I was pleased to see that Stephen Williams, the newly-appointed equality minister, has told me that he sees race equality as an important part of his role.
I asked him on Twitter not to forget race equality and he replied “It’s a key part of my role and one in which I hope to do good work. Bristol West is great prep for it!”
There will be those watching closely to see whether he delivers on this promise!
His predecessors, Sir Andrew Stunell and Don Foster, did not deliver on race equality, even though it was a key part of their roles.
Part of that failure is down to the reluctance to utilise the knowledge and expertise available to them within the party, to say nothing of the huge degree of experts in the field.
In previous meetings with Stunell and Foster, I and others have continually stressed the need to tackle the big issues such as disproportionate BAME unemployment, discrimination in the workplace, the criminalisation of Black youth and disproportionality in many other areas of life.
The basic point is that the Government cannot make progress unless race is put back on the political agenda and this has been repeated directly to equalities ministers several times during this parliament without success.
Stunell spent time working on Eric Pickles’ Integration Strategy that failed to once mention racism, a key factor that divides society and prevents integration.
He also began work on a report looking at the barriers for access to finance for BAME businesses however this report took two years to emerge and when it was finally launched, by his successor Foster, it was extremely weak and exempted the banks of any prejudice against BAME businesses, arguing it was the Black community’s fault.
And that – over the past two and a half years – is it. The only other policy with a direct baring on opportunities for BAME people was an idea in our 2010 manifesto for name-blind job applications. Yet this has not even been rolled out to the whole of Whitehall yet, and there has been no effort whatsoever to take it forward outside Westminster.
In other words, this Government has done next to nothing meaningful to specifically tackle race discrimination.
Yes, the Pupil Premium and raising the tax threshold are likely to have a particular benefit to BAME communities who are disproportionately economically disadvantaged, but so far nothing serious to dismantle the barriers of racism which keeps BAME people down in the first place.
It is a completely unacceptable situation. If Williams wants to make a difference in this area the first thing he needs to do is to refuse to parrot civil service briefings about tiny pots of money handed to sport, music and dance projects and start to work with experts who will turn the focus to the real issues, getting a measure of the true extent of racial discrimination and designing policies to make a significant impact in changing that.
We are now in the autumn of this Government’s term in office and time is running out. Two and a half years have been squandered by Williams’ predecessors and it will be deeply disappointing if we reach the next general election to find that three Lib Dem white men have all failed to take race equality seriously.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
