to grow significantly, particularly to Bradford, Leicester and Southall in west London.
There followed two decades when governments of both main parties progressively tightened immigration control and, in parallel, gradually strengthened measures to outlaw discrimination. By the end of the process the British Nationality Act of 1971 had put Commonwealth citizens on virtually the same footing as citizens of other countries if they wanted to enter Britain; and the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), set up in 1976 to replace previous, weaker arrangements, had been given the power to investigate and prosecute acts of both direct and indirect discrimination. In 2007, the CRE was subsumed into the Equality and Human Rights Commission under legislation that also imposed a duty of promoting racial equality on many public authorities.
Despite both the restrictions on immigration and the measures to prevent discrimination, British society was marred by conflict and controversy over race. In 1968 the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made the notorious speech in which he said, “like the Roman, I see the Tiber flowing with much blood”.6 In 1981, riots sparked by harsh police action against Black people broke out, first in Brixton in south London and then in the Liverpool district of Toxteth. In 1986, PC Keith Blakelock was killed during a riot on the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London, where a Black woman had died of heart failure during a police raid. In 1993 the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in south London by a gang of White racists; the subsequent inquiry report declared that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’ and led to the establishment of enhanced procedures for complaints against the police.7 The behaviour of the police towards Black people has continued to produce flashpoints, such as the shooting of Mark Duggan by officers in north London that led to disturbances on the streets in 2011.
Over the years there has been some reduction in racial discrimination and disadvantage, resulting in increased proportions of people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds in Parliament, the arts, the media, other professions and sport. But discrimination and disadvantage continue to come to light in British society in areas ranging from education to employment and the criminal justice system. Black Caribbean pupils were around three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school in 2015/16 than White British pupils, for example, and one in ten adults who were Black or of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or mixed origin were unemployed, as compared to one in twenty-five White people.8 Black people were more than three times as likely to be arrested as White people and more than six times as likely to be stopped and searched by police; 12% of the prison population was Black, compared to 3% of the population as a whole.9, 10 All this helps to explain why the Black Lives Matter movement found such fertile ground in the UK.
The role of charities in race relations
During the second half of the 20th century, charities and voluntary organisations were closely involved, at several levels, in attempts to create a society free from racial discrimination and conflict. At the local level in the 1950s, many community relations organisations – some of them paternalistic in style – were set up, such as the Bristol Committee for the Welfare of Colonial Workers or the Nottingham Commonwealth Citizens Consultative Committee. Many churches became involved in local initiatives. Immigrant groups set up organisations with local branches to oppose discrimination in employment, such as the Indian Workers Association and the Black Workers Movement.
At a national level, some existing organisations became involved in race relations. Political and Economic Planning (PEP), a think-tank that had been founded in 1931 and influenced many social reforms of the post-war period, produced several studies on race in the 1960s. These are credited with prompting the extension of race relations legislation in 1968 to cover discrimination in housing and employment as well as in access to public places. A further series of PEP studies in the 1970s, jointly financed by the Home Office and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a grant-making charity, formed the backdrop to the Race Relations Act 1976, which outlawed indirect discrimination and created the CRE.
The Institute of Race Relations, a think-tank with charitable status, was set up in 1958 to study the relations between races everywhere, and between 1963 and 1969 – financed by the Nuffield Foundation, a grant-making charity – produced Colour and Citizenship, a massive, ground-breaking 800-page study of British race relations.11
Two of the most influential and effective charities on immigration and race relations were the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and the Runnymede Trust, both of which were still active in 2020. The JCWI was set up in 1967 and since then has campaigned against the perceived injustices of the increasingly complex web of immigration laws and regulations. It has used the courts, the media and its political influence both to challenge policy and to pursue individual cases. Early in 2019, the JCWI successfully challenged the so-called ‘right to rent’ rule, part of the ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigration brought in by the former prime minister, Theresa May, when she was home secretary in 2016. The rule, which required landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants, was declared by the High Court to be a breach of human rights law.12 The Court of Appeal overturned this decision the following year, but the charity pledged to take the case to the Supreme Court.13 In August 2020 the Home Office scrapped an algorithm it had been using to assess visa applications after the JCWI and the tech-justice organisation Foxglove threatened it with judicial review. The two groups claimed the algorithm entrenched racial bias and discrimination in the visa-processing system, but before the case made it to court, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel MP, agreed to suspend the use of the tool pending a redesign of the process.14
The Runnymede Trust was named after the island in the Thames where in 1215 King John and his barons signed the Magna Carta, which was seen (erroneously, according to some historians) as a guarantee of individual rights and freedoms as well as a brake on the powers of the Crown. The charity was founded in 1968, partly in response to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, to contribute to public education on race relations by conducting research and engaging with policy questions. Its co-founder, Anthony (later Lord) Lester, who died in 2020, had been involved in the drafting of earlier legislation on race relations, and in the 1970s was special advisor to Roy Jenkins, the home secretary in the Labour government when, as mentioned above, the most far-reaching piece of race relations legislation was passed.
Usha (now Baroness) Prashar became assistant director of the Runnymede Trust in 1975 and helped to steer through the new Race Relations Act 1976. She says the charity was influential because it established itself as authoritative:
“Its credibility was based on the fact that it was not sensational, gave accurate information and analysis, and influenced government departments on what good race relations policies might be. We had highlighted how the 1968 Race Relations Act was limited because it didn’t deal with indirect discrimination. And the 1976 Act did finally deal with it. It was a recognition that discrimination could be systemic and therefore you had to look at institutionalised discrimination and racism. The concept of indirect discrimination was, in my view, the most innovative aspect of that law. As the law went through, Runnymede was in the background playing a role and setting a climate with the broader work it was doing, and was also involved in specific things such as drafting amendments at the committee stage of the Bill and providing briefings to MPs.”
The Runnymede Trust also played a part in persuading health authorities to put more resources into treating sickle cell anaemia, which mainly affects Black people. An influential Runnymede publication in 1976 was Publish and Be Damned, which led to a code of practice for the media about handling stories concerning race. Real Trouble analysed the treatment of Asian youths arrested during the march in 1979 by the National Front through Southall, west London, during which a young anti-fascist demonstrator, Blair Peach, died. The training of magistrates was subsequently improved.
But there were other milestones of progress towards racial equality that were, according to Prashar, erected partly by the efforts of smaller, informal,
