the by now substantial Commonwealth populations actually residing in Britain. Moreover, the contrast between the festival’s emphasis on equality and the government’s concurrent, discriminatory attempts to restrict immigration was widely noted.17 It was indicative of the then Labour government’s ambivalence on the issue of race that the festival also coincided with what might be seen as the genesis of the multicultural policies that would be adopted on a much larger scale in later decades.
Nationally, the key marker was the 1965 Race Relations Act, which although limited in practice nevertheless for the first time formally outlawed racial discrimination in public places.18 The Local Government Act of the following year also represented the moment the state began to play a significant monetary role in intercommunity relations. The act included a funding package for local authorities with large numbers of immigrants, which was primarily used to employ teachers with the relevant skills to teach English to Asian pupils in schools.19 By 1969 the central government was contributing £15 million under the terms of the act, and there was a more general recognition among policy makers that inner cities—with their vastly disproportionate levels of unemployment, poverty, and immigration—were in a state of acute crisis.20 Initially, wider policy responses were ostensibly concerned with structural issues such as unemployment and housing, though local authorities in particular often used these issues as a de facto way of dealing with race. The Urban Programme, influenced by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the United States and introduced in October 1968, signaled a more explicit focus, with the channeling of resources to areas where more than 6 percent of the school population was pupils from immigrant backgrounds. By the mid-1970s and the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act, which made it a statutory duty for local authorities to legislate to end racial disadvantage and encourage equality of opportunity, the program was explicitly being aimed at ethnic minority organizations.21 However problematically and incoherently, then, the vision of pluralism and equality ostensibly articulated at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival had also begun to inform both local and national government in the shaping of a domestic multiculturalist agenda—increasingly in monetary terms.
Because of a lack of clear direction from the central government, the period following the passage of the 1976 act was characterized by diverse and sometimes confused responses from local authorities. In Birmingham, this largely continued into the 1980s. If the GLC took the lead in establishing the multicultural model, the Birmingham council embarked on a more cautious path. In 1984 the Labour administration created the Race Relations and Equal Opportunities Committee, but rather than implement the GLC blueprint it made a conscious effort to avoid being identified with the “looney Left.”22 The committee focused on the process of defining the council’s equal opportunities policy; even as late as 1985, it claimed it did “not have a specific fund for supporting organisations of ethnic minority people.” Two years later, because of concerns that its work could harm support among Labour’s electoral base, the committee was abolished and replaced by the Personnel and Equal Opportunities Committee.23
In spite of this reticence, throughout the 1980s more funds were being directed by the council toward black and Asian groups and projects, usually under the euphemism “inner-city aid.” In March 1985, for example, the Birmingham City Council’s Economic Development Committee reported that it had made £400,000 available to projects that aimed to improve the employment opportunities of those living in inner areas of the city, where 75 percent of the city’s “ethnic population” lived.24 The West Midlands County Council (WMCC) explicitly set out to fund better community relations and most obviously adopted the language of multiculturalism. The race relations subcommittee of the council was established in 1981 with a remit to “consider matters affecting ethnic minorities” and allocate monies to “voluntary sector organisations involved with ethnic relations matters.” The subcommittee’s response to the rioting certainly illustrates the tendency of the state to assume that if there was a problem in black areas, the remedy could straightforwardly be found with the distribution of funds. In the aftermath of the 1985 rioting in Handsworth, the immediate response of the committee was to express concern about whether black and Asian organizations had been able to gain equal access to the funding that was available. To address this problem the council assigned a community liaison officer to “advise, support and consult voluntary organisations on various issues affecting themselves and the county council.” The subcommittee then set up an emergency “Handsworth Disturbance fund” of £11,000, which was signed off on just days after the riots and was made available specifically to black and Asian groups in the area.25
The county council system was abolished following passage of the Conservative government’s Local Government Act of 1985 in the context of its ongoing battles with the GLC and attempts made by authorities in the north of England to implement “local socialism.”26 Other bodies began to play a greater role, including the charitable Cadbury Trust, which between 1985 and 1986 allocated a total of £186,933 to “race relations” projects in Birmingham in an attempt to help fill the gap left by the county council.27 And the mid-1980s also witnessed national government becoming increasingly active. According to David Waddington, the Home Office minister responsible for racial minorities between 1983 and 1987, the strategy was to “try and identify the leaders of the various communities with whom the government could deal” with a view to the allocation of monies.28 Following the 1985 riots, Kenneth Clarke, then minister for employment, identified Handsworth as the pilot area that would receive the attention of an inner-city task force, a scheme conceived by the government for areas that were “showing acute signs of economic and social distress.” Almost £5 million of central government money was made available to various projects in Handsworth with the primary object of increasing the employability of people in black and Asian communities. This was to be a “proactive” project, developed alongside community representatives to target particular ethnic minority groups. The task force was regarded as a success, with 73 percent of projects funded regarded as meeting targeted audiences. In 1987 further funds were made available for task forces in sixteen inner-city areas across the country.29
Policies such as these show how in spite of Thatcher’s rolling back of the state, there was also a parallel willingness on behalf of the government to sanction the kind of focused investment that is rarely associated with the politics of Thatcherism.30 This is not to say that the idea of an inner-city task force did not cause unease within the Thatcher administration. In response to earlier proposals from Home Secretary Douglas Hurd that a program of positive action was required to remedy what he diagnosed as a “thoroughly dangerous situation” in Britain’s inner cities, Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth, then junior policy advisers to Margaret Thatcher, warned against any further distribution of funds. In overtly racialized terms they suggested that it was unlikely that any increased investment would have a positive effect, given that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.” The inner-city unrest, Letwin and Booth made clear, had been caused “solely by [the] individual characters and attitudes” of those involved. As long as this persisted, “all efforts to improve the inner cities [would] founder.” Any funds that were allocated, it was suggested, would merely end up subsidizing the “disco and drug trade” or “Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops.”31
Such comments offer an insight into the inability of some in government to comprehend the black inner city as anything other than profoundly alien. In spite of this, the projects and organizations that were supported by local and national funds—many of which were small grants that covered the cost of new equipment or the employment of temporary project workers—do illustrate the extent to which the inner areas of Britain’s major cities had by the 1980s become sites of a remarkable tapestry of diversity. In Birmingham, organizations supported by the city council included the Bangladeshi Women’s Association, the British Association of Muslims, and the Midlands Vietnamese Association; among the many others the county council supported were the Bethel Church of Jesus Christ, the Selly Oak Punjabi School, the Birmingham Jewish Council, the Sikh Youth Service, the St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla Society, and a project to develop resources for teaching
