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'Disproportionate rates of stop and search blight the police force - many of the worst offending services tried to stop collecting data on ethnicity during stops.' Photograph: Gideon Mendel/In Pictures/Corbis
'Disproportionate rates of stop and search blight the police force - many of the worst offending services tried to stop collecting data on ethnicity during stops.' Photograph: Gideon Mendel/In Pictures/Corbis

Black Britons face a double whammy – failed race relations law, now budget cuts

This article is more than 8 years old
Kehinde Andrews
The 2000 act was a chance to fundamentally address racism in Britain, but little has changed – and budget cuts are making things worse

On Sunday, the Runnymede Trust released a report highlighting that ethnic minorities will be badly hit by George Osborne’s latest budget. The Treasury responded by claiming that it had “fully considered equality impacts on different protected groups”, words robotically reproduced from the Race Relations (Amendment) Act (RRAA) of 2000. The act is one of our most progressive pieces of anti-racist legislation; but over the past 15 years it has proved to be the most weakly enforced law on the statute books.

The act was a direct response to the Macpherson report of 1999, which found that the police service was “institutionally racist” following the Met’s gross mishandling of the Stephen Lawrence case. The act built on previous legislation, and is seen as progressive because it places a legal duty on public institutions (including the government) to proactively ensure that major initiatives do not negatively effect racial equality.

The way to do this is to implement race equality impact assessments, which must be carried out before institutions make significant changes. Together with the strong wording of the Macpherson report, there was hope that New Labour would seriously tackle institutional racism while in office. There was hope that the year 2000 would mark a turning point in addressing racism in Britain.

Over the past 15 years those hopes have been dashed. The major target of the reforms, the police service, is as institutionally racist as in 2000. As of 2014, the force shows no signs of meeting its 7% target of ethnic minority officers, with the number standing at about 5% since 2013. Disproportionate rates of stop-and-search blight the force – to the extent that many of the worst-offending services tried to stop collecting data on ethnicity during stops. Meanwhile, the largest public sector body, the NHS, launched its own workforce equality standard this year, in recognition of the entrenched and systematic discrimination in terms of employment. In the university sector, where I work, not only are black Britons woefully under-represented at the top of the profession, but ethnic minority students are less likely to be offered degree places than their white counterparts.

Across all public institutions it is evident that little has changed in the last 15 years.

Not only is the Race Relations (Amendment) Act completely ineffectual, it has now become an active device for institutions to cover their discriminatory tracks. Prof Derrick Bell, founder of critical race theory, argues that the key civil rights legislation in the United States actually worked to solidify racial inequality rather than overturn it.

The problem with the legislation is that it provides the illusion of addressing the issue while never actually tackling it. Bills are passed, court battles are won and a society congratulates itself yet achieves nothing. This explains how schools in the US are more segregated than in the late 1950s, but this is no longer a major policy concern.

In the UK the most progressive piece of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act is the equality impact assessments, a provision that is broadened out to cover a range of protected groups in the Equalities Act of 2010. Yet the government’s austerity policies have consistently hit minority communities hardest. Removing a million public sector jobs has disproportionately affected black women, who have relied on public sector employment, in part due to discrimination. In fact austerity policies as a whole have more harshly impacted ethnic minority communities, who were already experiencing discrimination in housing, health, employment and wealth.

If any equality impact assessment were carried out, it is apparent that reducing support in the welfare system would hurt those already discriminated against disproportionately. This is the major problem with the provision: it is only incumbent on institutions to consider equality; there is little recourse if they either do not carry out the assessments or simply ignore the findings.

The Treasury’s response to the Runnymede report shows how insidious the uses of the 2000 act have become. Rather than challenge racial inequality, the law has become a fig leaf for discrimination. The act has ended up giving cover for institutions to ensure that they have “considered the impact on protected groups”, while making life all the more difficult for them. It is a significant condemnation of British race relations that a once progressive piece of legislation is now being used to legitimise discriminatory practices of the key institutions of the country.

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