The Crusade against Discrimination in Britain Part 1

This article is the first of a two-part series dealing with race and immigration in the UK in the post-war period. This first part focuses on the genesis and development of the crusade to criminalise free speech and freedom of association in Britain in the name of what is euphemistically termed race relations. A second part will follow, focusing on the history of non-white immigration since 1945.

The BNP is on record as promising to repeal the race relations legislation (see 2005 general election manifesto), so it might be useful to explore just what that might entail. However, it’s important to recognise that, rather than having just a single piece of legislation to deal with there is in reality a labyrinthine thicket of primary and secondary legislation in which the concept of racial discrimination as a criminal activity is embedded and which will need to be undone. It’s a complex area, perhaps intended to be that way, but I hope this piece will provide an accessible and non-academic survey of the subject.

The subject of race relations legislation has returned to topicality and seen a spike in public interest as a result of the recent and ongoing litigation involving the BNP and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). This concerns the BNP constitution and, in particular, the criteria for membership. The legal arguments pertaining to this case are somewhat arcane, and the EHRC’s motives for bringing it this particular time have been subject to debate and criticism. Both have been well-aired here and elsewhere, so I’ll defer further commentary until we get to discussion of the particular legislation under which the action was brought; that is, the Race Relations Act of 1976.

The 2009 Equalities Bill

Sometime during early 2010, if not later this year, the Single Equalities Bill that was foretold in Labour’s election manifesto of 2005 will eventually come to pass as the Equality Act of 2010 (EA10). The EA10 will form the capstone on forty-five years of progressively more intrusive and draconian legislation enacted to deal with equality, diversity and discrimination. A great majority of this legislation has been sponsored and enacted by successive Labour governments although, as will be shown, that could not have been achieved without the acquiescence and tacit approval, at least, of the Conservatives whilst in opposition. Indeed, certain key aspects of the overall legislation were even introduced by and enacted under various Conservative administrations. 

We will return to discussion of the Equality Bill in greater detail later. But in order to view it in its proper perspective, as a part of continuum of activist-driven social engineering unprecedented in British history, it is necessary the trace its origins back to the beginning. To assist in this, we will need to review each major element in the raft of race-related legislation that has been enacted since the mid-1960s, back to the Race Relations Act of 1965 and even earlier. In the course of this exercise we need to consider three crucial questions at each stage in the process:

1. What were the factors that led to race becoming a matter for Parliamentary debate and legislative action?

2. Who were the sponsors of the legislation, and how did they succeed in getting it enacted?

3. What determined the actual structure and scope of the legislation as actually enacted, and how has it affected public life and private discourse?

I don’t expect that this project will stir any significant debate, since it is historical rather polemical in tone. It does however highlight the guilty parties and their role in what has unfolded over time as well as tip the hat to the (depressingly) small number of those amongst the political class who valiantly tried to stem the madness. And it truly is a madness; that a sovereign people should voluntarily impose upon itself the constraints on personal freedoms that the panoply of repressive legislation represents is, to quote a great Englishman, a prophet without honour in his own land, “ to watch a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

In order to understand what is needed to slay it, it is necessary to know the nature of the beast, hence this slight offering. I hope it is both interesting and informative.

A note on sources

I will provide a full list of all the major sources that I consulted at the end of the article but, in the interests of clarity and readability will not be including in-line footnotes and references, except in cases where extensive verbatim citations are used. If anyone requires detail on the source for any particular statement or assertion please feel free to ask.

So let’s get going, and where better to start than at the beginning, with the …

The Race Relations Act of 1965

British common law has long included various statutes intended to create and maintain public order including the Tumultuous Petitioning Act of 1661 and the Seditious Meeting Act of 1817. There were also a variety of other laws dealing with ‘breaches of the peace’ and ‘public mischief’. It was for the latter offence that Arnold Leese was prosecuted and jailed for six months in 1936. He was found guilty of publishing material on Jewish ritual murder which was said to be have rendered ‘His Majesty’s subjects of Jewish faith liable to suspicion, affront and boycott’.  Leese, it may be recalled, was the leader of the International Fascist League who had in the early ‘30s derided Oswald Mosley and his BUF as ‘kosher fascists’ because of what he viewed as their luke-warm embrace of anti-Semitism. A further case in 1947 saw the proprietor of a local newspaper in Morecambe, Lancashire, prosecuted for seditious libel under an act dating back to 1888. This concerned the publication of ‘anti-Semitic’ comments following the murder of two British Army sergeants by Zionist terrorists in Palestine. The speedy acquittal of newspaper owner James Caunt - the jury took just 13 minutes on its deliberations which perhaps indicates the widespread extent of anti-Jewish sentiment at the time - gave rise to energetic lobbying from Jewish organisations for stronger laws.

Public Order Act of 1936

Although we’re going to be focusing on legislation intended specifically to criminalise racial discrimination, it’s worth noting that existing legislation had been used to perform this function even prior to the 1965 Race Relations Act. A prominent example is the case of John Tyndall and Colin Jordan who were sentenced to short prison terms in July 1962 on being found responsible for disturbances that broke out between NSM members and other elements (including Jews) in Trafalgar Square. Tyndall and Jordan were prosecuted and convicted under s5 of the Public Order Act 1936 (POA36). This Act had been enacted principally to deal with the disturbances which attended the emergence of the BUF in the mid 1930s. Its main provisions were intended to ban paramilitary dress and to bring large marches, meetings and other such gatherings under stricter police control. Section 5 however was an innovation in that it criminalised the use of ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour which is intended, or likely to occasion, a breach of the peace’. The conviction was overturned on appeal amid widespread concern that unreasonable constraints had been placed on freedom of speech since the prosecution rested on fact that someone who objected to a speaker’s ideas had reacted violently, thereby giving rise to breach of the peace. The convictions were reinstated however on higher appeal, with the presiding judge observing that a speaker cannot assume that his audience will consist of reasonable people only, and that he must ‘take his audience as he finds it’.

S5 of the POA36 live on today, albeit it in much-modified form, as the basis for the offence of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ which forms a part of all subsequent anti-racism legislation.

Post-war ‘anti-racism’ initiatives

During the 1950s and early 60s a number of Private Member bills were submitted to Parliament calling for the introduction of laws to outlaw racial discrimination. The first such bill was introduced by Labour MP Reginald Sorensen in 1950 and sought to outlaw what was quaintly termed the ‘Colour Bar’. It failed to get a second reading as did the nine similar bills introduced by fellow Labour backbencher Fenner Brockway between 1956 and 1964. With a laissez faire Conservative government anxious to sweep any substantive discussion of race and immigration under the carpet, and which had comfortable enough majorities to allow them to do so, it is little wonder that anti-discrimination legislation failed to attract any significant political attention during the period. Needless to say, there was no discernible electoral support for such legislation, the prevailing understanding being that British law was colour-blind and should remain so.

The background to the 1965 Bill

Various commentators attribute the change in the political environment that eventually culminated in the Race Relations Bill to the convergence of several factors:

? The Notting Hill riots in the summer of 1958 alarmed both public opinion and the political class.  This led the Labour Party in particular to begin to cast the need for outlawing racial discrimination in a public order context.

? The British Nationality Act of 1948 (BNA48) confirmed the principle that every citizen of Empire was also a citizen of the mother country, a principle that was held not just by Labour but also by many in the patrician and liberal wings of the Conservatives. As the Conservatives edged more and more towards a policy of restricting Commonwealth immigration in the early 1960s the Labour leadership as well as its rank-and file became enraged over what they viewed as a violation of the BNA48, and one which discriminated on racial grounds.

? The Commonwealth Immigration Act became law in 1962 (CIA62) and was regarded by many on the left as a violation of their liberal conscience. Chastened by the 1958 riots, leadership on both sides wanted to preserve social peace and avoid US-style racial tension. The first tentative signs emerged of a desire to remove race from political sphere, which meant the need for an accord between Labour and the Tories – more on that later.

? During the early sixties a number of pressure groups started to agitate for legislation to outlaw racial discrimination as a counterpiece to the restrictionist CIA62. According to Erik Bleich ‘Most of the low-level pressure for anti-incitement provisions came from the Jewish population’. He cites Kushnick that following the Jordan conviction in 1962 for ‘anti-Semitic’ speech (he claimed that ‘Hitler was right’),  430,000 had signed a petition in favour of anti-incitement legislation. What Bleich does not mention is that this petition was jointly organised by the communist-dominated National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) and the Yellow Star Movement.

? One of the important points that emerges from the literature is that the Jewish involvement in the clamour for the outlawing of racial discrimination did not arise wholly or even principally out of concern for the rights of coloured immigrants. Instead it arose out of concerns about a perceived rise in anti-semitism. From around 1959 on an epidemic of anti-semitic behaviour spread across western European, involving defacement of Jewish gravestones, attacks on synagogues, swastika daubing and so on. Jordan’s pronouncements that ‘Hitler was right’ was just the cherry on the top. It’s pretty clear that these events, which started initially in Germany, were probably an agit-prop campaign stage-managed by Communist factions in eastern Europe and intended to place the ‘neo-fascist’ regimes in the West in a bad light. Whatever the root cause, there is little question that it was this wave of anti-semitic activity, rather than universalist sentiment for their dusky brethren, that was the driving factor in Jewish agitation for anti-discriminatory legislation.

? One activist pressure group which soon achieved national prominence was the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) formed in 1964 by Anthony Lester QC and David Pitt, a black member of the London County Council. Lester, who will feature quite prominently throughout this entire discussion, had spent some time in the US and made a close study of the civil rights movement and the associated legislation that was making its way through Congress at the time. He described himself as being ‘inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’ and said that CARD was set up as a British civil rights organisation.

? Not least, of course, was the fact that by the early sixties the coloured population had passed the one million mark and racial tensions were becoming harder to ignore in many major cities. This burst to the fore during the 1964 election when several Conservative candidates in constituencies that had experienced a significant migrant influx refused to toe the party line and campaigned on an anti-immigration platform. The most spectacular instance being the defeat of Labour minister Patrick Gordon-Walker by Peter Griffiths at Smethwick. Griffiths is said to have sympathised with the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”  His victory sent shock waves through the Labour Party and the political elites since it made race and colour major factors for the first time in a British election.

? Among the lessons that Labour drew from the Smethwick episode were that British tolerance was not universal and that racial discrimination was a ‘lurking monster’ which could only controlled through legislation. The benefit of eliminating race as a political issue was clear but they deeply feared the electoral consequences of being seen as pro-immigrant. The only way to settle the race issue without committing electoral suicide, and to defuse the ticking bomb, was to pursue a bipartisan Parliamentary consensus. The Tory patrician and liberal wings which formed the majority of the parliamentary party as well as, crucially, the Tory front bench, proved gratifyingly receptive to Labour overtures.

The Labour Party election manifesto in 1964 included the following simple pledge: “… a Labour Government will legislate against racial discrimination and incitement in public places and give special help to local authorities in areas where immigrants have settled.” In June Labour was returned to power after an absence of thirteen years with a slim majority of four. Various commentators suggest that Labour’s majority was lower than anticipated due to the unofficial anti-immigration stance taken by renegade Tories in a number of constituencies.

The Race Relations Bill in Parliament

A consortium of representatives from the Labour NEC and the Group of Labour Lawyers, which included future Home Secretary Frank Soskice, wrote the Bill in mid-1964. It was announced in the Queen’s Speech on the reopening of parliament in October and received its first reading in the Commons in March 1965. The decision to include anti-incitement provisions in the bill was taken at cabinet meeting 22.2.65, and Soskice was able to convince his cabinet colleagues that the exist common law provisions, as well as the POA36, were ineffective against written incitement (cif. the Caunt case).

The Bill therefore contained provisions to deal with both access racism (discrimination on access to goods and services) and expressive racism (an intention to stir up racial hatred). The legal meaning of the term ‘hatred’ was deliberately left undefined in order that courts would have the widest possible latitude in their inpretation. Section 6 read as follows:

It will be an offence to publish or distribute written matter, or speak at a public meeting or in public words which are ‘threatening, abusive, or insulting’, with the intent to stir up hatred against any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, ethnic, or national origin.

On its introduction two aspects of the Bill were particularly criticised. There was no provision for sanctions against discrimination in housing, employment or religious matters – the legislation was to cover ‘places of public resort’ (pubs, cafes, cinemas etc) only – and such any access racism was to be a criminal offence.

Opposition was particularly hostile on the second point, and given the very slim Labour majority there was a strong possibility that the Bill might even fail to get a second reading. As it happened, all nine Liberal MPs voted with the Government and the Bill passed its second reading by 258 votes to 249.  Rather than oppose the Bill directly the Tory leadership acted ‘pragmatically’. Understanding that open opposition would bring the dreaded charge of racism they tabled a ‘Reasoned Amendment’ (in effect an alternative Bill) which would remove the criminal aspects of access discrimination and replace them by a conciliation process and, in the last resort, an injunctive process in the civil courts. Paradoxically they also criticised the Bill because it didn’t go far enough and should have also outlawed other forms of access discrimination such as in housing and employment. The Conservative amendment was defeated by 261 votes to 249.

There was still a danger however that the Bill would stall in committee and to circumvent this, Soskice modified the provisions against access racism to change it from a criminal offence to civil one, and proposed the introduction of conciliation machinery in the form of a Race Relations Board (RRB). The RRB was an early forerunner of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), the immediate predecessor of the present-day EHRC.

Much of the debate in both Houses was concerned with issues of incitement and freedom of speech (but not, noticeably, of freedom of association). Concerns were voiced that words would now be punishable not for their effect on behaviour (as would be the case in speech that caused a breach of the peace under eg the POA36) but rather their effect on people’s feelings and thoughts. Pointed questions were asked about the necessity for incitement provisions, and why wasn’t the existing legislation adequate? After all, the nine (white) teenagers found guilty of aggravated assault during the 1958 riots had received ‘exemplary’ sentences of four years, and Jordan had received a two month sentence under s5 of the POA36 in 1962. So the existing laws appeared adequate to deal with incitement to racial violence as well to deal with actual acts of violence, whether racially motivated or otherwise. What was Soskice’s response to that?

Essentially it rested upon the argument that incitement to racial violence was one thing, and was already provided for, but stirring up to racial hatred was not. A further limitation, per Soskice and his allies, was that the existing legislation criminalised speech and behaviour only, but not writing. In taking that position they seem to have overlooked Leese’s conviction in 1936 for anti-Semitic writings. It was clear then that the proponents of the incitement to racial hatred provisions were determined to cast the offence in specifically racial terms and, in contrast to the earlier legislation, to extend the offence beyond injury to a specific individual to include defamation of an entire racial group. Group rights had arrived and would soon come to trump those of individuals.

The RRA65 Bill was eventually enacted in November, and was in every respect a compromise. Access discrimination was to be a civil offence with cases handled through a conciliation process (the RRB) but with no legal penalties; incitement to racial hatred was to be a criminal offence punishable by up to 2 years in jail and/or a £1000 fine. Mark Bonham Carter, the first chairman of the RRB stated ‘It was in response to this combination of pressures, some political, others historical and others prompted by guilt that the RRA65 emerged.’ Its first high-profile casualty was again Colin Jordan who received an 18-month sentence in February 1967 under s6 of the Act for the distribution of literature intended to stir up racial hatred. I believe he still holds the record together with Nick Griffin for the most prosecutions under the Public Order Acts.

The bipartisan consensus on race and immigration

One of the most striking features of this period is the emergence of the bipartisan effort to remove race and immigration from party politics. Randall Hansen argues that the consensus was not something that happened as a result of any one or even a particular series of events, but rather an understanding that grew on both sides that both issues were highly radioactive. He credits Frank Soskice with the first practical outcome of the growing consensus, his ‘package deal’ in which Labour would refrain from further opposition to restrictionist legislation (specifically the CIA62, which was still subject to annual renewal) if the Conservatives would acquiesce in the enactment of legislation outlawing racial discrimination and incitement. Hansen states:

… On 23 March [1965] when [shadow Home Secretary Peter] Thorneycroft initiated a parliamentary debate on immigration, the [Labour] government struck a conciliatory note that appeared to be reciprocated by the Opposition. [Conservative MP] Nigel Fisher stated that ‘I am myself a believer in a bipartisan approach to the problem. I think that as far as possible it should be taken out of party politics.’ Labour agreed, and Soskice concluded with a ringing endorsement of bipartisanship:

”[T]here has been disclosed in the course of this debate a very great degree of unanimity on the broad aspects of the problem with which we are faced. … [First] the Government accept that there must be – simply because of the scale of the possible immigration – effective control of numbers. … [Second,] our aim should be to see that there is only one class of citizen, each with equal rights, each with equal respect, each with equal opportunity and each with an equal career of happiness and fulfillment in his life in the community. We all agree that we should aim at that.” 141

The most remarkable aspect of this bipartisan effort to remove race (and immigration) from party politics has been its persistence until the present day. Apart from some minor sabre-rattling during the 1970 election campaign, when Edward Heath was manoeuvered into a more restrictionist posture by Enoch Powell, and a short period following Margaret Thatcher’s accession to the Tory leadership (the infamous remarks on ‘swamping’), neither race nor immigration has since featured prominently in the political platform of any mainstream party. Even more important, the passage through Parliament of all legislation dealing with race relations, including the current Equalities Bill, has been totally serene. The few renegade Tory backbenchers who have stood up in the Commons (or the Lords) to criticise either the content of successive Race Relations Bills or to question whether the legislation is even necessary, were howled down, and most vociferously by their own front bench. 

As Hansen notes:

“… The 1965 Race Relations Act … provided the institutional basis for official measures against racism and in favour of integration. … The 1965 Act was followed by substantial extensions in 1968 and 1976; both became part of the bipartisan framework. Although, as evidence of the strange bedfellows encouraged by politics, the far left and the far right continue to attack the laws as ineffective, they enjoy broad support, and even a measure of official pride, in contemporary.” 129

Hansen’s claim for ‘broad support’ comes without any further substantiation, but let’s pass over that and move on to consider next the second phase of the anti-discrimination project.

Related and ancillary legislation

First though a slight digression to mention another important piece of race-related legislation that followed quickly on the heels of the RRA65. This was the Local Government Act of 1966 (LGA66). Section 11 of the Act provided for financial grants to be paid from central governments to local authorities where existed “…substantial numbers of immigrants from the Commonwealth whose language or customs differ from those of the community ,…”. This could be viewed as a cynical ploy to conceal the real costs of immigration which would otherwise have shown up on the property tax bills of the residents of those municipalities where immigrants clustered and would no doubt have attracted media attention. Section 11 grants continue today in the form of the so-called Ethnic Minority Achievement Grants which fulfil the same function of subsidising immigration by stealth. The major difference between 1966 and the present is the amount of money involved - £3.5 million then versus the £207 million budgeted for 2010.

The role of Enoch Powell

During the preamble I promised to acknowledge the brave parliamentarians who stood up to the totalitarian effort to dismantle our ancient freedoms but there are, in truth, depressingly few of them. Hansen states that during the 1950s and 1960s there were ‘no more than ten backbench MPs who took a consistent stand against black immigration’, and by extension campaigned against legislation to make the colonists feel more comfortable and welcome. Reviewing the pages of Hansard, only a a few names stand out, such as the Conservative MPs Cyril Osborne, Roland Bell, Peter Griffiths and Anthony Hunt, who all took a principled stand. No doubt many more would have wanted to comply with the wishes of their grass-roots support in the constituencies and to have followed suit. As would no doubt not a few Labour MPs who represented constituencies in the industrial heartlands which were already bearing the brunt of the ‘enriching’ diversity. But all too many were weak-willed careerists, easily cowed into submission by the party whips and, wary of the threat of deselection the next time around, stayed silent and voted against their conscience.

One conspicuous absentee from the debates was Enoch Powell, even though he is known to have been strongly opposed to the Bill and indeed any form of race-based legislation. He did not speak a single word on the matter in the chamber, an anomaly perhaps explained by the constraints imposed because of his position as Transport spokesman in the shadow cabinet. The role of opposition spokesman for home affairs was taken by Peter Thorneycroft. No doubt parliamentary protocol prevented Powell, as a shadow minister, from trespassing on the portfolio of a ministerial colleague. Such collegial niceties would become superfluous a few years hence when Powell would no longer feel himself to be under any such constraints. But more about that later.

Next, the Race Relations Act of 1968 …

The Race Relations Act of 1968

Hardly had the ink dried on the 1965 Act before agitators sprang up calling for more and ‘stronger’ legislation. By late 1965 however Labour’s already slim majority had shrunk to two seats. With a keen understanding that the electorate was in no mood for any more restrictive legislation that seemed to favour immigrants, the government had to turn a deaf ear to the clamour from pressure groups such as CARD and other race industry professionals.

All this was going on against a backdrop of continuing public antipathy towards coloured immigration. Erik Bleich provides polling data showing that between 1963 and 1970 never less than 80% of those polled considered that too many immigrants had been admitted. It seems amazing today considering its negative attitude to the concept of ‘British Jobs for British workers’ but in the mid-sixties the TUC showed itself to be particularly hostile to any new race relations legislation that touched on discrimination in employment. This was felt to threaten its traditional prerogatives in the matters of collective bargaining and the much-cherished closed-shop.

So, the political climate was simply not conducive to the introduction of new legislation in the race relations field, and Labour made no mention of such in its manifesto for the general election which was held in March 1966. Labour went on to win that election with a much improved majority, with Harold Wilson installed as Prime Minister, Edward Heath having followed Sir Alec Douglas-Home as leader of the Conservative Party in July of the previous year.

Perceived issues with the RRA65

Anthony Lester has described the 1965 Act as ‘fatally flawed’. Proponents for further legislation pointed to the very few prosecutions that had been launched by the Attorney-General under the ant-incitement provisions during the first few years. Only four such cases were initiated by the time that the new Bill was under consideration by Parliament in 1968. Alarmingly, the Act had even seemed to backfire. Its first high-profile victim, even before Colin Jordan, was the West Indian-born black revolutionary and ‘civil rights activist’ Michael de Freitas (Michael X) who was jailed for twelve months in 1967 for incitement to racial hatred. In November 1967 four members of the United Coloured People’s Association were prosecuted for inciting hatred against whites during speeches at Hyde Park Corner. Although found guilty they escaped with a fine. Even more embarrassingly, in March 1968 four members of the National Front, including the publisher Alan Hancock (father of Anthony – the publisher, not the comedian) were acquitted of the same offence at a trial in Lewes, Sussex. This wasn’t how things were meant to work out!

To compound this spectacular fiasco, there was not much to celebrate in the way of positive outcomes on the access discrimination front either. This was taken as proof positive that the 1965 Act was far too limited in its scope. Recriminations flew that no provisions had been included to outlaw discrimination in housing or employment, merely in ‘places of public resort’. Furthermore, the Act was said to be unduly focused on conciliation and not court action, as evidenced by the very low number of cases referred to the Attorney General by 1968.

Writing in 1972, Lester and Bindman noted that one of the unanticipated side-effects of the criminal provisions against incitement in the 1965 Act had been to induce the creators of ‘racist propaganda’ to adopt a more sophisticated and less strident approach. This had the unwanted effect of making such material more appealing to a wider audience, as well making it far more difficult to prosecute. The case of R vs Hancock (the Lewes case) is cited as being particularly worrying because, although the publications in question espoused the racial superiority of whites and called for the repatriation of blacks and Asians, the court did not consider them to amount to incitement. Since they were not written in a ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ manner as required under the Act, they failed to meet the test and hence the acquittal. In the view of Lester and Bindman, this perverted the intention of the legislation:

… Public attention is diverted from considering whether racialist propaganda is morally wrong or factually inaccurate to whether it is illegal. In such a climate, the demagogue’s cowardly attack upon a defenceless minority can all-too-readily be interpreted as courageous conduct, carrying a real risk of prosecution and imprisonment, while members of the minority are regarded not as victims but as a privileged group, immune to criticism. 372

Clearly ‘something had to be done’, and quickly.

The orchestrated campaign to agitate for stronger legislation

Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and that man did appear in the form of Roy Jenkins who assumed the role of Home Secretary from Sir Frank Soskice in December 1965. To fully catalogue Jenkins’ contribution in creating what has become known as the permissive society is beyond the scope of this narrative, suffice to say it was enormous, not to say unequalled. Jenkins’ arrival at the Home Office provided the essential impetus for the onward development of race relations legislation. He may also be credited with the first official public disclosure that the creation of a multicultural society was to become an objective of state policy. In a speech in May 1966, directly following the recent election, he stated:

“Integration is perhaps rather a loose word. I do not regard it as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. I do not think that we need in this country a ‘melting-pot’, which would turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman,

“It would be bad enough if that were to occur to the relatively few in this country who happen to have pure Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins. If it were to happen to the rest of us, to the Welsh (like myself) , to the Scots, to the Irish, to the Jews, to the mid-European, and to still more recent arrivals, it would be little short of a national disaster. It would deprive us of most of the positive advantages of immigration, which … I believe to be very great indeed.

“I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. That is the goal.”

Many will be familiar with this speech, in general if not in its particulars. However few will be aware of the creative spirit behind it, which turns out to have been none other than the by now ubiquitous Anthony Lester. In his Jim Rose Memorial Lecture to the Runnymede Trust in 2003 (Lester and Rose co-founded the Runnymede Trust in 1968), he notes

”… I helped in preparing Roy Jenkins’ public statement of his attitude towards racial discrimination and the problems of integration … Jenkins, I and many others worked behind the scenes to build support for effective and comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation.”

So by mid-1966 the key members of the team were in place, with Jenkins at the Home Office and part of a new Labour government with a very comfortable majority, Lester chairing the legal committee at CARD, and another key in place in the form of Geoffrey Bindman who was then legal adviser to the RRB.

A key issue, however, was the almost total lack of any evidence that a serious problem actually existed with racial discrimination in Britain. And so pressure groups like CARD took it upon themselves to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the legislation, and especially the RRB as currently constituted, and to link these glaring defects to the need for yet more legislation. In May 1966 CARD initiated a campaign of stimulating complaints to the RRB for propaganda purposes. Its ‘Complaints and Testing Committee’ was formed to manufacture complaints which would deliberately fall outside the present scope of the legislation and in which the RRB was powerless to intervene. During the summer of 1966 fifty-one such complaints were submitted to the Board by CARD. There seems little doubt that behind-the-scenes collaboration between Lester and Bindman played a key role in the success of this campaign.

A next crucial development was a study conducted by the Political and Economic Planning (PEP) think-tank in the spring of 1967, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree (of KitKat fame) charitable trust. The report “PEP Survey on Racial Discrimination” surveyed areas of potential discrimination that were not covered by the 1965 Act, specifically: employment, housing (including purchase, private and public rental), credit facilities, insurance and other personal services such as car rental. The principal methodology used in the survey was also much favoured in the US, that of ‘situational testing’. Three person teams consisting of a coloured immigrant, a white alien and a white English person would be sent to apply independently for jobs, housing etc. Predictably, evidence of widespread discrimination was soon uncovered and the PEP report formed an essential element in the campaign for more legislation. As an aside, the PEP continues in operation today as the Policy Studies Institute, and continues to receive major funding from the Rowntree Trust for research into ‘socially relevant’ topics.

The completely unsurprising conclusion of the P.E.P. report was that, despite the RRA65, racial discrimination was still ‘rampant’ in Britain. According to Erik Bleich:

Publication of the report had the desired [emphasis added] effect for advocates of the new law. Even the Conservative opposition’s shadow Home Secretary was impressed by the evidence. During the Second Reading debate in April 1968, Quintin Hogg expressly mentioned the PEP report’s evidence as a factor which encouraged him to rethink his initial reluctance for fresh legislation. [76]

The perception was reinforced by the report of the Street Committee, which had been commissioned to investigate race relations legislation in other countries, particularly the US and Canada. It was also to advise the government on the need to extend the RRA65. Geoffrey Bindman was appointed as one of the three committee members, and work of the committee was underwritten by the Sieff Family trust (Marks and Spencer). It is almost superfluous to note that in its report, published in October 1967, the committee included strong recommendations to the government on the need for more effective and more comprehensive legislation, and in particular on the need for more robust enforcement mechanisms.

Passage of the Bill through Parliament

The Second Reading debate of the 1968 Bill took place in the House of Commons on April 23, 1968 in a highly-charged atmosphere. Enoch Powell, who was present but did not speak, had delivered his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham three days earlier. Sentiments were running high amongst Labour backbenchers (and a number of Tories too) over what was viewed as the Labour government’s betrayal of Asian holders of British passports who were being targeted for expulsion by the government of newly-independent Kenya. The Commonwealth Immigration Act (CIA68), which effectively removed the right of abode in the UK from the Asians, had been rushed through Parliament in less than a week. Not least amongst those influences that contributed to the unusually fervid atmosphere were recent events in the US, where dozens of cities had experienced serious race riots in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Not surprisingly then, much of the debate centred around public order issues, this comment from junior minister David Ennals being typical:

“Those who suggest we should delay before bringing in our legislation are playing with fire and danger. … I say with absolute conviction that we may have a flashpoint in this country if we do not extend the field of the legislation.”

It’s all the more surprising that this apocalyptic note should be sounded, since the public order provisions in the Bill (that is, the sanctions against expressive racism aka stirring up racial hatred) were essentially unchanged from those in the 1965 Act. Perhaps the thinking was that unless coloured immigrants were guaranteed equal employment opportunities or non-discriminatory auto insurance rates there would be Watts-scale race riots in Britain’s inner cities. The liberal mind can sometimes be difficult to fathom.

Although, actually, the extremely mundane matter of insurance became one of the most contentious aspects of the bill, and the only one on which the Conservative leadership took an obdurate stance. The PEP report had uncovered evidence that indicated that discrimination was particularly rife in the vital field of motor insurance:

…” Within the fields covered, other than employment and housing, it was discrimination in motor insurance which was having the greatest impact on coloured immigrants. Fifty-eight per cent of those immigrants who had tried to obtain motor insurance claimed personal experience of discrimination. In seventeen out of twenty tests with insurance companies the coloured immigrant experienced discrimination (either being refused insurance altogether or quoted a higher premium) compared with the matched white alien and English testers. This discrimination in car insurance was also reflected by differential terms in car hire. “

Now actuarial science is one of the most exacting numerate disciplines known to man. Vast fortunes rely upon its integrity. Nobody doubts for a moment that a teenage male motorist represents a significantly greater underwriting risk than a 50-year old schoolmistress, or that is entirely appropriate that premiums should be adjusted accordingly. Heavy smokers, or drinkers, or the obese are subject to significantly higher life insurance rates than those with more responsible lifestyles. But, it seems that finding that a recent arrival from the Caribbean or from Kashmir, who may be more used to encountering the occasional donkey cart on their travels than urban motor traffic on the scale encountered in the West, might represent a more significant risk than a local motorist is discriminatory, while demanding higher premiums from a teenage male motorist is not.

For a little light relief, consider the following contribution to the insurance debate from a Jewish MP who unwittingly confirmed the widespread belief that “Jewish Lightning” was as prevalent in post-war England as it had been in Weimar Germany in the 20s and 30s.

§ Mr. Maurice Orbach (Stockport, South)
…
One of the issues that the right hon. and learned Gentleman took up was that of insurance. He said that this was an area in which we ought to let the insurance actuaries operate. I want to speak of my experience in dealing with the question of prejudice in the insurance market. For 28 years I have been the general secretary of an organisation called the Trades Advisory Council. This is the only body which has been dealing with the question of economic discrimination. It has denied discrimination against the Jewish community wherever it has found it.

Very early in the history of this body I discovered that the Jews in our business community were being discriminated against by almost every insurance company. I made the sort of approach that I believe the new body that has been set up will make in respect of coloured people or people of other ethnic origins. I approached the insurance companies, and from them was referred to the actuaries who had declared that Jewish businessmen in the rag, gown, furniture and food trades were serious risks. From the insurance companies I went to the Institute of Actuaries, which told me that it was definitely correct, statistically, that Jewish traders were poor risks.
…

It seems axiomatic, one would have thought, that the very essence of insurance as a business is that it is discriminatory per se. How could it function otherwise?

As for any opposition to the Bill mounted by the Conservative front bench that proved to be, as in 1965, merely symbolic. This time around the opposition spokesman was Quintin Hogg (the future Lord Hailsham) who, aside from some ritualistic shadow-boxing on peripheral matters such as insurance, simply waved the Bill through on behalf of the Conservatives. As a sop to their grass-roots support the 1965 gambit of symbolic opposition to the Bill through the tabling of a Reasoned Amendment was reprised, but with Labour’s overall majority now approaching 100 this was soundly trounced, to the great relief no doubt of the Tory leadership. In the end the now institutionalised bipartisan approach prevailed, the Tories withdraw the whips and allowed a free vote. On third reading the Bill was passed to the Lords on a vote of 182 to 44, those two-thirds of members who couldn’t be bothered to vote obviously recognising a done deal when they saw one. The 44 ‘nays’ were all Conservatives who ignored the official opposition instructions to abstain.

The RRA68 in summary

After its untroubled passage through Parliament the Bill was finally enacted in November 1968. Its provisions were unremarkable, being practically identical to those contained in the original Bill presented to Parliament in April. Such change as had been effected was restricted to slight changes to the law as it related to the sale of individual private real estate. The Act as finally passed did entreat the RRB to take a softly softly approach to those unenlightened and recalcitrant vendors who balked at turning their property over to dusky incomers, but that was about it.

The provisions against incitement to racial hatred remained exactly as before. The innovations in the 1968 Acts were confined to the extension of the sanctions against access discrimination as well as endowing the RRB with greatly expanded powers of enforcement. Amongst the most significant new provisions of the Act were:

? Discrimination in housing, employment and the provision of goods and services generally was made illegal.

? The RRB was empowered to investigate enterprises even if no actual complaint of racial discrimination had been made (although this was later restricted by the courts)

? The RRB, and not just aggrieved individuals, could initiate legal proceedings and demand financial compensation for behaviour that contravened the Act.

? The Crown, in its capacity as an employer and as a provider of goods and services, was for the first time subject to the provisions of the Act. The deletion of the exemption for the Crown was proposed by Labour MP and ‘radical socialist’ Alexander Lyon (husband of Clare Short) and enthusiastically supported by opposition spokesman Quintin Hogg, who declared that it was unfair to treat private employers more strictly than public employers: “Why should the ordinary subject be liable to an action for damages, as the Home Secretary has decided that he should be, but the Home Secretary get off scot free?”.

As would be the case in every subsequent revision of the race relations legislation, the 1968 Act was entirely additive rather than substitutive. Whereas the 1965 Act had run to five pages and 8 sections, its 1968 successor entailed 29 sections plus five accompanying Schedules for a total of 40 pages in printed form. Most of the additional verbiage was devoted to describing the new sanctions against access discrimination and, even more so, the new powers of enforcement that were entrusted to the RRB.

Enoch Powell

As we have seen Powell made no contribution to the debate in the House, confining his interventions to the single speech in Birmingham. This seems entirely consistent with his reputation as a staunch and traditional parliamentarian and a loyal member of the shadow cabinet. It would have been unthinkable for him to have intervened in the debate against his own front bench colleagues. In fact he supported the official stance and had no real philosophical disagreement with the concept of equal treatment for all citizens, of whatever race, as his spirited attack on the Bill in his Birmingham speech makes clear.

… As Mr. Heath has put it we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens.” This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do. …

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. … For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

It would be remiss to close this section without acknowledging the Conservative ‘antis’ who, alone amongst the 50 or so speakers, stood up to denounce not just the content of the Bill but also the principle behind it. In doing so they defied not just the government but also their own party leadership. In addition to Roland Bell, who I have quoted elsewhere in this thread, we must also add the names of Harold Gurden and William Deedes to the Roll of Honour.

Next: The Race Relations Act of 1976

Continued in Part 2

Posted by Dan Dare on Monday, October 26, 2009 at 09:45 PM in Crusade against Discrimination in Britain
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