While Britain was still struggling through the Covid pandemic in autumn 2020, Keir Starmer announced that Labour would bring in a race relations act if it came to power.
His promise was driven by concern about the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus crisis on minority ethnic communities, confirmed in a report from Doreen Lawrence, the Labour peer and mother of the murdered black teenager Stephen.
“If no long-term action is taken to tackle structural inequalities, we will keep seeing this pattern of injustice occur beyond the pandemic,” she said. “We have heard enough talk from the government. It is now time to act.”
Lady Lawrence was asked by Labour to lead a race equality taskforce to draw up specific policies to tackle those structural inequalities that exist throughout society: at work and in the economy, the health service, the criminal justice system and in housing.
The statistics are depressingly familiar, yet still shocking. Analysis by the TUC reveals the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workers in insecure work more than doubled from 2011 to 2022, from 360,200 to 836,300.
The cost of living crisis has hit people of colour, already disproportionately poorer, hardest: they are 2.5 times more likely to be in poverty than white people, according to the Runnymede Trust.
Black people are almost three times as likely as white people to live in social housing, the census shows, with minority ethnic households more likely to experience homelessness or live in poor quality, unsuitable or overcrowded homes.
So Starmer’s pledge was welcomed by BAME community leaders and race equality experts, as well as his own MPs. But the years passed, and despite attempts to reassure that the party was still committed to one, there was no draft law, and concerns began to mount.
At the same time, Starmer has faced a reckoning over his handling of the Forde report, and the scrapping of democratic structures for BAME Labour members, while the party has been criticised for its failure to select more minority ethnic candidates.
Labour’s cautious approach to policy ahead of the election – including over its green investment plan and, this weekend, reform of social care and the House of Lords – had worried some that it could also hold back on other big reforms.
So the confirmation of what a race equality act would look like under a Labour government, after years of regressive and harmful policies from successive governments, will no doubt be welcomed.
Yet it is unlikely to be enough, with experts such as the Runnymede Trust arguing that it falls short of addressing the formidable scale of inequalities that people of colour face.
“Committing to address structural racial inequality needs to understand that racism doesn’t simply arise when the system fails – but that racism is actually sewn into the very fabric of the system itself,” the trust said.
That is the real challenge for a future Labour government: can it bring together an ambitious, cross-governmental approach backed up with sustained investment to address the unacceptable, and in some cases worsening, disparities that exist?
And not just because it is good for economic growth – a key tenet of its argument for bringing in a new race relations act – but because it is the right thing to do.
