Racism in the UK and in welfare provision

Racism in Britain has a long history. In York 900 years ago, the prominent indigenous burgers of the city imprisoned all the Jewish population – who had migrated to the UK in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and had been tolerated for their ability to offer an effective banking service – and then burnt them alive, rather than repay their debts. Black people have been visiting Britain since Roman times and, according to surviving records, minorities were British-born as long ago as 1505. The history of significant UK Black minority settlement, however, largely starts with the history of slavery, an activity most clearly exemplifying a profoundly racist view of Black people, one which saw them as subhuman: as commodities to be bought, exploited and sold in the market place. Most slaves went direct from Africa to the USA; however, some were brought to UK. The British viewed Black slaves, including the few living in England in the eighteenth century, as British chattels rather than British citizens, if they saw them at all, although this view was challenged in one famous court action – the Somerset case – by abolitionists opposing the transportation of a former slave who argued that anyone living within Britain should enjoy the full rights of citizenship as then understood (Walvin, Reference Walvin1984).

A more recent example underlines the long pedigree of racism in British state policy towards minorities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act – the first modern immigration legislation – led to the appalling treatment of Jewish people fleeing Eastern European pogroms. Those coming ashore in Hull were kept in accommodation or shut up in trains awaiting onward transit in conditions reminiscent of those created in Germany 35 years later. This Act, much as now, was enacted in response to right-wing pressure from organisations such as the British Brothers’ League, a forerunner of the British National Party, which, with enthusiastic encouragement from populist media, portrayed refugee Jews as ‘scroungers, disease-ridden and a burden on society’ (see Fryer, Reference Fryer1984). This is a different stance from that taken when the British government, barely 30 years earlier, had wished to play politics with other, hostile, countries. In 1872, Lord Grenville, defending the government's decision to refuse the request of the French government for the extradition of the communards as common felons, communicating with the Spanish government noted: ‘according to British Law, all foreigners have an absolute right to enter the country and to remain; while they are here, they enjoy the same protection from the law as British subjects’,Footnote ⁵ an official echo of the Somerset case. This is in marked contrast to the UK government's position now in respect of most refugees.

Racism in state welfare also has a long history. The various Poor Laws since the fourteenth century were structured in such a way that ‘strangers’ (of whatever kind) would be excluded from their local benefits, however dubious. Queen Elizabeth I, at a time of economic depression, ordered the compulsory repatriation of Black people so that state welfare would be consumed only by White citizens. At her urging, the Privy Council in 1596 ordered all ‘negroes and blackamoors’ (Walvin, Reference Walvin1984) to be deported; and again in 1601 (just before her Poor Law was introduced) the Privy Council commented: ‘the Queen's own natural subjects were greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth’ (ibid.: 29). Twenty-five years before the first Black slave settlement of Barbados, this is the clearest indication of the outsider status of Africans in English eyes and a precursor of official racist formulations. The conjunction of economic decline with victimisation of those least likely to have been responsible for it is a phenomenon with many recent resonances.

Williams (Reference Williams1989) identifies three important historical moments in racism's inter-relationship with state welfare:

• • The importance of the construction of notions of nation, welfare state and citizenship, in the early twentieth century, characterised by increasing exclusion of certain categories of people: essentially, any notion of nationhood or citizenship which includes people must also exclude (Dwyer, Reference Dwyer2000). We can trace the ongoing manifestation of this process in the increasingly arbitrary behaviour during the early part of this century of both former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Home Secretaries (such as Charles Clarke and John Reid) seeking to exclude a range of ‘foreigners’ from the UK;

• • The significance of the eugenics movement which constructed certain groups as pathological, to be contained to ensure the greater good of the wider society: ‘discourses involved in this [eugenics] movement were racialized, and . . . overlapped with notions of class, gender, disability and sexuality’ (Williams, Reference Williams1989:16). One once enthusiastic supporter of eugenics was William Beveridge (Harris, Reference Harris1977). The eugenics movement drew heavily on the pseudoscientific notion that Blacks were genetically less able than Whites (Walvin, Reference Walvin1984), less able to govern themselves (a view still manifest today, as in comments expressed under parliamentary privilege about people living in ‘Bongo Bongo land’), and less able to contribute in all walks of life. This line of argument prompted a substantial public debate in 2006 when aired by a Leeds University lecturer, Frank Ellis. Such views have also a long historical pedigree. The Adjutant-General in 1886 wrote that ‘blacks, as lazy cowards, would undermine the power of the British army’ (ibid.: 25): in making these comments, he seems to have overlooked the astounding courage of Ashanti and Zulu nations who defeated technologically better-equipped western armies. In the twentieth century, British Armed Forces frequently made awards for outstanding valour to minority ethnic military personnel.

• • The post-war period of Black immigration encouraged by the state to meet labour shortages, during which, as Williams suggests, the ‘historical legacy of racism reconstituted itself, especially in relation to the pathologization of black family life’ (Williams, 1989:120). Indeed, as she argues, the emergence of the welfare state itself was in part based on fears of the degeneration of the ‘British race’ and the loss of the British Empire. Aneurin Bevan, post-war left-wing Labour icon, was himself, for similar reasons, strongly opposed to the immigration of Blacks destined to be employed within the NHS (Skellington, Reference Skellington1992).

Although the growth of Britain's minority population has been a fact of life for hundreds of years – there were by 1772 estimated to be about 14,000 Black and Asian people in Britain – and has frequently led to political unrest, it is particularly in the past 60 years – with politicians increasingly using the ‘numbers game’ as a key weapon in political manifestoes – that immigration has achieved a pre-eminent political and policy profile.

The failure of the state's response

Given these key moments identified by Williams, that the state's relationship to racialised minorities remains – at best – ambivalent today is not surprising. Indeed, with the advent of the so-called ‘war on terror’ following attacks on the World Trade Center, and subsequent bombings, it appears that the state's position is becoming ever more overtly hostile to certain minorities, a position supported by media which now appear to be running largely out of control. The failure of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) or the government itself to bring a single successful punitive legal action against a newspaper for promoting racial incitement or directly abetting racist activity is itself perhaps the clearest indication of the extent to which key political institutions in British society collude in neglecting the welfare of Britain's minorities. Right-wing tabloids – particularly The Sun and the Daily Mail – now daily print lies about refugees seeking asylum, migrant workers and immigrants more generally, expecting not to be punished for it. One typical headline from 2005 from the Daily Mail simply asserted, under the headline, ‘How many more of them?’ (linked by a not very subtle piece of editorial framing, to a polemic on the 7 July bombings) that the ‘immigrant’ population in the UK was now 15 per cent and rising. Actually, the minority population is, according to the 2001 census, about 8 per cent of the total UK population. Almost half of this 8 per cent was, in any case, UK-born and bred. This misleading barrage of information for large-scale readerships is adopted by politicians who regard a ‘tough’ line on immigration as central to their own political futures. The former Minister for Welfare, Frank Field, for example, colludes with this distorted view of the size and impact of migrant populations, arguing (The Guardian, 24 May 2006) that Britain has now taken 30 times the number of migrant workers originally anticipated (the actual multiplier is about six). The implication of many of these statements is that migrants are a drain on the UK economy. Yet official reports suggest that there is a net annual benefit to the UK economy of some £2 billion to £3 billion (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Dawson, Kilkey and Martin2004a). These exaggerated statements, as well as being false, need in any case to be placed in an international setting. The UK immigrant population – including second- and third-generation Black and Asian settlers – is significantly smaller than in most OECD countries, half of which have migrant populations of 10 per cent or more. Similarly, frequent political and media claims that Britain has been a ‘soft touch for asylum-seekers and refugees’ overlook the fact that, measured by its GDP, Britain is 32nd in the list of the world's countries in terms of the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers being processed and that 70 per cent of the world's refugees subsist in developing countries (IPPR, 2003).

The failure of the British state to confront racism effectively can be seen in other obvious ways. One is in the inability of the formal ‘race relations’ machinery to challenge racism in, for example, the housing or labour markets. The pitifully small number of successful prosecutions since the creation of the Race Relations Board in the 1960s and its successor bodies, is one clear measure. Another is in the use of language which is not challenged inside Parliament as well as outside it. Typical of this commentary was that of Duncan Sandys, prominent Tory MP and some-time Cabinet Minister in the 1960s, who said ‘the breeding of millions of half-caste children will merely produce a generation of misfits and increase social tension’,Footnote ⁶ without any action being taken against him.

Social policy's response

It is important to acknowledge that neglect of the issue of ‘race’ is not confined to social policy as political practice; it is shared by the academic discipline of social policy. It is still not uncommon for mainstream social policy texts to treat debates on ‘race’ and racism as marginal. This is striking considering that the social policy discipline is concerned centrally with issues of citizenship rights, welfare, equality, poverty alleviation and social engineering. This lacuna extends to the practice of social research, where many proposals, proposers, funders or commissioners still treat the dimension of ethnicity as too complex, too expensive or too marginal to be worthy of serious attention (Craig and Katbamna, Reference Craig, Katbamna, Becker and Bryman2004), where it remains difficult to find groups of researchers, particularly minority ethnic researchers, and most of all minority ethnic researchers with permanent contracts and high-status roles, focused on issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Some of the reviews I have examined or had returned to me for proposals for projects to be funded by significant research funders would have been risible were they not so serious in their failure to address the central issues of ‘race’. One proposal submitted to the ESRC to look at the health needs of minorities in rural areas generated a review which preferred to argue about the precise definitions of rurality, rather than think about the issues facing rural minorities: of isolation, difficulties in accessing services, or the failure of health organisations to provide culturally sensitive services. After a considerable period of development, the ESRC has dropped the idea of a research programme on ‘race’ and ethnicity; its rationale that the dimension of ‘race’ should permeate all research proposals (personal communication from ESRC, February 2006) might have greater weight if it funded a significant number of proposals which treated the issue of ‘race’ seriously. This failure of the social policy community also extends to social policy teachingFootnote ⁷ and to the high-profile social policy journals: a review of the last five years’ contents of the present Journal and of Policy and Politics, the British Journal of Social Work and Social Policy and Administration shows a striking absence of the dimension of ‘race’ in their tables of contents.Footnote ⁸ Until very recently, when a few articles have appeared in print, the only slightly honourable exception to this criticism was Critical Social Policy.

The treatment of ‘immigrants’ since the Second World War

During the war, the colour bar had (with the gender bar) been lowered within industry – a result of labour shortages – to be replaced when the war ended; otherwise it existed across all sectors of British life, in hotels, in the armed forces, in housing. Levy's novel, Small Island (Reference Levy2004), graphically portrays the experiences of Caribbeans coming to London in the mid-1940s. The Black heroine is taken on a shopping expedition by her White landlady who explains in a patronisingly patient way what a butcher's or a grocer's shop is, while the heroine equally patiently bites her tongue as she remembers butchers’ and grocers’ shops left behind. There were a few public gains against racism such as the case where Learie Constantine, internationally renowned cricketer, sued a London hotel (‘no dogs, no blacks’) for refusing him accommodation, showing that the law might be used – for those strong or determined enough – to protect the citizenship rights of Black Britons. Generally, however, racism dominated and continued to do so. White workers were encouraged, as they had been after World War One, by racist propaganda (Fryer, Reference Fryer1984), to regard Black labourers as an economic threat. In areas such as Liverpool, racism took the form of violence; here, by 1948, there were 8000 Blacks and the National Union of Seamen organised to prevent them getting work.

Racist attacks on Blacks took place with the connivance of the police, in Nottingham, in Middlesbrough and in Notting Hill. After the Notting Hill ‘riots’, provoked by White fascists, London police took a racist position against the Black victims: Blacks were, they said, ‘unemployable owing to their arrogant wholly uncivilised manner [they were] cunning unprincipled crooks living on women’ (The Guardian, 16 February 2005) and, in relation to their ‘dangerous tendency’ to date White women, it was ‘difficult to obtain sufficient evidence to bring these loathsome creatures before the courts’ (ibid.). Another entry in the same Metropolitan Police files perpetuated the myth that Britain was a haven for benefit ‘scroungers’: ‘there is little doubt that the men, having found the land “flowing with milk and honey” – an experience a long way from that of Levy's heroine – are urging their families and kindred to join them, and partake of the benefits so loosely obtainable here’ (ibid.). This racism extended beyond obvious and growing manifestations of violence, to everyday life. Whites felt that Blacks should not work with them, should not marry their children, should not live with them. Glass and Pollins said, in a timeless report echoing the 1905 discourse, that: ‘coloured people are feared as competitive intruders; they are thought of as promoters of crime and carriers of disease; they are resented when they are poor and envied when they are resourceful and thrifty’ (1960: 47).

However, in a classic contradiction which states have to manage, particular sectors of the economy – the textile mills, heavy engineering, public transport and health service – were seriously short of labour. The growth in post-war immigration – stimulated by energetic recruitment by employersFootnote ⁹ – occasioned different responses. Despite its attempts to recruit workers from Eastern and Western Europe, the government was obliged to turn to its Colonies to address the need for labour in the reconstruction project. The public face of this contradiction was seen in the media which talked of ‘willing hands’ (Phillips and Phillips, Reference Phillips and Phillips1998) as the Empire Windrush arrived. There were warm public words from government – a Conservative Minister in 1954 announced that ‘we still take pride in the fact that a man can say civis Britannicus sum – I am a British citizen – whatever his colour may be’ (cited in Hayter, Reference Hayter2000: 44) and, indeed, the active intervention of some government Ministers, including, in a twist of acute historical irony, Enoch Powell, sacked by Prime Minister Heath fifteen years later for his Rivers of Blood speech. In 1953 Powell actively recruited nurses and ancillary health workers. The dominant private view in government (and in the police), however, was that this immigration should be limited, and reversed as soon as possible. An interdepartmental working party was set up to look at the ‘social and economic problems’ arising from the growing influx into the UK of coloured workers: immigration was again being problematised. The Leader of the House of Lords announced in the same year that ‘it is not for me merely a question of whether criminal negroes should be let in . . . it is a question of whether great quantities of negroes, criminal or not, should be allowed in’ (Carter et al., Reference Carter, Harris, Joshi, Jams and Harris1993: 65). A Peer wrote to him saying that if ‘we legislate on immigration, though we can draft it in non-discriminatory terms, we cannot conceal the fact that the object is to keep out coloured people’ (ibid.), arguing at the same time that it would be a ‘great pity’ to interfere with the freedom of movement of, that is, (White) Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians. After Notting Hill, a Commonwealth Office official went to the heart of the problem, suggesting that the difficulty with legislation to control immigration was that it would imply that ‘the British people are unable to live with coloured people on tolerable terms’ (Spencer, Reference Spencer1997: 102).

Over the past 60 years, political pressure, mainly from the right – which now means virtually all political parties – supported by an increasingly hysterical media, has meant that liberal reservations have been dissolved as parties scramble to present themselves as toughest on immigration. The implication of steadily restrictive immigration policy remains – that, ‘we’ do not want to live alongside ‘them’ – and that therefore their welfare is of little concern beyond basic maintenance of a low-paid labour source.

Despite continuing attempts to limit immigration both by explicit (that is, legislative) and implicit or covert (bureaucratic delays at High Commissions such as the refusal to accept certain kinds of documentation – see Gilroy, Reference Gilroy1998), the numbers of migrants to the UK grew steadily to prop up Britain's economy, usually at the bottom end of the labour market. By 1958, 125,000 West Indians had arrived in Britain, 4,000 of them recruited by London Transport alone. About 55,000 had come from the Indian subcontinent, particularly India and Pakistan, by the same year. They had British passports and were – for thenFootnote ¹⁰ – British citizens. By 1961, there were about 400,000 immigrants in the UK.Footnote ¹¹ By 1971, when the major flow of people from South Asian countries had been underway for some years, and despite several Immigration Acts removing the citizenship of many, the number had risen to 1.4 million; by 1991 the number was 3 million, and in 2001 about 4.5 million. It now exceeds 5 million.

Much of the growth of minority populations now is not from immigration but from natural family growth as the UK moves to third-generation settlement. Although minority populations are concentrated in London, the East and West Midlands and parts of West Yorkshire, every local authority district now has a settled minority population and it is not now possible – if it ever was appropriate – to talk of ‘race’ as an urban policy issue limited to a few areas. The minority population is growing faster than the UK population as a whole, and even faster in rural areas than in urban areas. Within about 50 years, without unprecedented shifts in policy and/or demography, the minority population will be about 20 per cent, spread much more evenly across the whole of the UK.

The minority population's growth has not led to more settled intercommunal relations, however, nor has it led to a paradigm shift in their treatment. In 1981, in the context of a much smaller minority population than now, a British parliamentary committee documented 250 attacks by fascists on Blacks, Asians and Jews, attacks described at the time as the tip of an iceberg (Fryer, Reference Fryer1984). The figure in 2004/5, according to the British Crime Survey, is substantially more than 250 every twelve hours, and even official Home Office figures suggest that the figure is around 160 a day, a total publicly confirmed elsewhere (Metro, 31 March 2006).

Managing migrants

Alongside increasingly repressive immigration policy (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Dawson, Hutton, Roberts and Wilkinson2004b), a central plank of British social policy since the 1950s has concerned the containment of the domestic ‘race relations problem’ (Solomos, Reference Solomos2003). This nexus of immigration and ‘race’ relations legislation contained fundamentally contradictory political positions. On the one hand, since the 1960s in particular, restrictive immigration control has led to Immigration and Nationality Laws appearing ever more rapidly (to the extent that the Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Directorate collapsed in 2006 taking with it the then Home Secretary). Alongside this, on the other hand, there has been an apparent policy concern for the welfare of minorities, evidenced by a continuing flow of quangoes and policy shifts, from the early national Community Relations Commission, local community relations councils, the 1966 Local Government Act Section 11, and the 1960s Urban Programme (Solomos, Reference Solomos2003), through to today's policy obsession with community cohesion.

This domestic ‘community’ policy, however – measured by its process and outcomes, rather than by its rhetoric – has been in reality much more about containment and, echoing the language of the 1950s, about assimilation than about real concern for the enhancement of minorities’ welfare (Bleich, Reference Bleich2003). Punitive immigration control has been characterised by broken promises, policy confusion (with Home and Foreign Offices offering contradictory advice about the safety of different countries), political panics, vicious media hysteria, and an obsession with the numbers game, most recently illustrated by the government's random targets for control of asylum-seeker numbers, targets bearing no relationship to the flow of refugees or indeed to distribution of events generating them. Increasing immigration restrictions have been justified publicly by both Conservative and Labour governments not just in terms of their importance to the state, but it being in the interest of minority ethnic communities themselves. Roy Hattersley, a politician who has positioned himself to the left of the government since leaving it, argued, when Home Secretary in 1977, for the necessity of stricter immigration controls if the integration of existing minority ethnic groups was to become a social reality. Mrs Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was more explicit, voicing what many doubtless said privately, justifying fears of the presumed dangers of continued and large-scale Black immigration in terms of the natural resentment, on the part of the White British community, to being ‘swamped’ by alien cultures.

Although such comments were aired publicly, formal response to growing immigration has also been characterised by profound political duplicity. In 1971, for example, Premier Edward Heath publicly welcomed the 31,000 East African Asian Ugandan refugees, having privately failed to convince Caribbean countries that they, rather than the UK, should be their country of refuge. This was an echo of RA Butler, Home Secretary in 1961 who, prior to the first major 1962 Immigration Act, publicly announced that ‘we shall decide on [legislation] on a basis absolutely regardless of colour and without prejudice’ (Hayter, Reference Hayter2000: 47), but told his Cabinet colleagues that ‘although the scheme purports to relate solely to employment and be non-discriminatory, the aim is primarily social and its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively’ (ibid.).

The harshness and obstructiveness of immigration policy (Fryer, Reference Fryer1984) has been reflected in the invasive treatment of migrants themselves as they arrived. Perhaps the best examples of this were the ‘virginity tests’ on South Asian women, where they had to undergo physical examination to prove that they were indeed arriving for the purposes of marriage,Footnote ¹² or the ‘primary purpose rule’, imposing on migrants a requirement that they had no access to public funds, denying them benefits available to other citizens (Humphry and Ward, Reference Humphry and Ward1974). The detention centres where asylum-seekers are held now are the most obvious contemporary example of the harsh treatment of migrants, where the appalling conditions in which even families with children are held have been exposed by undercover TV journalists.Footnote ¹³ At the same time, continuing low-level political commentary continues to suggest that migrants brought alien values and cultures and that the major task of government was, where they could not be stopped, to assimilate them into British culture: this kind of approach informed, for example, the infamous ‘cricket test’ of an arch-Thatcherite government Minister, Norman Tebbitt, who argued that those of Pakistani origin should cheer the English cricket team when they played Pakistan.

Increasingly, as a result of this kind of political intervention, immigration, driven by populist and media pressure, has become ever more central to the winning and losing of elections; this may be contrasted, for example, with the failure of governments – on left or right – to make significant public pronouncements about childhood poverty within minority groups, and indeed – on the political left – when, to the public outcry, a prospective parliamentary candidate campaigned in 1966 on the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.

Minority ethnic settlement has nonetheless become a fact of life, the result, as noted, rather more of natural population growth than of continuing large-scale immigration. As this population has grown, political treatment has moved from a race relations approach – which attempted to manage a relatively small minority population – through the community relations paradigm (Solomos, Reference Solomos2003) – to incorporate a grudging acceptance of the reality of minorities’ long-term settlement, and the concept of multiculturalism. Even this was attacked vigorously when the Parekh Commission (2000) suggested that Britain might be seen as a ‘community of communities’. At present, issues of immigration control are increasingly inter-woven with political rhetoric about security and the so-called ‘war on terror’, building on a ‘Fortress Britain’ mentality. This rhetoric legitimises much greater levels of open hostility, both in the media (Law, Reference Law2002) and directly against minorities, especially those thought to be of Muslim persuasion, with police reporting substantially higher levels of racist attacks in the past few years. In 2004, compared with a White European, an Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani was already thirteen times more likely to be the victim of a racial crime (The Guardian, 7 March 2005). The incidence of attacks on Muslims after the 7 July 2005 bombings has increased substantially.

This article deals with the issue of immigration at length because it is the overarching political and ideological context which shapes the treatment of migrants once in this country and of minorities who have been born or settled here. It tacitly legitimates their exclusion or marginalisation and demonstrates, more clearly than in other policy processes, how racialisation is ‘a historical political process’ (Solomos, Reference Solomos2003: 12). The failure of many welfare agencies to respond effectively to the needs of migrants or even to try to establish what those needs are – in short to neglect of their welfare – is because, as migration rhetoric put it, they are ‘a threat’, ‘disease-ridden’, ‘criminal’, ‘likely to swamp our culture’ and ‘cunning, unprincipled and loathsome’. This prevailing ideology tells us implicitly and explicitly that migrants are second-class citizens. Paraphrasing Fryer (Reference Fryer1984), the racist tail has profoundly wagged the parliamentary dog, and indeed the public welfare dog too.

This position is, of course, littered with everyday contradictions. ‘We’ may not like ‘them’ but we like their food and adopt it as our national dish,Footnote ¹⁴ and we have embraced sports folk heroes such as Linford Christie, Kelly Holmes and Sol Campbell as ‘of us’. Ironically, political parties recognise now that the Black vote is becoming increasingly important in marginal constituencies, although this recognition is not reflected in Parliamentary representation. Increasingly, political pronouncements are made by party leaders that they are minority-friendly – and even the Conservative party has moved from offering up a Black sacrificial lamb as its Cheltenham candidate in 1982 to portraying the party leader in PR photos typically surrounded by minority Tory party members. And, despite the overarching ideology of hostility to difference, young people of different ethnic origins and skin colours meet, have sex, have children, marry and bring up families. The mixed heritage grouping is now the fastest growing category within the minority ethnic population, according to the 2001 Census. Some minorities – who may be characterised as ‘special cases’ – are, of course, also acknowledged to be good for Britain: the Uganda Asians are now reckoned to be the UK's most successful entrepreneurial group in the UK, having arrived at Britain's refugee camps with virtually nothing (Swinerton, Reference Swinerton1975); they created tens of thousands of jobs in London and the East Midlands. Mixed with admiration of this group, however, is the feeling that, in the words of Glass and Pollins, quoted previously, that they are: ‘resented when they are poor and envied when they are resourceful and thrifty’ (Reference Glass and Pollins1960: 47).Footnote ¹⁵ The most successful school students in terms of educational attainment are now girls of Chinese or Indian origin.

Welfare outcomes for minorities

There is considerable evidence to underpin the view that the British state is only marginally concerned with the welfare of minorities and acts energetically only in response to serious crises, such as occasional urban disturbances, or to the vigorous campaigning of minority organisations (as with the Stephen Lawrence Campaign). This evidence can be seen through tracing the outcomes for minorities who have engaged with the British welfare state. There is not space to do this in detail; some salient examples will have to suffice.

Let us look, first of all, at the labour market. The last PSI National Survey of minorities (Modood et al., Reference Modood, Berthoud, Lakey, Nazroo, Smith, Virdee and Beishon1997) found widespread acceptance of the fact of continuing discrimination against minorities. Their experience of the labour market, education and training meant that, however equal opportunities might be in principle, outcomes were shaped as much by racism as by acquired skills, knowledge and experience. This was confirmed by a Cabinet Office (2003) study revealing that ‘all ethnic minority groups are not doing as well as they should be, given their education and other characteristics’ (p.iii) and (extraordinarily) ‘that government needs to establish a new framework for action’ (ibid.), this 50 years on from the first evidence of discrimination against minorities. Those groups which do relatively well, particularly those of Indian origin, have done so despite the prevalence of racism. The same report commenting on the so-called economic success of the Chinese population ignored both their social isolation, their lack of connection with wider welfare structures, and their tendency compared with all minorities to be most prone to racist attack (Adamson et al., Reference Adamson, Cole, Craig and Law2005). Racism – as a study of young people entering the labour market in ten European countries, including the UK, showed – also shaped access to both skills and knowledge (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Dietrich, Gautie, Bradley and van Hoof2005). Young Black and Asian people disproportionately left school early, were excluded from school and disappeared from official statistics, being neither in training, education or employment (Britton et al., Reference Britton, Coles, Convery and Craig2003). Barriers to young BME people were even more profound where they had disabilities (Ali et al., Reference Ali, Atkin, Craig, Dadze-Arthur, Elliott and Edwards2006). Despite these difficulties, the record of organisations which might confront racism in the workplace – the Industrial Tribunal system, the CRE and trade unions – has generally been thoroughly inadequate.

In relation to social security's ability to maintain adequate incomes for minorities, evidence demonstrates that it fails to do so. Minority ethnic communities are more likely – much more likely in some cases – to experience poverty than the UK population as a whole (Craig, Reference Craig and Ditch2000; Platt, Reference Platt2003). The edifice of national insurance – what remains of it – is constructed on conditions which most minorities cannot meet: particularly of long periods of uninterrupted earnings at decent levels of pay (Gordon and Newnham, Reference Gordon and Newnham1985; Platt, Reference Platt2003). This structural discrimination has been reaffirmed in the proposals for pension reform announced by the 2006 Turner Commission. The inter-relationship of poverty, low pay and unemployment is shown most graphically in London (GLA, 2003). In 2003, while 28 per cent of London's working-age population were from BME groups, they accounted for 45 per cent of unemployed adults. In 2000/01, the unemployment rate was 24 per cent among Bangladeshis, 19 per cent for Black Africans, 16 per cent for African Caribbeans and 14 per cent for Pakistanis, compared with the White unemployment rate of 4 per cent. Bangladeshi and Pakistani households together have the highest percentage of children living in income poverty (73 per cent), and over half of all Black children are living in income poverty (Craig, Reference Craig and Preston2005). Given the level of educational qualifications achieved by older BME people prior to entering the labour market, their shorter UK employment careers, and their greater experience of unemployment and low pay, BME pensioners are more likely to have reduced access to occupational pensions, reduced state pensions and other contributory benefit provision and will thus be more dependent on income-replacement (usually means-tested) social security benefits. Yet, until very recently, the relevant government department, the DWP, had no effective system for monitoring minorities’ experience: and in some places, as noted earlier, it clearly does not regard monitoring as necessary in any case.

In the field of housing, much has recently been made of the fact that residential segregation of minorities has occurred, with Trevor Phillips, recent Chair of the CRE, arguing that ‘we are sleepwalking towards ghettoes’ (The Guardian, 25 January 2006), although the data underpinning this assertion have been disputed by others (see, for example, Dorling and Thomas, Reference Dorling and Thomas2004). In any case, this scenario implies choice for minority ethnic groups over housing options, a choice which, as research shows (Skellington, Reference Skellington1992; Law, Reference Law2003), does not exist for many. As Susan Smith puts it: this does not explain why minorities ‘should pursue this [choice] in the more run-down segments of the housing stock [with poor quality housing, dangerous neighbourhoods and inadequate health and education provision], rather than in areas where they could secure the symbolic and economic benefits associated with suburban life’ (Reference Smith1989: 130). In what might be seen as a classic example of ‘blaming the victim’, the minorities associated with the disturbances in northern cities in 2003 have effectively been blamed for their residential segregation, their failure to get good jobs and so on; while young minorities argue, after three generations of neglect in which their elders – the so-called ‘community leaders’ – have colluded, that rioting (as Martin Luther King said in another context) might be the only ‘language of the unheard’ that would enable them to be ‘heard’ by the political process (Jan Khan, Reference Jan Khan2003).

In every other aspect of welfare, despite the achievements of some minority groups, broadly the same picture obtains, of a lack of achievement as a result of structural racism and discrimination: in education, for example, we can note the high rates of school exclusion of young Caribbean boys (SEU, 1998); the strong association, as Gilborn and Mirza (Reference Gilborn and Mirza2000) record, between attainment and poverty (Craig, Reference Craig and Preston2005); low levels of attainment in post-school education among many minorities; the overlooking of minority ethnic teachers in promotion boards; the ability of local school management bodies to exclude certain kinds of minority pupils in order to maintain their league table rankings; the presence of very few Black and Asian staff in the higher echelons of higher education – no more than 4 per cent of whom are professors (and, ironically, fewer than that in social policy); and so on. Even in Sure Start, the most significant government programmatic investment to improve the position of pre-school children from deprived backgrounds, there is clear evidence of the neglect of BME populations (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Adamson, Ali, Ali, Atkins, Dadze-Arthur, Elliott, McNamee and Murtuja2007).

In health, despite the fact that the NHS – the employer of most Black and minority workers in the UK – would now collapse if minorities were to withdraw from it wholesale, a major inquiry has revealed structural racism through the service (Blofeld, Reference Blofeld2004), with minorities largely trapped at the bottom of both private and public labour markets. Only 1 per cent of NHS organisations are led by minority employees, and the peak professional organisations, the various Royal Colleges, have virtually no representation of minorities at their highest levels. The NHS has failed properly to acknowledge the importance of ailments specific to particular minorities, such as thalassaemia (Ahmad, Reference Ahmad1993; Rudat, Reference Rudat1994; Anionwu and Atkin, Reference Anionwu and Atkin2001); and there continues to be misdiagnosis and mistreatment of minorities by the mental health system (Rai-Atkins, Reference Rai-Atkins2002; Blofeld, Reference Blofeld2004). At present only nine of the 41 English Mental Health Trusts are known to have a race impact assessment policy in place. In the criminal justice system, despite major inquiries into racism in the police force, the probation service and the police service in the past three years, Black and Asian people are more prone to stop and search, are over-represented in the prison system and heavily under-represented among criminal justice employees. It is unsurprising that many minorities have little confidence in the criminal justice system (Cole et al., Reference Cole, Davidson, Adamson, Murtuja and Craig2006), and that racist abuse and assault is under-reported.

This picture of the neglect of minorities’ welfare is common across all branches of welfare and requires committed political responses both inside and outside government. It is not, of course, the case that BME communities have resigned themselves to being passive victims in the face of such structured discrimination: these communities have increasingly organised since the seventeenth century against the racism of state and state welfare (Walvin, Reference Walvin1984; and see www.irr.org.uk and the journal Race and Class). Alongside what such communities characterise as acts of resistance on the streets of the UK, there has been a significant growth of self-help organisations, such as the Black housing movement, in the capacity-building of BME voluntary and community groups, campaigns around specific issues such as sickle cell anaemia, mental health and disability, involvement in mainstream political activity (though still largely ineffective), and pressure from Black-led organisations such as the 1990 Trust and the Race Equality Foundation (see, for example, Mullard, Reference Mullard1985; Sivanandan, Reference Sivanandan1990; Braham, Reference Braham1992; Harrison, Reference Harrison1998; Chouhan, Reference Chouhan2004).

Explaining the persistence of racism

Despite the range of liberal ‘community relations’ initiatives and a series of race relations legislative interventions, it is clear from the range of research reported above and much besides (see Craig, Reference Craig2001) that racism persists in all welfare sectors. The position of minorities within the health services remains that they are, in general, trapped in the lowest levels of the employment structure despite their large numbers; they are more likely to be criminalised by a criminal justice system which they view, with good reason, as hostile to them; they have – with some exceptions – poor outcomes in housing, education, in the mental health system and the labour market, not because of some inherent genetic inability, but because of structural barriers to their improvement and a plethora of individual acts of racism.

The explanation for the continuance of racism lies in the cultural orientation of the White majority towards minorities. The persistent populist cry of ‘bloody foreigners’, echoed in the media, is based, not on an understanding of Britain as a country of migrants but as a ‘durable set of genes, ideas and habit, a White page to which, in the last few decades, a few multicoloured flourishes have been added . . . [flourishes which are inevitably] seen as one of the problems or challenges faced by postwar society’ (Winder, Reference Winder2004: 1). At a deeper level, the British attitude towards migrants draws, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not, on the legacy of empire, on ‘white supremacist attitudes towards “race” . . . in particular the notion of atavism – the belief that the “primitive” people of Africa constituted an earlier stage of development [with its] perceived deficiency of language, intellect and culture’ (Young, Reference Young, Back and Solomos2000: 268), the coloniser seeing himself as the ‘civilising white man’. The creation of nation states over the past 200 years has relied on the definition – however mythical – of national cultures which immigrating minorities must either accept or continue to be defined as the ‘other’ or ‘outsiders’ (Parekh, Reference Parekh2000), sometimes (as increasingly at present) an ‘other’ determined to destroy our culture. ‘Those constructed as outsiders . . . thus need to be integrated’ (Bhavnani et al., Reference Bhavnani, Mirza and Meetoo2005) and the barriers to their advancement are not, according to this view, about racism but created by their own ‘refusal’ to integrate.

The issue of racism in welfare – and more widely in UK society – cannot fully be addressed until the overarching (or underpinning) ideology of racism, most clearly reflected in migration policy, is addressed. This would require an unprecedented challenge to the current political and cultural consensus. Perhaps, in the year commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, it may be time for another ‘Somerset’ case, one where it is established beyond challenge that anyone living in Britain – regardless of the colour of their skin – should enjoy the full rights of a British citizen.