Sixty years on from the Race Relations Act
In the winter of 1965, Harold Wilson’s Labour government passed the landmark Race Relations Act, the first piece of legislation in the UK that aimed to outlaw racial discrimination in public places. A law of huge symbolic value, if relatively limited scope, the act emerged out of a period of racist violence and rhetoric that has clear parallels with today. Hannah Francis examines the background to the legislation and its legacy six decades on.
This November marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Race Relations Act, instated in 1965 by a newly elected Labour government led by Harold Wilson. Wilson has a legacy of being the first leader of the UK to enact legislation to explicitly address racial discrimination, but was the law as progressive as the British state tends to remember?
The act followed a period of racist violence across the country, notably Notting Hill, London and St. Anns, Nottingham, in 1958; the murder of Antiguan-born carpenter and ‘aspiring lawyer’ Kelso Cochrane in 1959; and the overhang of the Conservative-led Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, which severely restricted the immigration of Commonwealth citizens to the UK. As a result, Wilson had the task of gaining the trust of a deeply divided country.
This divide was arguably an invention of the state itself, regardless of which party was in power at any given time. In response to the growing number of citizens from Commonwealth countries and former colonies migrating to Britain, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1962 act sought to cull the number of arrivals by removing ‘the automatic right of citizens of British Commonwealth countries to migrate to the United Kingdom’. In the words of Trinidadian trade unionist and communist Claudia Jones, the act ‘established a second-class citizenship status for West Indians and other Afro Asian peoples in Britain. Accompanying the general social problems confronting all new immigrant workers, West Indians… are experiencing sharper colour bar practices’.
As education campaigner Professor Gus John recollected, the ‘blatant process of racialising immigration’ by politicians in the 1960s, positing new arrivals of Caribbean, African and Asian heritage as competition against Britons for jobs, housing and education, had sowed a seed of division directly by the state. For example, although the 1964 election saw the country swing in Labour’s favour by 6 per cent, a historically Labour stronghold in Smethwick elected Conservative MP Peter Griffiths, who ran a notoriously racist anti-immigration campaign. Many will be familiar with the campaign slogans such as ‘Keep Britain White’, further falsifying the presence of Black and immigrant communities as a ‘problem’ in Britain.
Efforts had been previously made to pass anti-discrimination bills by Labour MP Fenner Brockway but all of his nine attempts failed. In the midst of Conservative rule, however, the Labour MP for Sheffield, John Hynd, introduced an adjournment debate in November 1954 on ‘Colonial Immigrants’, which, according to historian of education Ian Grosvenor, was: ‘The first post-war Commons debate focusing on the issue of immigration.’ Hynd was careful not to explicitly state that the social unrest of the period was due to ‘colour’ but he was quick to identify that the ‘sudden influx of outsiders’ was a cause and that the status of British citizenship for Commonwealth immigrants could be called into question ‘if the problem got out of hand’.
‘While the act is memorialised as a key piece of progressive legislation in 20th century Britain, it was quite limited’
Once Wilson had acquired power, he refused to repeal the 1962 act, making it clear that ‘they too, stood for quotas and control’’. The 1965 white paper Immigration from the Commonwealth laid before parliament in August that year indicated ‘there is a limit to the number of immigrants that this small and overcrowded country can absorb’, playing into the narrative that new arrivals were causing housing shortages and extensive pressure on social services.
In response to criticism from migrant communities and allies, the Labour party was motivated to pass the Race Relations Act in December 1965, outlawing incitement to racial hatred in places of ‘public resort’ such as bars and hotels. The act also introduced the Race Relations Board, a body responsible for investigating and mediating incidents of racial hatred, an idea ‘championed’ by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), founded by Trinidadian student Marion Glean in 1964.
While the act is memorialised as a key piece of progressive legislation in 20th century Britain, it was quite limited in scope. Firstly, it did not extend to any meaningful protections for Black people against discrimination in areas such as employment and housing allowing the existing colour bar to continue. From the date of implementation of the act to March 1967, of ‘309 complaints received… only 85 fell within its scope, the rest relating to employment, housing or financial services’. Secondly, the Race Relations Board was not granted full investigative power into incidents of racism, with ‘enforcement powers remaining with the Attorney-General’.
Although CARD fought to extend the effectiveness of the act, creating ‘a Complaints and Testing Committee in 1966 to increase complaints to the board’, many Black, migrant and activist communities still viewed the legislation as merely a plaster over a major political failure of black and immigrant communities. CARD’s association with state powers came under scrutiny from groups such as the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC), an umbrella organisation formed shortly after the Notting Hill riots in 1958 as a means to bring together African-Caribbean communities to advocate for their own interests. According to Professor Hakim Adi: ‘WISC and others increasingly turned their backs on “integration” and CARD’ with the adoption of the right of working black people and immigrants to self defence outside of British-state endorsed organisations to exist.
To identify the legacy of the 1965 Race Relations Act as one of contestation would be an understatement. Although it was revamped in 1968 to grant protections to black and immigrant communities in housing, employment and public services (though this did not apply to police services) and later in 1976 (which eventually led to the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010, superseding all previous anti-discrimination legislation) can we really argue that, 60 years on, the peddling of division at the level of state has changed?
From pogroms conceivably endorsed by right-wing sections of major political parties in 2024 to our current Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer echoing the words of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech earlier this year in an anti-immigration address, it is clear our country’s leaders are still projecting immigrants and people of colour as a ‘problem’ instead of looking at themselves as the key perpetrators of disunity.
Hannah Francis is a former research analyst at the Runnymede Trust. They are currently an AHRC-funded (via Techne) student completing a PhD in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their PhD by Practice focuses on exploring opportunities to utilise the collections of the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) to improve the representation of Black British history in GCSE and A-level history.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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