Adieu, Commission for Racial Equality

A fond farewell to the Commission for Racial Equality

19 September 2007

It never grasped that ethnic disparities reflect cultural forces

The CRE, meanwhile, has left us with a threat that 15 government departments may be taken to court — at our expense, presumably — because they haven’t checked the precise ethnic origin of everyone who works for them. There is no suggestion that the departments have discriminated against British Caribbeans, or British Bangladeshis, or British Static Travellers (yes, there really is that wonderful category); merely that they haven’t yet asked everyone if they’re properly and nicely white or not. The crime is one of ‘non-compliance’. And along with that, the report churns out the usual stuff about how Britain is ever more segregated, socially and in the workplace, and that extremism ‘both political and religious’ is on the rise. To which we might say: well, yep — and whose fault is that, then?

For the first 25 years of its 31-year existence, the CRE was cheerfully wedded to the notion of multiculturalism, wherein Britain’s disparate communities were encouraged to remain apart and preserve their own cultural values, which were every bit as valid, in a very real sense, as those of the indigenous white majority. At the same time, of course, white working-class communities were urged not to remain apart, but to embrace change, or risk being called racist. It was only with the arrival of Trevor Phillips at the CRE (and coincidentally, the growing suspicion that quite a few members of the Muslim community weren’t entirely on board with this old democracy, equal rights for women business) that this uniquely damaging policy was, almost overnight, reversed. The imperative now is for everyone to integrate, smile politely, and try to share in their collective vision of what society should be like. But having promulgated precisely the opposite view for the last quarter of a century, it seems a bit rich of the CRE to blame the rest of us for having allowed segregation to occur.

However, let us move on to the end of their report, which, while it concedes that we no longer have signs up on boarding houses saying ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Static Travellers’, there is still great inequality. ‘An ethnic minority baby born today is sadly still more likely to go on to receive poor quality education, be paid less, live in sub-standard housing, be in poorer health and be discriminated against in other ways than his or her white contemporary,’ the report concludes. Well, forget the tortuous construction for a moment: is this true? And if so, is it as a result of vindictive racist discrimination by the white economic elite?

The evidence would seem to suggest precisely the opposite.