Race Relations in New Britain

Abstract

‘The law,’ said Martin Luther King, ‘does not change the heart — but it does restrain the heartless.’ But on both sides of the Atlantic, those who pushed through anti-discrimination legislation, including King, had far greater ambitions than this minimalist view would suggest. The 1975 Home Office White Paper Race Discrimination states: ‘Legislation is the essential precondition for an effective policy to combat the problems experienced by the coloured minority groups and to promote equality of opportunity and treatment. It is a necessary pre-condition to deal with explicit discriminatory actions or accumulated disadvantages Elsewhere the paper also declares: ‘It is the Government’s duty to prevent … morally unacceptable and socially divisive inequalities from hardening into entrenched patterns. It is inconceivable that Britain in the last quarter of the 20th century should confess herself unable to secure for a small minority of … coloured citizens their full and equal rights as individual men and women.’¹