A Guest Blogpiece by Maggie Chetty.

Sara Salyers’ work on the Scottish constitution and the Claim of Right has taken me back to some insoluble problems of equalities work at the end of the twentieth century in the UK.
The gulf between legal minds in two different jurisdictions has clearly been lurking for centuries.

During the late eighties and the nineties, I worked as the Senior Community Relations Officer (later Director) of the West of Scotland Racial Equality Council (WSREC). There were five Councils in Scotland-West of Scotland,Lothian,Central,Tayside and Grampian.We worked as voluntary organisations,funded in part by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and by the local authorities in our area.

It was a job of many strands;building positive relationships between black and minority ethnic communities and the local white communities;promoting diversity through festivals and publications;working to help local authorities diversify their infrastructures and most importantly taking race cases to court and employment tribunals.
Believe me when I say that race casework is worse than any public notion of if-when you relate the essence of some race cases to interested observers,they don’t believe you. I have no reason to think much has changed in twenty years.
We were managed and overseen by our executive committees,elected by local BME and local voluntary sector organisations and by our bosses,the CRE essentially a government quango.

Race Casework

But what I want to draw attention to was our requirement by the CRE to take race cases.
The objective was to build up a bank of race casework that would influence and alter public policy and the legal frameworks.Most of us officers came from backgrounds like teaching and the voluntary sector so getting to grips with work in tribunals and early stages of race cases in courts was quite challenging.
But what proved an insuperable hurdle for Scottish RECs was the CRE’s refusal to recognise Scottish difference in the legal framework!The CRE legal team were recruited from a diverse group of lawyers who had been trained in England or sometimes overseas but with no knowledge of Scottish law as far as I was ever able to perceive.

If,for example, a race case had been taken successfully against an English Housing Association,the CRE would not support a Scottish case that was similar because the English legal exemplar was there. It was hopeless arguing that Scottish lawyers and employment tribunals would pay little attention because of our different legal system.
There was great pressure on us to do race cases and the idea was to get maximum publicity when a successful case was run in order to ensure that public awareness was raised.

I loved my work in the West of Scotland REC and I believe that the CRE achieved a lot with its race casework and collection of race statistics. But the English domination of thinking about good race relations without consideration of national difference was a major handicap.

For a long time we had great difficulty in running successful cases in courts or tribunals but eventually we began to have some successes-sometimes with big multi-nationals or major stores. The major stores often had excellent race equality policies and diversity training for their stores in London and the South but they did not extend to Scotland because they were not perceived to be important issues .

The more successes we had ,the more cases we attracted.Word of mouth publicity was critical.
Latterly the great majority of cases were settled out of court or tribunal.Many cases began with victims simply looking for an acknowledgement of the hurt and humiliation felt with an apology .and those who were accused ultimately had to cough up a few thousand pounds and face public acrimony because they were too arrogant to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

The Stephen Lawrence factor

Stephen Lawrence was a young black architecture student in South London who was murdered by a group of young racist thugs with gangland connections.His parents were indefatigable in their search for justice. After several unsuccessful prosecutions some of the accused men were finally successfully prosecuted in 2013.

In 1999 Sir William Macpherson,an English judge of Scottish origin published his inquiry into the police handling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

He pronounced the Metropolitan Police ‘institutionally racist’and thus began a new chapter in UK race relations.Sir William Macpherson, Chief of Clan Macpherson of Cluny and member of the UK establishment recognised the deep-seated racism and discrimination of many major institutions in the UK.The changes to the Race Relations Act 1976(Race Relations Amendment Act 2000) required the staff of all public bodies to have training in the ‘General Duty’ ;to remove unlawful racial discrimination and; to promote equal opportunities and good community relations between persons of different racial groups.

This made a huge difference. Because I had already set up a joint Race Equality course with the University of the West of Scotland, WSREC became a beneficiary of this legislation.Much training was carried out with Strathclyde Police,the Scottish Prison Service,the Procurator Fiscal Service,colleges,education services,HMIs, and local authorities,including the entire staff of the University of the West of Scotland.

Merging of Equality bodies

Much of what was achieved then is no longer given the same level of attention as priorities changed and other aspects of equalities gained higher priority age,disability,LGBT and lately trans issues.The CRE itself stopped giving funding for race casework and so many RECs are no longer able to carry this out.More emphasis is placed on promoting good race relations,important but only a strand of promoting equality in the UK.
The race casework provided a map of how, why and where racism was prevalent and dangerous.
The CRE became the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2007 bringing together responsibility for sex and race discrimination and human rights .

Trust and Mutual Respect
In reflecting about equalities work over this period there are some issues that stand out for me, Other colleagues from RECs and the CRE will doubtless have different views. But for me what was critical to our work was trust and mutual respect at all levels.

For the latter half of my work as a race equality director I was mostly at war with the CRE.
They often operated in a colonial manner patronising and handing down orders and new work directives.I can look at this now with the helpful framework of Professor Alf Baird’s book ‘Doun Hauden’. The really important work building trust with BME communities and local authority partners was largely taken for granted by the CRE and greatly under-valued.
I think this is probably true of many government bodies and local authorities
Whatever achievements the RECs developed the CRE took credit for. And the Scottish RECs had much to be proud of-many diverse initiatives in different parts of Scotland including work with gipsy and traveller communities.
Occasionally in London the CRE Legal team appointed South African exiles to work with them.
I became friends with one of them ,an African lawyer who was about to go back to South Africa to head up Oliver Tambo’s legal team.(OT was then President of the African National Congress) .This was in the early nineties after Mandela was released,
I asked him at our last meeting if he would be drawing up race legislation like the UK Race Relations Act 1976. He looked at me absolutely horrified and said’ Certainly not! We won’t need that in the new South Africa’!
I was speechless, at his level of naivety as someone who had worked at the grassroots in a less challenging situation than that of South Africa.
As the next couple of decades played out in South Africa,it transpired that some detailed race legislation would have been very helpful