Tuesday, November 08, 2005
This year is the 40th anniversary of the passing of the Race Relations Act 1965. I wrote a few words on this for the Independent:
"When my father came to this country from Pakistan in the 1960s, there were signs up in houses saying: 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs'. That sort of attitude led to clusters of various ethnicities living together because of safety in numbers, which is worth remembering when people start lecturing the ethnic minorities about segregation.
Since then they have tended to stay there because they are near places of worship, community organisations and shops.
The 1965 legislation was the beginning of the government recognising, and saying loud and clear, that certain types of behaviour were unacceptable. It was the start of a process of influencing people's behaviour.
Over the last 40 years the situation has improved to a point where legislation was passed in 2001 which places responsibility on authorities to work towards the elimination of racial discrimination and promote equality of opportunity.
That Act was the latest of several that built upon the foundations of the
1965 Act. It might seem a bit antiquated now, but it was the first stepping-stone to the position where we are now - we have the best and most comprehensive race relations legislation of any country in western Europe.
Sadly my father passed away recently, but he would have been proud to have one of his children elected as the Member of Parliament for Tooting, where our family settled, and to know that we had been accepted fully as part of British society.
No one is pretending we are living in a Utopia and much still remains to be done to combat racial prejudice. But when I remember our family's early days in Britain living on a council estate, surrounded by racial abuse and criminal damage, I recognise huge progress has been made in the last four decades."
"When my father came to this country from Pakistan in the 1960s, there were signs up in houses saying: 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs'. That sort of attitude led to clusters of various ethnicities living together because of safety in numbers, which is worth remembering when people start lecturing the ethnic minorities about segregation.
Since then they have tended to stay there because they are near places of worship, community organisations and shops.
The 1965 legislation was the beginning of the government recognising, and saying loud and clear, that certain types of behaviour were unacceptable. It was the start of a process of influencing people's behaviour.
Over the last 40 years the situation has improved to a point where legislation was passed in 2001 which places responsibility on authorities to work towards the elimination of racial discrimination and promote equality of opportunity.
That Act was the latest of several that built upon the foundations of the
1965 Act. It might seem a bit antiquated now, but it was the first stepping-stone to the position where we are now - we have the best and most comprehensive race relations legislation of any country in western Europe.
Sadly my father passed away recently, but he would have been proud to have one of his children elected as the Member of Parliament for Tooting, where our family settled, and to know that we had been accepted fully as part of British society.
No one is pretending we are living in a Utopia and much still remains to be done to combat racial prejudice. But when I remember our family's early days in Britain living on a council estate, surrounded by racial abuse and criminal damage, I recognise huge progress has been made in the last four decades."
