By: JurmoloyaRava
RACE AUDIT SEEKS TO DEFINE CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL MOBILITY IN THE UK
YOU wait ages for the son of a bus driver to top the GG2 Awards and then two come along at once.’
The friendly tweets exchanged by Sadiq Khan and Sajid Javid, across the party political boundary, after they ranked first and second on the GG2 Power List 2018, saw both politicians reflect on the pride of their parents in how Britain had become a country in which anyone with talent could reach high office.
That aspiration among parents, that their children should enjoy better opportunities and broader horizons than they did, has been described by prime minister Theresa May and others as the ‘British Dream’. It is an important theme because Britain in 2017 is a society that is anxious about social mobility being lost, or going into reverse. Yet there are undoubtedly many British Asians, especially among the first generation of Commonwealth migrants from south Asia, for whom this story of opportunity and mobility has been precisely their lived experience of British society.
If life in Britain was tougher than many new arrivals had hoped, in a country which too often did not recognise their connection to it, and where many worked in jobs below the level of their education and qualifications, the confidence that this would provide a stronger platform for the next generation did often pay off.
Yet their British-born children and grandchildren will often combine being more successful with being more sceptical too. It is a generation more likely to challenge the racism and discrimination which their parents may have been fatalistic about; which sees the jury as still out on whether even being top of the class translates into equal opportunities in the professions; and where the hope of getting a first foothold on the housing ladder may be a dream deferred from young adulthood into the late 30s or mid-40s, or seem simply unattainable.
So the government’s race disparity audit is an important and timely initiative. The motive for the exercise was to uncover uncomfortable truths, indeed to highlight what the prime minister called “burning injustices”.
The audit also presents “a mixed picture” that includes “remarkable successes too”, as Damian Green, first secretary of state and May’s deputy, noted at the GG2 Leadership Awards dinner.
The pattern of opportunity and disadvantage in British society has never been more complex – and no longer fits the shorthand of majority advantage and minority disadvantage.
There are very stark racial inequalities in our prisons and mental health services. That British Indians are now the highest earners in the UK when it comes to average earnings is almost certainly unparalleled when it comes to ethnic minority groups in any country in Europe.
Ethnic minority Britons are a little more likely to be university graduates than their white British peers. The closure of gaps in education have not, however, translated fully into similar progress in the workplace.
In this generation, race equality needs to reach right to the top. FTSE 100 firms have had ethnic minority chief executives – yet invariably the top job has gone to those from the US, India or Africa who already have a track record of success overseas. There remains work to be done on developing a pipeline of British-born ethnic minority talent, with few being given the chance to prove that they can emulate that success.
The race audit confirms the UK as a pioneer in public policy in tackling racial inequality. It is by far the most comprehensive study of opportunity and disadvantage by race undertaken by any major democracy. Indeed, France goes so far as to prohibit the collection of official statistics by ethnicity. Were president Emmanuel Macron to feel that a French version could cast light upon the deep social and economic divides in the suburbs of Paris and other major cities, he would find himself prevented from doing so by the laws of his country.
The British model builds on how the UK has pioneered approaches to race and discrimination for many decades. The first anti-discrimination legislation was passed in 1965, being extended to the crucial areas of housing and employment in 1968, almost half a century ago now. That was deeply controversial then. It is often now forgotten that the timing of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was not simply a response to rising Commonwealth immigration, but a specific polemic against anti-discrimination legislation that would, Powell believed, give “the black man the whip hand over the white man” within 15 or 20 years.
Those arguments about the illegitimacy of state action to challenge discrimination are much more marginal today, even though our anxious and polarised debates about immigration and integration in this Brexit era still contain echoes of that past.
But how much difference that the race audit will make will depend on what happens next. The prime minister set down a challenge to government departments to “explain or change” the disparities. The race audit sets out the challenges: what is now needed is the agenda to ensure that the promise of equal opportunity is kept.
[TheChamp-Sharing]
