Nevertheless, some charities published statements of support, including the Bristol-based Stand Against Racism and Inequality (SARI), which said it would not be joining in demonstrations because of coronavirus social distancing rules, but ‘stands in absolute solidarity with the mission and belief of Black Lives Matter, “imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive” ’.3 Irvin Campbell, the charity’s chair, added that SARI could not condone any criminal acts in relation to the Colston statue, but believed it ought to be in a museum rather than a public space.4
Meanwhile two different UK organisations, neither of them charities, were using Black Lives Matter in their titles and raising funds for their activities. In their public statements, they seemed caught in a debate between revolutionary and evolutionary approaches. The one founded in 2016, Black Lives Matter UK, was raising funds in 2020 on the GoFundMe website, where it states that it aims to ‘dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately and systematically harm Black people in Britain and around the world’.5 An earlier update on this site adds that ‘a charity structure would not allow us the freedom and flexibility to do our political work in the ways we wish to do them’. The other organisation has a website, blacklivesmatter.uk, which states it is a ‘non-political, non-partisan, non-violence Black Lives Matter platform’, and dissociates itself from the other organisation.
It’s clear that informal bodies and pressure groups, which often communicate and organise through social media, play a greater part in demonstrations and protests than organisations constituted as charities. But charities in the UK have played a leading part in researching the nature of racism and discrimination and in campaigning for changes in policy and attitudes, and are likely to continue to do so. Their work began after the Second World War when immigrants from the British Commonwealth came to the UK, partly to help rebuild the economy and partly to escape unemployment and poverty.
From Enoch Powell to Black Lives Matter
The start of post-war immigration is popularly seen as the arrival in Southampton in 1949 of the Empire Windrush, bringing nearly 500 Jamaican men to join the UK labour market. Immigration from the Caribbean grew through the 1950s, but the government did not consider that immigration control or race relations legislation was necessary until 1958, when the effects of discrimination and disadvantage boiled over onto the streets. First in Nottingham and then in Notting Hill in west London, White gangs roamed the streets attacking Black people; nine White ‘teddy boys’ were eventually jailed. From the early 1960s, immigration from Pakistan and India also began to grow significantly, particularly to Bradford, Leicester and Southall in west London.
There followed two decades when governments of both main parties progressively tightened immigration control and, in parallel, gradually strengthened measures to outlaw discrimination. By the end of the process the British Nationality Act of 1971 had put Commonwealth citizens on virtually the same footing as citizens of other countries if they wanted to enter Britain; and the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), set up in 1976 to replace previous, weaker arrangements, had been given the power to investigate and prosecute acts of both direct and indirect discrimination. In 2007, the CRE was subsumed into the Equality and Human Rights Commission under legislation that also imposed a duty of promoting racial equality on many public authorities.
Despite both the restrictions on immigration and the measures to prevent discrimination, British society was marred by conflict and controversy over race. In 1968 the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made the notorious speech in which he said, “like the Roman, I see the Tiber flowing with much blood”.6 In 1981, riots sparked by harsh police action against Black people broke out, first in Brixton in south London and then in the Liverpool district of Toxteth. In 1986, PC Keith Blakelock was killed during a riot on the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London, where a Black woman had died of heart failure during a police raid. In 1993 the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in south London by a gang of White racists; the subsequent inquiry report declared that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’ and led to the establishment of enhanced procedures for complaints against the police.7 The behaviour of the police towards Black people has continued to produce flashpoints, such as the shooting of Mark Duggan by officers in north London that led to disturbances on the streets in 2011.
Over the years there has been some reduction in racial discrimination and disadvantage, resulting in increased proportions of people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds in Parliament, the arts, the media, other professions and sport. But discrimination and disadvantage continue to come to light in British society in areas ranging from education to employment and the criminal justice system. Black Caribbean pupils were around three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school in 2015/16 than White British pupils, for example, and one in ten adults who were Black or of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or mixed origin were unemployed, as compared to one in twenty-five White people.8 Black people were more than three times as likely to be arrested as White people and more than six times as likely to be stopped and searched by police; 12% of the prison population was Black, compared to 3% of the population as a whole.9, 10 All this helps to explain why the Black Lives Matter movement found such fertile ground in the UK.
The role of charities in race relations
During the second half of the 20th century, charities and voluntary organisations were closely involved, at several levels, in attempts to create a society free from racial discrimination and conflict. At the local level in the 1950s, many community relations organisations – some of them paternalistic in style – were set up, such as the Bristol Committee for the Welfare of Colonial Workers or the Nottingham Commonwealth Citizens Consultative Committee. Many churches became involved in local initiatives. Immigrant groups set up organisations with local branches to oppose discrimination in employment, such as the Indian Workers Association and the Black Workers Movement.
At a national level, some existing organisations became involved in race relations. Political and Economic Planning (PEP), a think-tank that had been founded in 1931 and influenced many social reforms of the post-war period, produced several studies on race in the 1960s. These are credited with prompting the extension of race relations legislation in 1968 to cover discrimination in housing and employment as well as in access to public places. A further series of PEP studies in the 1970s, jointly financed by the Home Office and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a grant-making charity, formed the backdrop to the Race Relations Act 1976, which outlawed indirect discrimination and created the CRE.
The Institute of Race Relations, a think-tank with charitable status, was set up in 1958 to study the relations between races everywhere, and between 1963 and 1969 – financed by the Nuffield Foundation, a grant-making charity – produced Colour and Citizenship, a massive, ground-breaking 800-page study of British race relations.11
Two of the most influential and effective charities on immigration and race relations were the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and the Runnymede Trust, both of which were still active in 2020. The JCWI was set up in 1967 and since then has campaigned against the perceived injustices of the increasingly complex web of immigration laws and regulations. It has used the courts, the media and its political influence both to challenge policy and to pursue individual cases. Early in 2019, the JCWI successfully challenged the so-called ‘right to rent’ rule, part of the ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigration brought in by the former prime minister, Theresa May, when she was home secretary in 2016. The rule, which required landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants, was declared by the High Court to be a breach of human rights law.12 The Court of Appeal overturned this decision the following year, but the charity pledged to take the case to the Supreme Court.13 In August 2020 the Home Office scrapped an algorithm it had been using to assess visa applications after the JCWI and the tech-justice organisation Foxglove threatened it with