The Runnymede Trust was named after the island in the Thames where in 1215 King John and his barons signed the Magna Carta, which was seen (erroneously, according to some historians) as a guarantee of individual rights and freedoms as well as a brake on the powers of the Crown. The charity was founded in 1968, partly in response to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, to contribute to public education on race relations by conducting research and engaging with policy questions. Its co-founder, Anthony (later Lord) Lester, who died in 2020, had been involved in the drafting of earlier legislation on race relations, and in the 1970s was special advisor to Roy Jenkins, the home secretary in the Labour government when, as mentioned above, the most far-reaching piece of race relations legislation was passed.
Usha (now Baroness) Prashar became assistant director of the Runnymede Trust in 1975 and helped to steer through the new Race Relations Act 1976. She says the charity was influential because it established itself as authoritative:
“Its credibility was based on the fact that it was not sensational, gave accurate information and analysis, and influenced government departments on what good race relations policies might be. We had highlighted how the 1968 Race Relations Act was limited because it didn’t deal with indirect discrimination. And the 1976 Act did finally deal with it. It was a recognition that discrimination could be systemic and therefore you had to look at institutionalised discrimination and racism. The concept of indirect discrimination was, in my view, the most innovative aspect of that law. As the law went through, Runnymede was in the background playing a role and setting a climate with the broader work it was doing, and was also involved in specific things such as drafting amendments at the committee stage of the Bill and providing briefings to MPs.”
The Runnymede Trust also played a part in persuading health authorities to put more resources into treating sickle cell anaemia, which mainly affects Black people. An influential Runnymede publication in 1976 was Publish and Be Damned, which led to a code of practice for the media about handling stories concerning race. Real Trouble analysed the treatment of Asian youths arrested during the march in 1979 by the National Front through Southall, west London, during which a young anti-fascist demonstrator, Blair Peach, died. The training of magistrates was subsequently improved.
But there were other milestones of progress towards racial equality that were, according to Prashar, erected partly by the efforts of smaller, informal, mainly Black-led voluntary and community groups. One was the abolition of the ‘sus’ law – the power in the Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed police to stop and search anyone they considered to be acting suspiciously. The power had been used extensively by the police in Black communities and was considered to have contributed to the riots in British cities. Mavis Best, for example, led a group of Black mothers in south London in the Scrap Sus Campaign, which held demonstrations, lobbied politicians and played a part in the abolition of the power, as recommended by the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure in 1981. Prashar says:
“I think minority communities did see bodies like Runnymede as agents for change, but at that time in the 1960s and ’70s many of them established their own self-help groups, almost as an alternative, because they did not feel part of the existing charitable sector. I think there was a certain amount of racism in the local white voluntary sector at the time. It has changed to some extent in that you do now have people from minority communities running mainstream charities, and charities themselves have realised they have got to involve and engage with minority communities. It’s patchy, but it’s beginning to change.”
Despite continuing disputes about the nature of, and remedies for, racism in British society, it is clear that a number of respected charities made the running in improving race relations and outlawing racial discrimination in the second half of the 20th century, and continue to advocate for the rights of minorities. Other influential charities in the field of race relations have sprung up more recently, including two focused on challenging racism in football and sport – Kick It Out, and Show Racism the Red Card. The work of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, founded after the murder of the Black teenager in 1993, includes support for community organisations, and career guidance and bursaries for young people to study architecture, as Stephen had wanted to do.
Race equality within charities
As Prashar indicates, charities were in some cases slow to assess whether they were reaching beneficiaries in minority communities, or reaching them in an appropriate way. It was not until the first decade of the 21st century, for example, that the BHF improved its services to people of South Asian origin, who are at particular risk of heart attacks: it began to fund grassroots community organisations, produce information leaflets and DVDs in various languages and set up stalls at summer melas (community fairs).15 Similarly, Macmillan Cancer Support began employing ethnic minority community liaison officers and interpreters and Prostate Cancer UK produced targeted information for Afro-Caribbean men, who are more likely to suffer from the condition, and features them prominently in its publicity.
Progress on racial equality has also been slow in both charity governance, which is dealt with in Chapter 20, and the sector’s workforce more generally. Official figures in 2019 showed that the proportion of non-White staff in the public and private sectors was 12%, but in the voluntary sector it was 9% (14% of the UK population is non-White).16 In 2018 Thomas Lawson, then chief executive at Leap Confronting Conflict, a charity that supports young people, called on charity leaders to recognise and tackle what he called ‘the ingrained racial prejudices that permeate organisations in the sector’.17
The issue was urgent enough for Acevo to commission and publish research in 2020 that showed that 68% of Black and minority ethnic (BAME) people working in charities had ‘experienced, witnessed or heard of ’ examples of racism at work; it called for charities to adopt explicit race equity goals in both their own organisations and the work they do.18 The NCVO, the biggest and most influential of the sector umbrella bodies, was also shaken by the issue. A report on equity, diversity and inclusion in the 105-strong workforce by an external consultant in 2020 was not published externally, but the chief executive, Karl Wilding, who had succeeded the long-serving Sir Stuart Etherington in 2019, said in a blog: ‘That we are a structurally racist organisation is now clearer than ever.’19 Wilding resigned in January 2021 after 23 years at the organisation. In the following month details of the consultant’s report appeared in the press: it said bullying and harassment on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation and disability were common and there was an ‘in-crowd’ of ‘white, abled people’.20 In response, the interim chief executive, Sarah Vibert, said there was a ‘toxic culture’: ‘We were shocked and ashamed that an organisation with such a long and proud history as NCVO has enabled such a culture to persist and we are absolutely determined that this should change and fast.’21
These reports from Acevo and the consultant for NCVO came in the wake of the launch online of #CharitySoWhite (CSW), which followed the publication of a slide from training material by the charity Citizens Advice that was deemed to be racist. Under the heading ‘Barriers we find in BME communities’, the slide contained bullet points such as ‘an intrinsically cash-centric culture’, ‘very close-knit extended families’, ‘evidence of gender bias and discrimination’ and ‘a cultural focus on honour and shame’.22 Martha Awojobi, then a fundraiser for the domestic abuse charity Refuge and a CSW committee member, told a conference:
“Something that’s really struck me in the last few months since I joined the campaign is our utter unwillingness as a sector to say the word ‘racism’. This is the very beginning of the conversation that needs to be had. Structural racism is at the forefront of the reason why there is no diversity in our sector – and the reason why BAME people keep leaving.”
In August 2020, the 4F Group, which called itself ‘a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs’, published a report which criticised CSW for calling the training material racist and said Citizens Advice was wrong to admit that the material was ‘unacceptable’ and promoted racial stereotypes.23 The content