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From Socialist Worker, No. 96, 9 November 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Race Relations Act 1968 is one half of the government’s race relations policy. The other half is its curb on immigration from the commonwealth.
There it has almost word for word fulfilled the demands made by Sir Oswald Mosley and certain Tory extremists in the 1950s. The immigration policy is a complete surrender to the demands of racialism.
The Race Relations Act (it became law on October 25 and comes into effect on November 26) is its counterweight – a sop to the black community.
But the Act has a more serious purpose: that is to channel the energies of the black community along constitutional lines.
Black leaders in the communities will be offered jobs on the new conciliation committees and, if they are important enough, on the enlarged Race Relations Board or the new Community Relations Commission.
Their job will be to urge the people back in the communities from which they have come to take their grievances to the new body. The idea is to give a new constitutional remedy, and thereby discourage direct action or any kind of self-organisation among black people.
Already there are black ‘leaders’ and their white mentors raising the cry that ‘we must make the Act work’.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people, many of them very sincere, who will take up this task – quite fruitlessly. They will not make the Act work other than in a few isolated cases.
Enforcement of the new laws is not in the hands of those who are the victims of discrimination. It is in the hands of a new body of race relations ‘experts’ – the Race Relations Board – appointed by the government with a specific mandate to conciliate wherever possible.
That sort of law will never be effective, and there is a whole history of legislation to prove it.
In the 1850s this country passed some of the most progressive laws for that time to deal with the insanitary, rat-infested housing in which most industrial workers then lived.
But most of these laws remained dead letters, because the tenants had no say in their enforcement. The only time they were ever put in to operation was when the landlords and the ruling class felt there was a risk of typhoid or other dangerous diseases spreading to their own homes from the workers’ quarters.
Today there is a much more comprehensive set of Public Health Acts and Housing laws in force. Under them, all the rotten housing conditions could be eliminated.
But that doesn’t help the tenants of Notting Hill, Lambeth or Coventry Cross, because it is not they who enforce the laws, but the town hall and the various financial interests which dominate them.
The same principle will work with the Race Relations Act. Certain cases will get through.
There will be glowing reports each year from the Race Relations Board. These are the formalities, but the majority of those who suffer from discrimination will be unaffected.
When it comes to the details of the Race Relations Act even the Uncle Toms will have difficulty in giving the new Act a good recommendation.
The Act makes it unlawful to:
Government departments and local authorities are bound by the new law as well as private persons.
Nevertheless it should not be thought that the Act puts a blanket on racial discrimination. It does not. Each of the areas in which discrimination is generally outlawed is so riddled with exceptions that it will not require much ingenuity to find ways round the law. Take a few examples. One of the main areas of discrimination is at work.
20 per cent of the working population work in firms employing less than 10 people. Yet in the last two years of the new laws, firms employing less than 25 people will be entirely exempt.
After that, firms employing less than 10 will be entirely exempt. In the larger firms where the Act does apply, employers will still be allowed to discriminate provided they already employ a certain number of coloured workers and the Race Relations Board accept that their quota is ‘reasonable’ and is operated in ‘good faith’, whatever that may mean.
In housing too the exceptions would appear to outweigh the rules against discrimination. A lot of houses to let are in two or three storey terraced houses.
The landlord and his family live on the ground floor and the two floors above are to let. A toilet or bathroom is shared.
All these houses will be excluded. So will small lodging or guest houses where there is only room for six people in addition to the landlord and his family.
Under pressure from the shipping magnates an exception has been put in the Act for ships. If any shipping company wishes to instal segregated sleeping quarters for crew or passengers it will be perfectly entitled to do so.
These are just a few examples. There are other less important exceptions and no doubt quite a few loopholes.
Anyone who thinks that this Act is a substitute for self-organisation of the black community is deluding himself.
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