorities would put their 
contracts out to tender but would require that any company employed by the 
council would have to meet certain requirements with regards to ethnic minority 
representation and treatment that 
measure was attacked by the Conservative government at the time Margaret 
Thatcher explicitly accused these councils of interfering with the market 
mechanism imposing unreasonable demands on what would otherwise be a free 
market and perhaps the most controversial of all of those local authority 
initiatives was what was regarded or was er commonly er called race awareness 
training [sniff] race awareness training initiatives were essentially promoting 
the idea that if one could change people's views on race at the local level if 
one could challenge existing prejudices then perhaps one could get some 
institutional cultural change in prevailing racist ideas at the local level now 
again race awareness training was regarded by the right as brainwashing again 
not again ironically race awareness training was attacked from the left as 
emphasizing or misemphasizing individual activity when you should have been 
emphasizing institutional results and race awareness training 
really was the pinnacle moment of this whole process it was the point where 
local authorities actively got involved to try and change people's minds about 
race and there's nothing obviously good about that and in the practice of race 
awareness training some of you may even have gone through it the realities of 
race awareness training are that it is in effect in its practice was bullying 
in effect local authorities did not reach a moment where they could genuinely 
say that they were introducing some cultural change into the organized 
institutions of local politics in Britain that is the management of race in 
Britain in its most significant forms what we see today in terms of the 
sensitivities that we may acknowledge that councils have that we may 
acknowledge in terms of employers' commitments to some level of equal 
opportunities have come through that history we'll explore the more recent 
developments of that in the next lecture