Rising East Online

Multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’

Altered States

—Richard Macauley

London’s third State of Racial Equality conference took place at City Hall on 25^th March 2006. Organised by the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the Mayor of London, its aim is to bring politicians together with London’s key work providers to discuss ways to realise the goal of racial equality and end discrimination against black and ethnic minorities (BMEs).

Since the Race Relations Act (1976) there have been widespread efforts to get more BMEs through the door and in to work. At the conference there were representatives from the Metropolitan Police Authority, London Emergency Fire Planning Authority and Transport for London (TfL), all oriented towards the expansion of job opportunities.

Mayor Ken Livingstone is especially keen to support those people living in and around areas affected by the Olympics – and in these areas around half the population is from black and ethnic minorities. Similarly, the London Development Agency has promised ‘real, tangible outcomes’ to the communities surrounding the Olympic site, starting with contracts with the larger building and maintenance contractors that will force employers to hire workers from representatively diverse groups, and to sub-contract to black businesses in the locality. If major contractors do not fill their quota, they will not be awarded contracts with London councils. Recent developments in the tendering process for work on the East London line exemplify this approach, in that TfL has been bidding on behalf of black businesses who cannot normally compete for such large contracts.

The Mayor made another commitment to East London and its ethnic minorities. With people and cultures from China and the Indian subcontinent becoming more prominent, he plans to visit India twice in the course of this year, and will also set up offices Beijing. He mentioned that he would like to see ‘a new, better Chinatown’ in East London, and for the East End to be as ‘diverse and exciting as this old part of London’.

There are plenty of promises and new initiatives, but old problems remain. There was anger on the conference floor over ‘snow-capped’ organisations hired to build the Olympic site. The hard-to-shift ethnic make-up of predominantly white members of parliament, even 30 years after the Race Relations Act came into force, is still a source of frustration.

From the initiatives discussed, it seem that the new East London is something of a utopia, which of course makes it easy to speak of because such a place does not exist, and won’t – even in the best of all possible worlds – for many years.

If the population of the areas under discussion is at least 40 per cent from BMEs, when we are told of the work being done by the Metropolitan Police in raising BME employment to 7.4 per cent, it is hard to agree they are working hard enough. Their target was to have 7.7% of the Met workforce comprised of BMEs by the end of 2006 – a strikingly low target to begin with, and one that they are now ‘not likely to achieve’, according to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rose Fitzpatrick.

There was more encouraging news from Margaret Hodge, the Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform. She spoke of plans to introduce a ‘Fair Cities’ scheme, which has been successfully tested in Brent. It means that large scale employers (so far Hilton and Ladbrokes) put a quota of jobs ‘on the table’ for BMEs attending Job Centre +. If the Job Centre then provides training for someone from an ethnic minority group to the standard required for the jobs on offer, the employer must take that person on.

There are schemes to put more work on offer; but this will not necessarily address the concerns of delegates as to the kind of work made available to BMEs – almost always at the low end of status and pay scales. Nor is enough being done to address the attitudes of public and private sector recruiters who admit to discriminatory practises. And it sometimes works both ways. When a delegate from Hackney remarked that if he saw a person from an ethnic minority in a police uniform, he would think that the person’s head needed examining, it suggested that there is still a way to go – someone at the conference predicted another 100 years – in educating successive generations in tolerance and open-mindedness.

Richard Macauley is studying journalism

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