The recent anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade has prompted debate about lessons for today. One lesson is that formal, legal reforms will never bring about full equality under capitalism. Two hundred years on racism in Britain tragically continues to thrive; it is continually being reshaped by capitalist imperatives and bourgeois political concerns. It is a multi-faceted thing, taking economic, political, social and cultural forms. It is experienced on a daily basis by black and minority ethnic people in a variety of areas, including employment, public services, the law and policing, media and politics and in the streets. Mike Rowley presents an overview.
Racism in the labour market
Despite a multitude of initiatives and legal rulings — and the Race Relations Act is now more than thirty years old — black workers still face significant discrimination in the jobs market. The government’s “Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force” found at the end of 2006 that the employment rate for black and minority ethnic (BME) workers is 59.7%, very much less than the figure of 74.7% for the whole population.
All non-white groups except Chinese people have employment rates lower than that for white people. Black people between 16 and 24 have an employment rate of only 35%, and are also disadvantaged in full-time education. Officially, just over 7% of black and minority ethnic workers are reckoned to be unemployed, compared with just over 4% of white workers. In fact the figures for both groups are almost certainly significantly higher: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) gives the unemployment rate as 5.2% overall and 11.2% for BME workers. This suggests some racism in the unemployment system (i.e. unemployed BME workers are encouraged to be “economically inactive” and not claim benefit).
What is more, black and minority ethnic workers who do find a job are likely to be paid less than white workers. The Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force found that average pay for black and minority ethnic workers was £29 a week less than for white workers, and for Bangladeshi workers, the worst-off group in this and in many other ways, it was £141 a week less, or only five-eighths of the average pay of white workers.
Black and ethnic minority workers, and particularly migrant workers, face limited job opportunities in a restricted number of sectors. In the 1950s and 60s people from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent were welcomed to Britain to fill a shortage of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in manufacturing, transportation and the public services, particularly the NHS.
Today this tendency to sectoral segregation continues, though with the decline of manufacturing it has shifted somewhat. One in eight Pakistani men in work is a taxi driver and 52% of male Bangladeshi workers work in the restaurant industry (Labour Research Department, Black and Ethnic Minority Workers).
Anti-Muslim prejudice is rife among employers, and racism under a flimsy disguise is often used to deny people jobs (applicants are told they do not “fit in” or “present an appropriate image to the public”). Women are especially vulnerable. A Fawcett Society report found that women of Muslim background are stereotyped as being subservient, unwilling to work with men or concerned above all with having children. Black Caribbean women are also stereotyped and “pigeonholed into jobs which are not necessarily the ones they want to do”.
At the bottom of the labour market are migrant workers. Many are forced, whatever their qualifications, to work in unsafe and unpleasant conditions. In the East End of London the GMB union has discovered sweatshop conditions and workers paid well below the minimum wage. Some migrant workers are brought into the country by organised criminals. Their documents are stolen and they are sometimes held against their will by unscrupulous “gangmasters”, who take their meagre wages as “repayment” for giving the workers jobs.
All of this is possible because the workers can be threatened with reporting to the police followed by imprisonment and deportation under Britain’s draconian immigration laws. Employers do not have to face the consequences of employing people illegally; the Home Office sometimes puts pressure on them to sack migrant workers, if they wish to force a particular national group out of the country (e.g. Iraqi Kurds), but does not prosecute the employers. Employers are given an excuse to harass and even arbitrarily sack “foreign-looking” workers because they think the workers may not be allowed to work in Britain. Racism is thus built into the employment system.
The consequence of all this was seen in 2004 when 21 untrained Chinese workers drowned in Morecambe Bay while working in grossly unsafe conditions.
Public services
Despite much equality legislation, black and minority ethnic people still face gross inequalities in the allocation of public services, especially housing. A report from the Commission for Racial Equality published at the beginning of February 2007 found that in Wales, none of the twenty-two local authorities had carried out their legal obligations relating to BME tenants.
Under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, all councils have a legal responsibility to carry out race equality impact assessments of their housing policies. According to figures from the Welsh Assembly, people from ethnic minorities in Wales fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their quality of housing. There is no reason to believe the situation to be any different in the rest of Britain.
The overall lack of council housing is a situation exploited by racists. In places where the BNP has been active, they have spread propaganda about more money being spent on mainly black and/or Asian estates than on mainly white ones. Where there is any truth in this (and there usually isn’t) it happens because the estates with the largest numbers of black and Asian people suffer more deprivation and the quality of the housing is lower than elsewhere, some of it, indeed, unfit for human habitation.
Councils are merely doing their obvious duty in concentrating their meagre resources on the poorest areas. However, they are unable to improve the only slightly better housing on other estates at the same time because the “New Labour” government has kept the Tory policy diverting much of the revenue of publicly-owned housing away from the Council, and not allowing major expenditure to improve housing unless it is privatised.
The government simply ignores the wishes of tenants and the overwhelming evidence that this approach does not work. Communities are being condemned to poverty and fragmentation, not by the impact of immigration or policies about multiculturalism but by politicians’ neurotic attachment to neo-liberal economic dogma.
If you are a Roma or other traveller you will face even worse discrimination in housing provision. Travellers often face eviction from and bulldozing of their homes by racist councils, even if they own the land on which caravans are parked and homes are built. Councils, mostly Tory-controlled, simply refuse planning permission to any application from a traveller, and sometimes attempt to demolish entire sites housing dozens of families, such as Dale Farm in Basildon and Payne’s Lane in Epping Forest. In other cases, sites owned by Travellers are compulsorily purchased by councils, supposedly for the Travellers’ benefit; but the council then assumes the right to evict residents at will, allowing them none of the rights other council tenants have.
Migrants are often in an even worse position. They find themselves shunted around from local authority to local authority, with councils fuelling racism by complaining about their areas being “dumping grounds” for migrants. A Community Care report found that grossly substandard accommodation is provided by private companies under contract to councils or to the Home Office. Worse, there are many cases of migrants being made destitute under the government’s ever more “tough” policies.
Forced destitution — denial even of the right to work, along with all benefits — forces migrants into the “black economy”, doing low-paid or even unpaid jobs which, as the Morecambe Bay tragedy showed, can be lethal. Unsurprisingly people in this situation suffer from hunger and both physical and mental health problems, and are extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The consequences of this are exemplified by the fate of Israfil Shiri, from Iran, who killed himself in Manchester in 2003 after being thrown out of his accommodation and denied any benefits or any treatment for his painful illness. In Belfast, another destitute migrant who was sleeping rough in winter had to have both feet amputated because of frostbite.
The numbers of people in this terrible situation are frighteningly large: at the beginning of 2005, 2,000 asylum seekers were homeless in Birmingham alone.
The law and policing
From the beginning of mass immigration to Britain, people originating outside the country have been tarred with the brush of terrorism, disorder and a “threat” to “the British way of life”.
One of the main areas in which the law promotes racism is of course immigration. Britain’s first anti-immigrant law, the Aliens Act of 1905, was enacted by the then Liberal government in response to anti-semitic agitation from a proto-fascist organisation called the “British Brotherhood”. Jewish refugees from the vicious genocidal pogroms in Russia which formed part of the Tsarist reaction to the 1905 Revolution were denied entry to Britain.
Subsequent laws progressively restricted the rights of immigrants, and even people with British passports who happened to be black, to move to Britain. With these discriminatory laws there developed an immigration police with ever-increasing powers, who increasingly harass not only migrants, but anyone they suspect might be a migrant — that is, anyone with dark skin. It has not been uncommon for police to stop all black people in an area and demand “proof” that they are legally entitled to live in Britain.
Dawn raids are carried out on the homes of migrant families who have been split up and rushed to “detention centres” (high-security prisons). John Reid began his period as Home Secretary by accompanying police on one of these raids and gleefully announcing its “success” to the press – the plunging of another family into misery.
Asylum seekers and other migrants can be arbitrarily detained, just as arbitrarily released and detained again, as many times and for as long as the government likes. Some have been in detention for years, having committed no crime and been suspected of no crime. Many are forcibly deported to unsafe countries where it is known that, tragically, some have been murdered and/or “disappeared”.
Between 1989 and August 2006 according to the Institute of Race Relations, 222 asylum seekers died either in Britain or trying to get here; 71 killed themselves in this country; nineteen were murdered by racists - nine of these in the last five years.
The Stephen Lawrence enquiry revealed the “institutional racism” of the police. Despite the subsequent setting of many targets and so on, it is well-known that police operations in general still tend to target people who “look foreign”. In 2001/02, 12% of stops and searches recorded by the police were of black people (who constitute 1.8% of the population) and 6% of Asian people (2.7% of the population). Black people were eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, and four times more likely to be arrested. In the same year, following the events of September 11th 2001, stops and searches of Asians increased in London by 40% and in the rest of the country by 16%. The events also seem to have been used as an excuse for increased targeting of people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin — up 30% in London and 6% in the rest of the country.
Black suspects are less likely to be let off with a caution than white people, and less likely to be offered bail. They are six times more likely to be sent to prison than white people and more likely to be imprisoned for a first offence, although the acquittal rate for black defendants is significantly higher than that for white defendants, simply because so many cases are brought against them based on little or no evidence.
In 2002, almost a quarter of prisoners come from an ethnic minority background and 15% of all prisoners were black.
Politicians frequently make statements which can only tacitly encourage racism in the legal system: witness the call the leaderships of all the three main political parties in 2006 for “foreign criminals” to be punished twice by being deported or subjected to special movement restrictions — that is, they should be punished twice just because they were not born in Britain. Even people of dual nationality who are British citizens have been deported.
Racism is also reflected in the structure of the legal profession. The higher you go, the less black and minority ethnic people there are. In 2001 9% of barristers were from an ethnic minority background, 4.8% of magistrates, just over 1% of QCs (senior barristers) and less than 1% of circuit judges.
According to the Institute of Race Relations 170 black and minority ethnic people died in custody in suspicious circumstances between 1978 and 2003; there has been no appreciable diminution in such incidents over all those years.
Politics and the media
In a capitalist society, the ruling class habitually uses racism in order to divide the working class. Sometimes it really is as straightforward as that sounds. While the actions of individuals may be more complex in their motivation, the bourgeois political system can be pretty crude — their intention to whip up and exploit racism obvious.
From the racist panic leading to the Aliens Act of 1905, referred to above (which took place during a period of renascent union militancy) through Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech and Norman Tebbit’s “cricket test” of “loyalty” to Britain, to today’s more circumspect, but just as corrosive, discourse about Asians not wanting to participate in “mainstream” British society and being drawn into terrorism — there is a long and vicious line of deliberately divisive nonsense.
At present media emphasis is on anti-Muslim racism. Repeated media scares about terrorism have combined with constant new “security crackdowns” announced by politicians to produce something approaching hysteria about the possibility that “foreign-looking” people are murderous fanatics.
In 2005 Hazel Blears, then a Home Office minister, excused police targeting of Asians by saying “Some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community. If a threat is from a particular place, then our action is going to be targeted at that area”.
So people are encouraged to believe, on government authority, that the threat of terrorism comes not from ultra-Islamist (actually right wing) politics but from “the Muslim community” in general.
In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that when BNP canvassers in Dagenham told people that all asylum-seekers got £5,000 to buy a car and that many asylum seekers were “Muslim terrorists”, a substantial number of people believed these lies.
According to Understanding Prejudice, a major survey published in 2004 by the gay rights group Stonewall, two-thirds of white people surveyed admitted to some prejudice, even if only casual or unintentional, against one or several minority groups. Even three years after September 11th, the most widespread prejudice was against Roma and other Travellers, followed by prejudice against asylum seekers. Anti-Muslim racism has increased still further since that time.
According to the Institute of Race Relations, between January 2001 and August 2006 there were forty-seven murders with a known or suspected racial element. In 2000-01 police recorded 25,100 racist crimes and this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. It is also clear that not nearly enough is being done to stop this tide of racist violence.
Mal Hussain, the Asian shopkeeper who suffered fourteen years of racist abuse and violent attacks in Lancaster, said that “I feel betrayed and failed by the institutions who are supposed to protect those who suffer in the hands of racists”. Mal Hussain was abused and attacked for being “Asian”, for being “Muslim”, for being “black”, and for having a white partner.
It is apparent that anti-Muslim racism is an important sense just the new “cutting edge” of a much older and more comprehensive problem. It is used by racists as both a chisel to open up more general forms of racism, and a convenient cover for them. Immediately after the 7th July terrorist atrocity in London, there were racist attacks on three mosques — and a Sikh gurdwara. As Dave Renton observes, “The new racism is both old and new. It may take different forms, but it also reinvigorates older ones”.