Law and Race in Britain

Abstract

Race relations in Britain present a special challenge for two principal reasons. First, although actual contact between the races within the British Isles is very recent and the official policy at home has been nondiscriminatory for two centuries, the race attitudes of the British people were molded long ago—by English involvement in the slave trade and slavery in America and, more immediately, by the long experience of Empire in India, the West Indies, and Africa. Second, the present colored population of Britain—about two million—consists almost entirely of new immigrants from former colonies who have been arriving in relatively large numbers in a short span. Many have unrealistic expectations, and they stand out as jarring strangers in a uniquely settled and homogeneous society. The result has been massive discrimination in the private sector, which a conservative legal tradition was reluctant to tackle by law—except by way of controlling further immigration. Nevertheless, Britain enacted anti-discrimination legislation rather quickly, dealing with places of public resort in 1965 and the rest, very comprehensively, in 1968. The problem is that the law has no teeth; in the main, enforcement is attempted by persuasion, rather than coercion. This does not work, even in Britain.