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5

Equality, slavery and human rights

When George Floyd, an unarmed Black¹ man, died after a White police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes in the US city of Minneapolis in June 2020, there was an upsurge of protest around the world, especially in the UK. There were marches and demonstrations all around the country throughout June, even in provincial centres such as Bournemouth and Cheltenham; protestors dumped the statue of the 18th-century slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour and daubed the words ‘was a racist’ on the statute of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London.

The protests took place under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, which started when Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a vigilante in Florida in 2013. The movement gathered strength from a shocking series of police shootings of Black people in US cities in the following years, and a UK version of Black Lives Matter was set up in 2016 for a demonstration on the fifth anniversary of the fatal shooting by the Metropolitan Police of Mark Duggan in north London. But the protests of June 2020, some of which resulted in clashes with police and a number of arrests, created a dilemma for the estimated 200 registered charities in England that are Black led or work in the area of race relations.²

“Most of them are involved in service delivery and are not campaigning organisations,” says Elizabeth Balgobin, a charity governance consultant specialising in equality and diversity:

“A lot of them have council grants that restrict what they do or might have a reputation clause, and there would be a fear of being criticised as political. Some staff might be involved, but that would be privately, below the radar. A lot of the activists are young people who aren’t working through charities.”

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 judicial review. The two groups claimed the algorithm entrenched racial bias and discrimination in the visa-processing system, but before the case made it to court, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel MP, agreed to suspend the use of the tool pending a redesign of the process.¹⁴

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 was part of efforts to understand and help minorities, it argued, and could be seen as racist only if taken out of context.

Am I not a man and brother?

Charities had their biggest success in the field of race and human rights more than two centuries before the emergence of Black Lives Matter. One of the most memorable images of the campaign in question showed a Black slave, on his knees and half naked, holding up his manacled hands above the inscription: ‘Am I Not a Man and Brother?’ This was first produced in the form of a medallion by the famous English pottery company Wedgwood and became the badge of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded by a group of Quakers and evangelical Protestants in 1787. Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the Stoke-on-Trent pottery company, was an ardent supporter of abolition. The image was used on fashionable items including crockery, necklaces, brooches, hairpins and snuff boxes – the forerunners, in effect, of the pin badges, T-shirts, car stickers and wristbands issued by modern charities and campaigners.

Many people disapprove of the image today because it shows the subject as a humble supplicant and fails to reflect both the suffering of slaves and their attempts to free themselves through their own efforts, including rebellion. But in its day it was highly effective, and the inscription became a catchphrase. Wedgwood sent a packet of the medallions to Benjamin Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the US, who replied that its power was ‘equal to that of the best written Pamphlet, in procuring favour to those oppressed People’.²⁴

The drive to abolish slavery is widely regarded as the prototype of campaigns for human rights and equality. Over two decades, it built up support through pamphlets, lecture tours and petitions to Parliament, and William Wilberforce’s Bill abolishing the trade in slaves by British ships was passed into law in 1807 with only 16 votes against it in Parliament: it was reported that MPs were carried away by the success, rising to their feet and cheering. The movement was renamed the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and eventually achieved the abolition of the practice of slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833 – three days before Wilberforce died. The campaign against slavery in its modern forms also continues in the work of Anti-Slavery International, founded in 1839.

This humanitarian campaign was described in a lecture by Andrew Purkis, a historian and charity expert, as “the first great national, organised voluntary sector political agitation. It established the model for countless other agitations in the rest of the 19th century and beyond, in tandem with progressive extensions of the political franchise.”²⁵ Many of these ‘agitations’ were not legally set up as charities, but were charitable in the sense that they were conducted by like-minded social reformers voluntarily forming and financing an organisation dedicated to procuring a specific benefit in people’s lives.

Penal reform and working conditions

One campaign that got under way at about the same time as the drive against slavery was led by John Howard, who was appointed lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire in 1773. He was shocked by conditions in the county jail and other prisons he visited, and went on to promote new laws to end the system in which jailers were not salaried and made their living by charging prisoners for food and bedding. He also went on journeys through Europe in search of a humane model for English prisons, publishing his findings in two substantial volumes. When he died of typhus in 1790, he was busy inspecting Russian military hospitals.

Howard’s work led to the separation of men and women in jails, a better diet for prisoners and a reduction in the range of crimes that carried the death penalty. But by the middle of the 19th century concern was growing in the government that prisons were getting too soft, and new legislation led to a harsher system based on what the assistant director of prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, called ‘hard labour, hard fare and hard board’. A new charity named after John Howard, the Howard Association, was formed in 1865 to try to soften the regime.

The Association campaigned for better independent inspection of prisons, more effective management and staffing, improved diet, the end of capital and corporal punishment, and useful employment in place of the punitive but unproductive time prisoners were made to spend on the treadmill. In 1921 the Association merged with the Penal Reform League to become the Howard League for Penal Reform and, as such, it has remained active and vocal, although the Prison Reform Trust was also formed in 1981 by people who wanted to emphasise different concerns. The League played a significant role in the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, and its most successful campaigns have included improvements in the treatment of young people in custody, the removal of restrictions on the books prisoners are allowed to have and the abolition of the fee that people convicted of offences formerly had to pay to the court.

The humanitarian concerns that came to the fore in the 19th century went far beyond slavery and the treatment of prisoners. Growing industrialisation entailed punishingly long shifts for factory workers, which gave rise to the campaign to restrict working hours. The Factories Act of 1833 laid down that children between 9 and 13 years of age should not work longer than 8 hours a day in the cotton mills, and those between 14 and 18 no longer than 12 hours. But pressure was growing to restrict the working day to 10 hours for everyone in factories of all kinds. The campaign was a collaboration involving ‘short time committees’ formed by millworkers themselves, members of the Church of England, a few mill owners such as John Fielden, and Lord Shaftesbury, leader of the Factory Reform Movement in Parliament.

This movement was given impetus by the fiery pamphleteering and oratory of Richard Oastler, who wrote of ‘Yorkshire slavery’ in the textile mills of the industrial North, and of streets ‘wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the over-looker’.²⁶

Success for the campaign came in the form of the Factories Act 1847, which was perceived by some MPs as revenge by landowners in Parliament for the repeal of the corn laws earlier that year: the relaxation of restrictions on importing corn was going to hit their profits, and the shortened working day would hit the profits of the mercantile class in turn.²⁷

Shaftesbury, an evangelical Christian who had had an unhappy childhood, was an inveterate reformer whose campaigns earned him the nickname of ‘The Poor Man’s Earl’. Among other things, he led campaigns to improve care of the insane, spare women and children from working underground in mines and prevent ‘climbing boys’ being employed as chimney sweeps. In 1885, shortly before his death, he also founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (‘London’ was in due course changed to ‘National’), which succeeded five years later in persuading Parliament to pass a law to protect children from abuse and neglect. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is now part of the social fabric in the UK; it has statutory powers under the Children Act 1989 to apply for care and supervision orders for children at risk. The charity also incorporates ChildLine, which children can phone for help if they are frightened or being mistreated. The Howard League and the NSPCC are examples of how some campaigns of the 19th century have lived on, with changing emphases, into the 20th and 21st centuries; and Shaftesbury’s concerns about the condition of asylums and people with mental illness are also still being pursued by charities, as discussed in the previous chapter.

Other rights campaigns

Other examples of charities succeeding in changing the law are happening all the time, although their role is not always widely noticed. In December 2017, for example, the High Court ruled that the government’s changes to a benefit called the Personal Independence Payment were ‘blatantly discriminatory’ against people with mental health problems.²⁸ The case was brought on behalf of a single complainant by the Public Law Project, a legal charity, using evidence supplied by the National Autistic Society, Disability Rights UK, Revolving Doors and Inclusion London – all of them charities. Mind, as the country’s best-known mental health charity, also took part in the case, on the grounds that the rights of people not directly involved could also be affected. Early in 2018, the government decided not to challenge the court ruling and said it would pay some people the allowances that had been denied them.

Human rights and equality have clearly been high on the agenda for voluntary organisations and charities. There is little doubt that they have played a crucial part, by conducting research and campaigning, in changing the law, changing social attitudes and improving life for disadvantaged groups in society, including racial and other minorities. ‘Moments’ in history, such as the killing of George Floyd, will give a fresh focus and impetus to long-standing campaigns, but charities were there before and will still be there afterwards, for the long haul. Charities have also been deeply involved in the liberation of women, who, until relatively recently, were treated as the property of their husbands, excluded from education and most professions and denied the right to vote: this is the first subject of the next chapter.