In a major speech the Prime Minister reflected on the role of multiculturalism in a modern and evolving society.
In preparation for his lecture, the fifth in the Our Nation’s Future series, Tony Blair considered the following paper - one of those written by a range of experts in the field.
The authors are independent, and all views and opinions are their own. They do not necessarily agree with Government policy, but each makes an interesting contribution to the debate.
About the expert
Trevor Phillips OBE is Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality.
Read the paper
Race Convention
Trevor introduced me in his own normal elegant way. But he, and I, and you, know that like millions of others, if it were not for the monstrous crime of transatlantic slavery, Trevor Phillips would not be my name. The furthest back that my family can trace its ancestry is about 150 years. My great great grandmother, born into slavery, lived under the slave name of Happy, perhaps her owner’s idea of a joke.
Like all the descendants of the 12 million and more Africans whose ancestors were kidnapped, brutalised and slaughtered our family has waited for centuries for someone in Europe just to acknowledge what was done to us.
We will never have our true names back. We can never really be compensated. We will never realise the human potential that died in the traders’ coffles to the West coast of Africa, on the slave ships and under the planters’ whips.
But this recognition matters. And it will matter more, Ruth, if next year, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, our government backs its regret with resource to rescue the victims of contemporary slavery, many of whom are from Africa again; and support to those who still suffer from the disadvantage born of a slave past.
If 2007 is to mean anything it must be atonement for the past, yes; but it must also be a platform to provide for the future.
A future of more racial equality.
A future of less racial discrimination.
and
A future of real integration of all our diverse people.
In three days I will no longer be the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. I know that this will be a cause of grief to some; of rejoicing to others. For me, though these have been four of the happiest years of my working life, I am delighted to be standing here for three major reasons.
First, I was always told that the first duty of leadership was to ensure that you have the right successor. From Friday, after six Chairmen, for the first time, the CRE will have a Chairwoman, our current Deputy Chair Professor Kay Hampton, demonstrating that minority women - in this case an African woman of Asian origin - have exactly what it takes to lead a great organisation.
Second, I am thrilled to be here with the 900 or so of you who have come together for the first time on this scale anywhere in Europe. To review the last thirty years in race equality and race relations; to consider how we can do what we do better; and to debate, the hardest question of all, where do we go from here?
We look forward to the 44 break out sessions, and 160 speakers to lead us through the days.
Third, this is my last speech as Chair of the CRE, before I devote myself fully to the new challenge of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. So forgive me if, after four years of bland, consensual, low-key, say-nothing-to-frighten-the-horses kind of leadership, I finally unbutton my corset. I know that the Chair of the CRE being controversial may come as a surprise to many of you, but I’m feeling brave. After all, Ruth can only sack me once.
There are many questions we’ll address over the next two days, from the meanings of integration and multiculturalism, to the importance of faith identities, right through to, the burning race question of our time, which everybody has in their minds but no-one wants to ask out loud: why do the voters on shows like Strictly Come Dancing always chuck out the Black people first? And can Leona of the X-factor be the first since Lenny Henry to beat the talent show colour bar?
But this morning I want to address three, somewhat simpler questions about integration, race equality and race relations in Britain:
Are we, as a nation, better off than we were thirty years ago?
Are we, the race relations community, serving the nation as well as we should?
And
If we truly want to create a nation at ease with its diversity - are we all facing up to the challenges of the future?
And we should not mistake the scale of those challenges. As a nation we face two great issues this century.
One will be the toxic bundle of issues arising from climate change and environmental degradation. The other is that, in a world where people are asserting their right to have their own heritage and identity recognised, how we cope with the rising frictions between people of different races and faiths. In short
How do we live with our planet?
and
How do we live with each other?
We, the race relations community collectively are the leaders and the most experienced in the second of these issues, not just in this country, but I would say worldwide. We have a great responsibility.
But this is not some global change taking place above our heads. It will be our real life everyday experience in schools, colleges and workplaces. By 2011, only 20% of Britain’s workforce will be white able bodied men under 45. It will mean that those workplaces must change.
Ordinary people can already see the importance of what’s coming. And they are worried.
For this conference, the CRE commissioned a major quantitative and qualitative survey of Britain, boosted with a supplementary poll of ethnic minority Britons. For the first time in the history of such surveys, race and immigration shows up as the single most important issue for the British people, ahead of crime, the NHS, education and terrorism.
That is why what we do here today and tomorrow is so important.
Many in the political and media classes have yet to catch up with the people of course. They still regard race as a marginal issue, secondary to the latest piece of Westminster soap opera.
Others only take an interest because they see ethnic minorities as valuable voting fodder. Some are terrified that anxious white voters will be drawn to extremists if their party doesn’t convince those voters that it’s thinking what they’re thinking.
Yet others are only interested if they can pose as saviours of the poor, sad, voiceless victims of racism. But Black and ethnic minority Britons do not need white Messiahs to speak for them. They are beginning to find their own voices.
This convention marks a break with the politics of race as everybody’s political football. It marks the opportunity for us to take race equality and race relations from the margins to the mainstream.
That is why I welcome Ruth Kelly’s remarks this morning about the new seriousness with which her department will take its relations with ethnic minority leaders and organisations.
At least we have a Secretary State with responsibility for race who doesn’t approach every minority community with the words "Take Me To Your Leader". I hop that this approach will be matched by a clear commitment to listen and to hear the voices that truly represent our communities - black, brown white, Christian and non-Christian
The race relations community itself is now too large and too serious a force to be treated as just another pressure group. More than a thousand people work in Race Equality Councils around the country. They involve tens of thousands of volunteers.
The major organisations like the British Muslim Forum, the Hindu Forum, the Board of Deputies and the new leadership for Black Majority Churches bring together faith organisations which represent literally millions of British people in a genuine way.
Many more of you here work diligently in police forces, hospitals, local authorities, private sector companies, the media and elsewhere.
You do much that is unglamorous and unremarked but effective. Often your greatest achievements are not seen by the public because they prevent problems before they happen.
Last September I said, and I want to repeat this, one of the proudest moments of my career was the way that the race relations community as a whole pulled together in the weeks and months after 7/7, calming fears, defusing tensions, mediating disputes and standing up for threatened communities.
In recent controversies over for example the veil worn by some Muslim women, I think that our movement played an honourable role in injecting some rationality into what started as a debate and all too quickly became a public trial of one community.
Today we are an essential part of British life.
We are a long way from the autumn of 1976, when the Relations Act received Royal Assent. This Act broadened the definition of discrimination, introduced the concept of ‘positive action’, and created the Commission for Racial Equality.
It is perhaps hard to remember how extraordinary an achievement this was.
In the Britain of 30 years ago the National Front had a membership of over 17,000, and rising.
It was a time of dramatic street clashes between black people and the police at the Notting Hill carnival, allegedly triggered by the arrest of a suspected pickpocket, but in reality the product of racist use of the ’sus’ laws, which police used enthusiastically and almost exclusively against non-whites.
Then, the role of Chair of the CRE was thought to be a poisoned chalice - despised by whites, suspected by blacks and Asians. Thirteen people apparently turned down the role before a Conservative MP of liberal leanings, Sir David Lane finally took it on. Amongst his first Commissioners was, by the way, the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s District Secretary in Northampton, Mr William Morris - later Sir Bill Morris, now Lord Morris
Two years later, even the relatively moderate and in those days, extremely hairy head of the National Union of Students could not find time in his busy diary to accept the offer of a place on the Commission. In fact he preferred the street protest.
That’s because thirty years ago our only platform was the street. You might have found me this morning not in surroundings like these, but outside a small film processing factory in North West London. Grunwick was the first and most important anti-racist industrial action supporting the fight of a mainly Asian and female workforce for decent conditions. At that time I was a student activist. My deal with Jack Dromey, then the local Trades Council secretary was that if I brought the students, he would bring the megaphone. It worked.
Perhaps, this was a simpler, more straightforward era. Discrimination was overt and in-your-face. That didn’t necessarily make it easier to tackle, but at least we knew what we were dealing with. Now, race, religion, identity, nationality and belonging complicate our work. The simple slogan on a placard is no longer enough.
Many think we should still be outside shouting the odds.
Well, there will always be a place for such action, though perhaps the place for true radicals to be organising this weekend should have been outside the BNP’s gathering in Blackpool rather than outside the CRE’s in London.
And there will always be a place for the romantics who feel more comfortable dealing with the world as they would like it to be than the world as it is. But all of you have the day to day business of making race relations work have to do so in the real world of unspoken hostility, of lack of resources, of often unsympathetic colleagues.
I know a little of what this feels like. It’s no fun to be shouted at by a furious senior Cabinet Minister, and told that you are little better than a four letter body part. The reason on that occasion was that the CRE told the Government that it would derail an important piece of legislation if it wasn’t amended to take account of the impact on ethnic minorities. We stood firm, they changed their minds. It wasn’t the first time nor was it the last time.
I know that many people in this room face such situations week in week out. You get no headlines from it. Many of you don’t get paid for it. You do it because you think it’s right.
These two days are in part our tribute to you. Before I leave this job I want to say how much I owe to you for all the work that you do. I also want to thank the past and present staff and Commissioners of the CRE for all that they have done over the years to make us the organisation that we are.
This convention is also a statement that race equality and race relations are no longer a minority business.
Let me be blunt. I look around this hall. There are people who think that it should be full of black and brown faces - and only black and brown faces. But that would be a gathering purely for solace and comfort - not a platform for change.
But if we want to change Britain then all of Britain must be part of the debate and part of the solution. And that means that people of all races, all colours, all faiths and all stations in life have a role to play.
This is what we mean by moving race from the margins to the mainstream. Moving from protest to real politics. From the streets of exclusion to the corridors of power.
And the fact that we can now assemble in this way marks just how far we’ve come.
Many of the challenges seem unchanged of course.
Thirty years ago my predecessor Sir David Lane worried in his annual reports about issues that still preoccupy us today. For example he writes of "the frenzied atmosphere in which the debate on immigration has been conducted" and the fact that "some sections of the mass media continue to sensationalise race incidents".
He highlighted the deteriorating relationship between police and West Indian Youth - for which we can today read police and young Muslims; he also points to continuing racial violence, the strength of the far right, minority disadvantage in education and employment.
And he referred to the stress of reorganising the Community Relations Commission and the Race Relations Board into becoming a single body, the CRE.
But many things are different, not least because of what the CRE itself has achieved.
Let me start with what I suppose to some will be a controversial statement.
Britain is by far - I mean by far - the best place in Europe to live if you are not white.
In our MORI survey we asked about where people would prefer to live. Just 25% of Brits say they would prefer to live in all white areas. This is too high, but set that against the 44% in Greece, 42% in Belgium 39%in Portugal ands 37% in Denmark.
We are not strangers to police brutality and violence, but I don’t think that our cities are as tense as those of France; nor do I think we would expect these days, our football fans to do what French football fans did this week which was to mount a sustained assault on Jewish fans of an Israeli club, Hapoel Tel Aviv. The anti-semitic attack was so ferocious that a French policeman opened fire in defence of one of the Hapoel fans - a black policeman by the way.
Belgium’s capital is controlled by a coalition led by an avowedly anti-immigrant party. In supposedly liberal Holland, a racist party won three quarters of a million votes out of 12 million. The new government threatens to ban Muslims from wearing the burqa in the street.
Here I think things are still different.
Our courts now recognise racial offence in a way that would have been unthinkable in 1976. Sir David Calvert Smith , who chaired the CRE’s formal investigation into the police, last week sentenced a man to jail for 15 months for spitting in the face of a Muslim Asian woman.
Racial attitudes have changed radically. In our MORI poll the proportion of white people who said they would mind if a close relative married a black or Asian person fell from 33% to 12% over five years; those who would not mind rose from 22% to 54%.
And you will have your own everyday small signals of change which you see in your own lives. For me in the past week it has been seeing a huge wedding party in Hampshire for a young Asian couple in which all the women, including the large number who were not Indian wore saris - the feeling that at last this wasn’t a clumsy, faintly patronising gesture, but was a natural, very British thing to do. It has been the sound of turning on the whitest radio station in the world - BBC Radio 3 - and hearing at 8 o’clock in the morning, the sound of classical Arab music - and not having it remarked upon at all.
These are signs of change that we should welcome.
And much of that change is down to the encouragement, research, and enforcement of the Commission for Racial Equality.
Unlike its predecessor bodies, the CRE was given substantial powers to enforce the law and to bring legal proceedings where appropriate. And we have used them: over the 30 years of its existence, the CRE has assisted most of the 36,000 applications for help that it has received.
But times have changed. Today we take fewer cases to the courts because people know that this is a dangerous game for them to play.
In 1976-77, the CRE took on 1,122 cases. We won about 360. The highest settlement was £825, the median level was just £30, the total compensation around £10 000.
This year the value of settlements recovered in compensation for victims of discrimination in 2006 alone is already in excess of £2 million [1]. These cases covered a range of sectors - and for those who doubt our willingness to act against government - included cases against the Ministry of Defence for its disgraceful treatment in refusing compensation to many of those held in Prisoner of War camps in the Far East during the Second World War; and against the Labor Party. Right now we are preparing to contest the use of racial profiling to off load British Muslim passengers from a British aircraft [2].
We haven’t only dealt with individual cases of course.
Since 1976, the CRE has carried out about 70 formal investigations into a range of organisations, from shopping centres to taxi companies, restaurants, employment agencies, trade unions, local councils, education authorities and hospitals. More recently we have carried out in-depth investigations into the prison and police services, local authority treatment of Gypsies and Travellers. And our formal investigation into the policy of regeneration is due to report at the end of 2007.
Together, these investigations form the single most important body of information about racial discrimination in Britain.
And they have real effect. The formal investigation into the Police started as a result of the Secret Policeman film, but led amongst other things to a ban on BNP or NF membership among officers. I hope that other public services will take this path too.
Let’s remember too that our campaigns make a difference. When people talk about the CRE’s public profile being too high, they perhaps forget that it was that same public profile that fuelled the Commission’s campaign against racism in football - at a time when many politicians wouldn’t touch it.
Thirty years ago there were hardly any black footballers in the top flight, and the few there were, were treated with vile racism, both by the crowds and by their fellow professionals.
Today, just over a third of the Premier League’s footballers are from ethnic minorities. The CRE’s campaign, Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, launched in 1993, helped to transform football grounds from places where racist chanting and comments were routine, to one where such behaviour is now rare - and where we are the standard bearers for anti-racism in Europe..
But there is still much to do.
Stephen Lawrence’s name will live for ever as an historic wake-up call to our nation. His killing and the extraordinary campaign led by his family, resulting in the Macpherson Inquiry, changed Britain.
But we are a country in which we see episodes of vicious racial violence - the more recent murders of Anthony Walker, Kriss Donald, Zahid Mubarek and Johnny Delaney stand as grim testimony to where racial hatred can lead.
Our MORI survey shows that though the objects of our prejudice may changed, bigotry still remains a strong feature of British life. We may have become used to black and Asian Britons, but we are still intolerant of refugees and asylum seekers, we still treat casual abuse of gypsies and travellers as acceptable, and we still have deep unease about Muslim Britons.
And let us be clear. The prejudices we have can no longer be described in simple black and white terms.
61% of white Britons think we have too many immigrants; but so do 54% iof ethnic minorities. There’s a reason for this of course. British people in general think that 22% of those who live in the UK are from ethnic minorities. Amongst ethnic minorities that figure is even higher - ethnic minority Britons think that 32% of people living in the UK are non-white. The real figure is around 8%.
In football, things may have improved on the pitch and in the stands. But we still have too few ethnic minority people running clubs and working behind the scenes - just one per cent on football clubs’ staffs. As in my own industry, television, black stars having their strings pulled by white puppet-masters should belong to another era.
That is why, we are working with the FA and other football authorities to help them implement their own action plan to make employment opportunities in the industry open to all.
And there are major problems we aren’t even close to cracking.
The continued disproportion in stop and search, increasingly transferred from black to Asian young men.
The underachievement of black boys, and the over activity of the criminal justice system in pursuit of them has left us with a situation where a black boy is more likely to end up in a prison cell than a university lecture hall.
The failures of government departments to comply to the requirements of the Race Relations Amendment Act - which we think will very shortly lead to the first court action under the Act against a government department.
Then there are problems we have yet to find the tools to crack, and where we may need to go beyond the reach of the current law..
Take the phenomenon of stealth racism - the racism that smiles to your face just as it’s dumping your job application in the bin marked "Not White Enough".
For thirty years, the CRE has dealt with thousands of complaints which are serious but not justiciable, because the discrimination operates subtly and without an obvious perpetrator. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Stealth racism is costing the nation billons in the wastage of talent and capability.
But it won’t be addressed by more training and more slogans. Frankly, some areas of employment will never stop being all-white without new kinds of positive action, including I believe, giving employers freedom to exercise what you might call a community integration preference.
Some months ago I pointed out that both our police forces and our security services clearly need, in today’s environment to accelerate the integration of their staffs. White men who only speak one language do not make successful undercover agents when tackling the Eastern European or Chinese traffickers who terrorise and exploit their own communities. Clean shaven Essex boys won’t be too convincing when it comes to infiltrating cells of violent extremists falsely operating under the banner of Islam. Polish communities should be policed by at least the odd Polish copper.
Yet we know that integrating these services now - not next year or next decade - is vital to protect our whole society. But employers aren’t permitted by the Race Relations Acts to take the action required. Once again, I believe that we have to consider whether when there is a clearly set out public need we must allow our institutions, even if only temporarily to take special measures with the aim of integrating their workforces faster than would otherwise be the case.
In politics, contrary to all our hopes, the far right has not gone away. Far from it.
Though 72% of voters actively dislike the BNP nearly a million people voted for them in the 2006 local elections.
Earlier this year the CRE commissioned ICM to conduct polls of BNP supporters in Barking and Dagenham, and Sandwell, in the aftermath of the May 2006 local elections, where the party recorded their best ever result.
What we found was alarming.
- Their vote was not a protest vote. A quarter had voted for the BNP before. Most of the remainder were either people who hadn’t voted before or had voted Labour in the 2005 General Election.
- The people who voted BNP knew fully what they were voting for - they were not being duped - 74% of BNP supporters said they understood and agreed with the policy platform presented by the party.
The BNP is on the verge of moving from political pariah to being viewed as a ‘legitimate’ political party - a journey that the National Front never made. And despite their clearly racialist policies they are not shunned in the public sphere. Surely the time has come to follow the example set by police forces and to question whether it is acceptable for BNP members can truly carry out the role of public servant?
And then there are the problems we frankly just didn’t seem prepared for.
The CRE has, over the past two years drawn repeated attention to the risk of increased polarisation and segregation in our society. We have not done this for the sake of it, but because we truly believe that this is the great threat to a truly diverse, multiethnic society.
As a nation we are becoming more ethnically segregated by residence; and inequality is being amplified by our separate lives. It is true that some areas are more integrated, but only in the sense that one black person joining an all-white tennis club integrates it.
The real crisis lies in the areas which the middle-class minorities are leaving behind; areas which are becoming more and more ethnically concentrated and exclusive. The public education system - which should be teaching our children to live together - appears to be doing the very opposite. For example, of the Russell Group universities, 9 last year could not count more than 30 African Caribbean students in their ranks.
We know that there is a mix of reasons why segregation takes place. Social, cultural and historical. And there is the need for protection. For Jews who came a hundred years ago, Asians who came forty years ago and even the Eastern Europeans arriving now, all of whom may be subject to abuse and violent assault by a minority of their neighbours, there is safety in numbers.
But whatever the reasons we are seeing the emergence of separate and isolated communities.
MORI asked people if they had met anyone of a different ethnicity to themselves in the past year, and if so where.
The most common encounter, cited by 62% is in a shop; and I think we can guess what that’s about. Far fewer - 49% - work with people of a different ethnicity - which means that a majority of people work in all-white workplaces.
But most disappointing is that though there is clearly the opportunity to make meaningful relationships across the lines of race and religion 70% of us, more than two out of three hardly ever choose to meet someone of a different ethnicity in our own homes.
Even amongst ethnic minority communities there are some substantial differences. Four fifths of black people mix monthly with someone from a different race in a home environment; but only 58% of Asians and 27% of whites can say the same thing..
Not only do we live and work separately; we play separately.
About half of black Britons mix with people of different races through hobbies and sports, a low enough number given that most black people live in mixed areas; but just a third of Asians spend their leisure time with non-Asians, and only 30% of whites mix during sports or hobbies.
This isn’t just a social or cultural issue. Studies for the DCLG found that higher segregation is associated with lower employment, lower earnings, lower education participation and higher levels of deprivation.
And if we are to confront the threat from the far right it is here that we will win or lose. Our latest findings show clearly that the secret of good relations between different races is face to face contact. Bit it’s not just meeting that matters - it’s the quality of interaction that counts.
Our survey shows that people who mix socially are simply more racially tolerant.
People were asked if they agreed that we should do more to learn about the systems and cultures of different ethnic groups. There was a clear difference of view between those who mix socially and those who don’t. Amongst those who mix socially away from school or college 71% said yes, we should learn more about each other. Amongst those who don’t mix socially that figure was just 58%.
That is why we support and fund efforts to bring people together across the lines of race and religion, such as our successful summer camp pilot for young people this year.
But we are trying to achieve this against a background of extraordinarily rapid and unsettling change, not just in the social and economic environment but in the very composition of the British people.
For the first time, more than half of all ethnic minority Britons are British born. But even more significant is the astonishing rise in the numbers of mixed race Britons.
In 2001 they numbered 674,000. New projections based on the census suggest that this number will grow to 950,000 in 2010, and 1.24m in 2020. By the end of that decade they are almost certain to overtake those of Indian origin to become the single largest minority group in the country.
I welcome this, but as with all the changes we face it is not an uncomplicated prospect. The mixed race Britons are young, and they show the highest employment rates of any minority group.
But they also exhibit the highest rates of lone parenthood and family breakdown, in some cases three times the average. They suffer the highest rates of drug treatment. We don’t yet know why this should be so, though many people talk now of identity stripping - children who grow up marooned between communities.
In talking about change I could equally have cited the rising levels of failure amongst white young men in education and employment; or the task of integrating the new workers from Eastern Europe, as new issues for us to discuss this week and to tackle in the months and years ahead.
All these groups should have a claim on racial equality too. Integration isn’t a one-way street. Everyone must feel that they too have a chance to be supported by the race relations community. And as more kinds of diverse groups settle in the UK, race relations will become less and less a black and white issue.
That is the effect of globalization on the worldwide labour market.
The UN tells us 191 million people live and work outside their country of birth. In the past sixty years, Britain attracted about four and half million new settlers. We may welcome that number in the next thirty years.
At the same time, people are leaving. For every two emigrants in this country today only one returns. For every two immigrants, only one leaves, and that means the composition of our population, if not its actual size, is changing quite rapidly. Today, there are 42 communities of more than 10,000 people of foreign heritage in London alone.
This kind of rapid change alters the composition of the population significantly. In practice we notice the new faces in the High Street, the new accents in the shops. But the change isn’t just one of sheer numbers. It is also characterised by a new fierceness with which people express the aspects of their identity - heritage, ethnicity, faith - that make them different from their neighbours.
That is why we now need to talk of our aim being a society at ease with all kinds of diversity
So how should we be addressing this challenge over the next two days?
I’m not going to offer answers this morning, you’ll be relieved to hear. But I do want to ask some questions.
First of all, how do we tackle the new variant on our oldest problem; how do we expose and eliminate stealth racism?
Second, how do we widen the circle of the race relations community? If we want real change we have to go beyond the circle of the already committed and clued up. Our contribution has been to open up this Convention to many who previously would have been excluded from this conversation.
Third what role does the heart of our democracy, our political framework play in our aim of creating a society at ease with its diversity?
Let me say a few words of my own on this.
We have a record number of minority Members of Parliament - all of fifteen. We have the prospect, to be welcomed whatever her party, of the first Asian woman MP.
Yet it cannot be right that at present, we have a more ethnically diverse House of Lords than our House of Commons.
At least part of the reason at least is that our political parties still in their hearts and their bones have not changed their culture. Until they do we will continue to get it wrong. Here is the new truth in politics.
When ethnic minority individuals approach politicians they do so not as marginal constituents who might represent the swing vote if ‘handled’ correctly, but as citizens and rights-bearers. And for real change to happen we don’t need more minority-friendly politicians entreating community leaders to bring in the vote - we need more ethnic minority politicians in office, working for the entire community. Politics should be, as Ruth said earlier, a matter of shared values, of shared ambitions and not just shared opportunism.
Finally for those who hoped they’d be seeing the back of me, I am sorry to disappoint you.
The Commission for Equality and Human Rights is not the topic of my remarks this morning, but I want to make clear from now, that the CEHR when it takes up the mandate of the CRE will be no less vigorous and no less groundbreaking than the CRE.
We will be independent, authoritative and adventurous, just as we have tried to be in the CRE.
But we will be doing so with new powers of investigation and inquiry; new resources ; and a new framework to be set out by the Prime Minster’s Equalities Review to be published in February.
That is why this convention is just the start of a national conversation on race and integration. The CRE will be picking up the themes of this Convention - communities, participation, public services - and asking our regional and local networks to keep the debate going.
This week we will hear from the establishment - politicians, journalists, community leaders, activists, academics. Dare I say policy wonks? From next week we want to hear a fresh perspective. As we experienced with projects like Young Brits @ Art and our Summer Camps, there is a period of younger people’s life when they more open to this type of conversation. We want them to take the lead. Then the CRE will take stock of what has been learned, discover what has been set in motion, and hand it to the CEHR for the future.
The only condition for that debate is that nothing is off limits. Anyone who genuinely wants to talk about the future of race equality will have a place. But let’s be bold. Race equality can’t be advanced by half-measures. It’s time for us to be more ambitious.
The metaphor we use at the CRE these days is that we have for thirty years we’ve done pretty well in putting up umbrellas against the storms of racism and discrimination. We will continue to spread the umbrellas. By this I mean, more training, more awareness, more monitoring - all good steps in themselves. But umbrellas don’t change the weather - they merely give you a better chance of staying dry.
The time is right for us to be truly radical, to go beyond the begging bowl, to raise our eyes past the ethnic concessions, and to demand that the institutions of a society that is as changed and diverse as ours has become, undertake a deep thoroughgoing transformation to match.
After thirty years, it’s time for us to stop putting up more umbrellas. This week should be the moment we start changing the weather.
1. The precise figure to date is £2,167, 323.00
2. Akuji v Virgin Atlantic Airways
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