Race and Ethnicity in the Welfare Society

This book is an interesting mix of established and new thinking on the development of race-related law, policy and practice in Britain. The authors introduce the ideas and concepts that have developed over the latter half of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries, suggesting a steady progress towards a values-driven, rights-based society supported by the steady drip feed of legislation (e.g. the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act) and expert thinking (e.g. the 2000 Parekh Report). It makes a particularly compelling argument for greater attention to the interaction between service providers and service users within the ever-changing nature of devolved Britain. Questions are raised about the viability of black and minority ethnic (BME) groups as consumers of the welfare society, given that successive governments have lacked the capacity and sustained commitment to structural and institutional inequalities. The themes, frameworks and definitions are balanced in three parts. The first part examines the multicultural backdrop to the implementation of statutory duties and tracks the perspectives supported over time by successive governments, stridently pursuing modernisation and economic efficiency. The argument for equality of outcome is well made, particularly in the changing context of EU expansion and devolution, where the ‘colour coded hierarchy’ of Britishness (p. 20) has developed further to incorporate Englishness, Scottishness, Irishness and Welshness. The conclusions to Part One suggest that assimilation remains central to social policy and governments continue to gather information on performance, positive action and procurement but that neither policy nor data have necessarily been effective in improving service and equality outcomes.