Professor Gus John | Complicity in betrayal

…After 60 years of anti-discrimination legislation, lives are still being ruined

As I approach 62 years in Ole Blighty and reflect upon my 60 years in the struggle for racial equity and social justice, I am alarmed at this nation’s continuing betrayal of Black Britons.

On March 4, 1976, the Bill that would become the Race Relations Act 1976 had its second reading in parliament, receiving royal assent on November 22 that year. That Act extended the definition of discrimination to include indirect discrimination. It replaced the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission with the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) – a watchdog body with responsibility to enforce legislation and ensure legal compliance, as well as to conduct research to inform government policy on race relations.

Whereas before, individuals took complaints of race discrimination to the Race Relations Board, the Act enabled them to take discrimination complaints directly to civil courts or industrial tribunals.

The 1976 Act was replaced by the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which placed a general duty on public bodies to “eliminate unlawful discrimination and to have due regard to promoting race equality, assessing the impact of policies on staff/parents/pupils/service users and monitoring staff recruitment and career progression”.

Given the widespread evidence of non-compliance with the 1976 legislation, the CRE was not resourced at a level that enabled it to ensure compliance with that legislation, let alone with the amended Act. This meant that across the public sector, employers felt they were under no obligation to demonstrate evidence of legal compliance, because they knew there was little prospect of the CRE challenging them.

It is against that background that parliament passed the Equality Act 2010, thus getting rid of the CRE, the Equal Opportunity Commission and the Disability Rights Commission and establishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). But, whereas the EHRC started off with a budget of £70 million (2009/10), by 2014/15 that had been slashed to £17 million.

Race sits squarely on the back burner of the EHRC, with no fire under it.

To make matters worse, practically every black person in government, irrespective of party, has compounded the systemic/structural racism which remains the existential reality for Britain’s Black and Global Majority population.

Sadiq Javid, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, David Lammy, Suella Braverman and Shabana Mahmood could easily belong in the same party. Some of them, not least Lammy and Mahmood, could readily find a home in the Reform party. I for one will not be in the least surprised if they end up there.

SO, WHICH WAY BLACK BRITAIN?

Two recent developments, the report of the national curriculum and assessment review led by Professor Becky Francis and the curricular material on ‘Windrush’ being rolled out in schools across the country, lead me to ask: As our children grow older and prepare to vote at 16, what state are we in as a people and what future are we building and helping our children to build in this British nation?

It rather feels like we are on the way to hell in a hand cart pulled by Nigel Farage and Reform and pushed from behind by the Labour party in government in order to lighten the load.

After 60 years of anti-discrimination legislation, discrimination in employment, housing and education is still ruining lives. The Labour party continues to betray Black and Global Majority people and undermine our human rights and civil liberties, believing that to be seen to be defending black people’s rights is to encourage traditional voters to defect from Labour to Reform.

Nigel Farage and the racist Reform party dominate electoral politics and have visions of running more local councils after the May 2026 local elections and running the country after the next general election. Police continue to kill black folk with impunity and call such extrajudicial killings ‘Deaths in Custody’.

The pogrom ushered in by Theresa May continues apace, with the state manslaughter of 67 victims (and counting) of the hostile environment that framed the so-called Windrush scandal.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the equivalent of Suella Braverman on steroids, resisted the sentencing council’s proposals for reforming sentencing guidelines and threatened legislation to prevent them, protesting that there would be no two-tier justice system under her watch, when the revised guidelines, proposed by judges of all people, were in acknowledgement of the workings of precisely such a system for generations, to the detriment of black folk and young people in particular.

David Lammy, for his part, has introduced a Courts and Tribunals Bill in parliament which, on its first reading on 10 March, secured a majority of 101 votes, with many abstentions. The Bill proposes curtailing the right to trial by jury and will remove that right for offences that could be heard in either the magistrates or Crown Court, unless the likely sentence is more than three years imprisonment.

Mr Lammy argues that departure from the age-old right to trial by jury is necessary to deal with the growing backlog of the 80,000 cases waiting to be heard, a figure that is predicted to rise to 200,000 by 2035.

However, critics of the proposed law argue that it will make a negligible difference to the time it takes for cases to come to trial, while entrenching discrimination and inequality in the criminal justice system.

The Criminal Bar Association warns that trial by judge alone will not solve the backlog. They argue that the proposal will save 5,000 sitting days, approximately 3.5% of the Crown Court workload and that while rape complainants currently wait a year for their trial to be heard, the proposed change might see their case brought forward by about one week.

The Institute for Government has pointed out that the proposals will make a difference of 1% or 2% to the speed at which cases are heard in the Crown Court and will have a negligible impact on trial delays.

As critics point out, this is the same David Lammy who in 2017 conducted an independent review, commissioned by Theresa May, into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System.

TRUST ISSUES

Lammy’s review confirmed much of what we in the black community already knew, including: that Black and Global Majority (BGM) defendants are more likely to receive a custodial sentence for certain crimes. For example, black women are 227% more likely to receive a custodial sentence for drug offences than white women. 40% of young people in custody are from BGM backgrounds, despite being only 14% of the overall population. Black defendants have more trust in trial by jury and see that as a safeguard against prejudice and race and class bias.

The Review found that BGM defendants often pleaded “not guilty” and opted for trial in the Crown Court, because they had more confidence in the fairness of juries than they had in the fairness of magistrates’ courts.

All of that matters, not least because Lammy’s government and his zealous Cabinet colleague, Shabana Mahmood, are keen to demonstrate that they could get rid of the unwanted as quickly as they could, especially those whom they classify as undocumented and as foreign offenders.

Meanwhile, Tony (now Lord) Sewell is reminding the nation of his widely discredited report and his thesis that racial disparities are not the same as racism.

Lammy himself said of his review’s recommendations: “It is only through delivering fairness, rebuilding trust, and sharing responsibility that we will build the equal and just society so often spoken about.”

As the Prime Minister said, “if you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. Now is the time to stop talking and take action.”

Less than 10 years later, the ‘action’ he sees fit to take will compound the very situation he was condemning in 2017 and calling on Theresa May’s government to rectify.

- Professor Augustine John is a Human Rights campaigner and Honorary Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com