Today's blog post is written by Runnymede research and policy analyst Phil Mawhinney

The UK Conservative Party is currently asking why only one in six black and minority ethnic (BME) voters plumped for them at the last election.  As the BME population increases – 16% by 2016 – and parliamentary majorities remain elusive, they know they have to think about this properly.

So how does the party view BME communities? David Cameron’s 2011 speech at the Munich Security Conference , widely reported as claiming that ‘state multiculturalism has failed’, gives some insight.  The basic argument, that ‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream’  was much-disputed at the time.

But recent research by social psychologists, discussed at an event earlier this month, critiques this understanding of multiculturalism, identity and ‘Britishness.’

Today’s Blog post is written by Rob Trotter, research officer at Scope and former intern at Runnymede

Work by the Runnymede Trust has found that by 2051 there will be around 3.8 million black and minority ethnic (BME) people over the age of 65, a huge increase on current estimates. One key effect of this ageing population will be the impact on how many disabled people there are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Older societies often have more disabled people, so as the BME population ages, we can also expect the numbers of BME disabled people to increase.

Research published today by Scope and the Equalities National Council (ENC) presents new evidence about this community, drawn from statistical analysis and focus groups with nearly 60 care users.

The report – Over-looked Communities, Over-due Change - confirms what others have found: that BME disabled people face a range of difficulties in their everyday lives.

People told us about money worries, and trying to make do on low incomes without being able to find a job. Our statistics showed that at least half of all BME disabled people live in household poverty – and the true picture is likely to be even higher.

Others told us about the challenges they faced trying to get care and support through services. Many people spoke about being lonely and isolated, and so struggled to find out what help they were entitled to. Others reported local services translating only very basic materials for care users.

Today's blog post is written by Ojeaku Nwabuzo, a researcher at Runnymede

On Monday 6 August I read a twitter message from a close friend saying “riots are about to happen in Hackney”. At this point there had been two days of civil unrest in Tottenham and Brixton and I had a feeling it would eventually erupt in Hackney. Why? Well there was a pattern emerging. These were urban areas with high proportions of deprivation, unemployment and minority ethnic people that appeared to be reacting to the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the police.

Over the next few months I worked on the Riot Roundtables project; one of the few in-depth inquires into civil unrest in England last year that asked if race was a factor in the disturbances. As part of this project we visited communities across England and overwhelmingly participants in our research said that racial injustice was an underlying cause of the disturbances in August 2011.

Many roundtable participants felt that the death of Mark Duggan, a mixed raced man, had awakened a deep and real memory of historical injustices and grievances that Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities have had with the police and the criminal justice system. Currently, we can see in America how the killing of Trayvon Martin has lead to outrage within the black community and as one commentator said his death “is finally lifting the lid on the US's racist underbelly”.

Today’s blog post is written by Phil Mawhinney, a policy and research analyst at Runnymede

The government confirmed in its budget last week that it is taking forward plans for a single-tier state pension. Set at around £140 per week, it will provide a higher level of income and provide a simpler basis on which to save. We know that the number of Black and minority ethnic (BME) pensioners is rapidly growing and that some leave the UK at retirement. What about them?

Runnymede’s recent research shows that many British pensioners living overseas receive UK state pensions that are frozen in value, rather than up-rated with inflation every year, as they are in the UK. This ‘freezing’ happens in 120 countries worldwide, including the vast majority outside Europe. We have argued that this is unfair – people lose up to £24,000 of income over 20 years – and we believe that the government should up-rate all overseas pensions, in every country.

In response to a recent parliamentary question recently tabled by Lib Dem peer Lord Jones, government figures highlighted that there are over 550,000 people living overseas receiving frozen pensions. This is out of a global total of 12 million British pensioners, 1.2 million of whom live outside Britain. So, 1 in 20 British pensioners worldwide receive a frozen pension, including nearly half of all pensioners living overseas.

Today's blog post is written by Runnymede's director, Dr Rob Berkeley

The report of the Communities and Victims Panel on the riots of summer 2011 makes a series of bold statements and recommendations to government in order to avoid similar levels of unrest in the months and years to come. Many of the recommendations are more forthright than was to be expected from a panel set up by government to sidestep a public inquiry into the events of last August. However, the report’s authors seem to have gone to extreme lengths to avoid discussion of structural and institutional racism and the role that it played in the riots. The avoidance of discussing racism is currently fashionable in policy circles, but in this case such avoidance serves only to obscure the analysis and misdirect the solutions.

The panel’s report highlights the levels of hopelessness in our communities, stemming, they argue from respondents’ views that they felt that common goals for their age group, such as getting a job or going to college were unachievable.

They also point to problems that have been identified over decades for young people from many Black and minority ethnic communities – exclusion from school, low levels of attainment, poor careers guidance, little contact with employers,  and patterns of intergenerational unemployment. Yet they do not articulate that these patterns for some are also often driven by structural barriers and patterns of discrimination which make some groups more vulnerable to exclusion from the labour market.

Today's blog post is written by Vastiana Belfon, a research associate at Runnymede

Researching the Runnymede archives for our new website “The Struggle for Racial Equality – An Oral History of the Runnymede Trust, 1968-1988” showed just how much has changed and, equally important, how much history will repeat itself – unless we take steps to make radical changes.

The language of race has certainly changed - witness recent media coverage of the use of the word 'coloured'. There's still a sense of unease when you read in 1969 of 'immigrant schoolchildren' with IQs that 'work out below their English contemporaries'. In 1971, Conservative MP Gerald Nabarro, addressed the Malvern Conservative Ladies' Tea Club, saying, 'We have enough black men in this country. I call a chair a chair. I mean black men, not immigrants. I don't mind Australians and South Africans or any other white immigrants, but I do object to more impoverished black men, Indians and Pakistanis, coming in.' It is unimaginable that today an MP would confidently say such things in public without fear of recrimination.

In our schools, black parents in the 1970s expressed their concerns about their children being labelled as 'educationally subnormal' or 'remedial'. By 1985, the Swann Report on Multiracial Education was arguing that the problem facing the education system was not how to educate ethnic minority children, but how to educate all children for life in a multiracial and multicultural society. Today, parental worries might focus on exclusions, bullying or school choice.

Today's blog post is written by our deputy director Sarah Isal

It is with great sadness that we learned of Ann Dummett death on 7 February 2012 at the age of 81.  Ann was the director of Runnymede from 1984 to 1987 but her involvement with Runnymede and in the field of race equality went far beyond those three years.

Ann’s anti-racist activities started in the 1960s when she and her husband Michael would go to various London airports to help migrants who were arriving into the UK and support them in achieving their most basic rights (sometimes as basic as right of entry). Ann was a great pioneer in promoting immigration rights and early on fought very hard against various pieces of immigration legislation which she found appalling, not least the Commonwealth Immigration Act of  1968. In the 1970s, she wrote several books, including A Portrait of English Racism in 1973 and Immigration and Citizenship which Runnymede published in 1976.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ann to interview her as a former Runnymede Director in the context of our Oral History Project. She spoke passionately about her initial work in Oxford as a Community Relations Officer, which she saw as crucial because of the harassment of black and minority ethnic people she witnessed then.