Equalising Opportunities, Minimising Oppression

A Critical Review of Anti-Discriminatory Policies in Health and Social Welfare

Dylan Tomlinson, Winston Trew, Dylan Tomlinson, Winston Trew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415250870
• eBook ISBN: 9781134531264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Policy

Anti-Racist Practice (ARP), Anti-Discriminatory Practice (ADP) and Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP) form a trinity of concepts, nested into one another, which have evolved in welfare services over the last fifteen years. They tend to have developed as forms of practice panaceas and as a result have been subject to both unrealistic expectations and, at times, to political ridicule. This book clarifies the distinctions between three key concepts - ARP, ADP and AOP. Critically and constructively analysing these three approaches to practice it reappraises their potential in the light of emerging equality issues in the health service
With contributions from leading teachers and practitioners in the field, Equalising Opportunities provides students and practitioners in health and social care with a clear overview of an area where there is much confusion and imperfect understanding.

Chapter 1

From equal opportunities to
anti-oppressive practice

The historical and social context

Dylan Ronald Tomlinson

This chapter briefly examines the background to the development of equal opportunities and anti-discrimination in health and welfare, beginning with a consideration of some of the early usage of these terms in a civil rights context, then moving on to discuss how interest in anti-discrimination first manifested itself in social work. The concluding section describes the principal features of each of the main approaches to anti-discriminatory practice that have evolved. In focusing on the way in which the civil rights background provided a foundation for anti-discrimination, the chapter is principally concerned with gender and ethnicity.¹

The origins of UK equal opportunities

Equal opportunities and anti-discrimination are both terms which were commonly used in civil rights struggles in the United States in the mid twentieth century (Cashmore, 1994; Robertson, 1997; Street et al, 1967), although, as Coote and Campbell (1982: 17) suggest ‘while women's liberation in Britain drew some considerable inspiration from the United States, it had its own independent beginnings’. These beginnings included women trade unionists setting up an equal pay campaign in the 1950s and taking radical strike action on this issue in high profile disputes during 1968. These disputes culminated in a government commitment to introduce legislation for equal pay. The ‘independent beginnings’ also included outstanding contributions to the development of socialist feminist thought, one of which (Rowbotham, 1969) is argued to have had ‘a profound influence on the development of feminism’.

Although a Royal Commission on Equal Pay was instituted in 1944, its role was limited to evaluating the likely effects of introducing equal pay for equal work and it was not asked to make recommendations. The Commission ‘gave little encouragement to the broad application of equal pay’ (Office of Manpower Economics, 1972), finding that in most areas outside public service, the work undertaken by men and women was different.

Evans (1944) describes the proposal for an Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill to abolish discrimination against women in all its social and economic aspects, from lunacy at one end of the spectrum to employment at the other. She recounts how the hopes of women's organisations for more democracy were dashed during the Second World War. Quite the opposite to the desired process of reform was held to have taken place with ‘a wide range of laws, orders and regulations introduced since the outbreak of armed hostilities [continuing] to embody in one form or another some of the worst features of traditional and customary sex discriminations against women’ (p. 3). As a consequence of this situation the Women's Publicity Planning Association set up two inquiries in relation to what they argued was anti-democratic practice. The first was an investigation into Acts of Parliament which contained sex discrimination. The second was an investigation into the instances of discrimination freshly introduced by the actions and policies of public or semi-public bodies in the period since war had been declared.

Evans’ view is of course consistent with the often pilloried attribution by Beveridge of the breadwinner role to the male head of household (LWLC, 1979). Her emphasis on the need for more democracy to address discrimination against women was part of a broader conception of equal opportunity that links it to the later evolution of ‘catch all’ organisational policies prescribing equal treatment for a range of social groups commonly subject to discrimination, particularly ethnic minorities and disabled people, in addition to women. Thus Hughes (1968: 40) contends that ‘at least since 1944 the British nation has been committed, as a major social priority, to the establishment of a democratic education system which would provide equality of educational opportunity according to “age, ability and aptitude’”. By the 1960s, Hughes’ comments on education suggest, equal opportunities were as much associated with countering ‘positive discrimination in favour of the middle class’ and with establishing ‘positive discrimination in favour of deprived areas’, as with the position of women in society.

Snell et al. (1981: 2) suggest that up to 1970 equal pay, rather than equal opportunity, was the priority for women's organisations. Two particular pressures, in their view, led to the equal pay movement gaining momentum during the 1950s and 1960s. The first was a shift in position within the TUC, which had hitherto seen voluntary collective bargaining as the means to achieve parity and which, in 1961, recognised that legislation might be a necessary expedient by calling for the government to ratify the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention on Equal Pay. The second source of pressure arose from the contingency of the UK wishing to join the EEC, since the Treaty of Rome obliged member countries to make legislative provision to secure ‘equal remuneration for the same work’ (ibid: 3).

In 1970, an Equal Pay Act was finally passed. As Snell and her colleagues (1981: 2) point out, when the Act received assent in 1970 it was exactly 82 years after an 1888 TUC resolution calling for ‘equal pay for the same work’, thus constituting ‘the longest standing wage claim in the history of the trade union movement’.

By 1969, Coote and Campbell (1982: 15) note that a few women's groups had been set up in Britain, with most of those belonging to such groups being ‘members of the left wing intelligentsia – a staunchly masculine society in which women were active and committed, yet felt themselves confined to the periphery’. In February 1970 the first National Women's Liberation Conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford, an event which had evolved, by chance, from women's dissatisfaction with history workshops at the College proceeding ‘as though the female sex had no part in history at all’ (ibid.: 20). Among other matters discussed, such as campaigning for free contraception and abortion on demand, were proposals to lobby for a Sex Discrimination Act.

In each year between 1967 and 1973, bills were introduced into the House of Commons to make discrimination against women illegal. The 1972 ‘Antidiscrimination (no. 2) Bill’ for example, had as its objective to ‘make illegal and provide for the prevention of discrimination on grounds of sex’. Toward this objective the bill proposed the setting up of an Anti-discrimination Board. The Board was to secure a settlement of differences in case of discrimination and ‘an assurance against further discrimination by any party against whom a complaint is proved’. This was the second of two bills introduced by Labour members of the House of Commons in 1972, both of which attracted considerable support within the women's movement. As a consequence of Select Committee reports on the anti-discrimination issues raised by these bills, in both Houses of Parliament, a White Paper was finally published by the Conservative government in September 1973 (Department of Employment, 1973).

The White Paper was titled ‘Equal Opportunities for Men and Women’ and perhaps with some significance, as will be discussed further below, the government of the day preferred to see its proposals as directed against ‘unfair discrimination’ and as having the objective of ensuring ‘non-discrimination’. Subsequent to the White Paper, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1975. With the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) being set up by the Act wholly for the purpose of addressing discrimination against women, gender was formally signified, at least in relation to UK law and politics, as the primary domain for application of the concept of equal opportunities.

Coote and Campbell (1982) record how the omissions in the scope of the government planned legislation, such as pensions, taxation and social security, attracted significant protest within the women's movement, and that the proposed Sex Discrimination Bill was described by one group, in 1973, as consisting of only a ‘limited equal opportunities Bill’. They go on to suggest that at least some of the ‘feeble effect’ of the 1970s’ legislation can be attributed to these major deflciences.

The Sex Discrimination Act did, however, possess some features which could be regarded as ‘enlightened’ for the time. An important feature of the way in which the Equal Opportunities Commission was set up was the lesson learned by government from weaknesses in the functions of the Race Relation Board, as the latter was constructed under the 1965 and 1968 Race Relation Acts; these weaknesses were addressed in the 1976 Act through the establishment of the Commission for Racial Equality (EOC, 1976; Runnymede Trust, 1979). One problem had been that the Board's agenda was complaint led: it could not initiate its own programme of priority issues for investigation or determine particular organisations whose policies merited inspection. In consequence of this problem, the Sex Discrimination Act provided for individuals to take cases to industrial tribunals and County Courts, thus allowing the EOC to concentrate on the wider picture of discrimination in the areas under the Act. A related problem had been that many potential complainants did not come forward because they had good reasons to expect the failure of their case. For that reason the EOC was given powers of its own accord to investigate situations where it believed there might be discrimination, and without the necessity of initiation by those subject to discrimination.

The National Health Service

Equal opportunities policies were slow to develop in the NHS, and indeed it was not required by the Sex Discrimination Act to adopt such policies. Davies and Rosser's (1986) research found that there was a climate of hostility towards equal opportunities policies with regard to women, in the sense that the male career path in which the employee was one hundred per cent committed to work, was regarded as the norm, with women's family commitments leading to support for the widespread assumption that they were rarely in a position to meet that commitment requirement. ‘In particular … rarely did anyone feel it was justified to take measures to aid women with domestic commitments to take a full part in the organisation. There seemed no financial logic to providing nurseries or any other form of child care, and the moral logic of special training initiatives for women was regarded as dubious’ (p. 30).

While it was the case that, by 1982, a number of health authorities advertised themselves as ‘equal opportunity employers’, Davies and Rosser could find no health authority which had adopted an equal opportunity programme and made arrangements for its monitoring and evaluation (p. 14).

By the mid 1990s, however, the NHS Executive had established an Equal Opportunity Unit, designed to draw together health service initiatives in race, disability and gender, and the Executive asserted that ‘as one of the largest employers in Europe the NHS is committed to becoming an equal opportunity employer’ (NHS Executive, 1996).

Nonetheless, as Archibong discusses in Chapter 7 of this volume, the problem remains in many NHS Trusts one of monitoring the impact of equal opportunities policies both in relation to data on recruitment and retention of staff and in relation to staff's own views of the usefulness of the policies.

During a 1999 national visit to units providing services to catchment areas with significant black and ethnic minority populations, the Mental Health Act Commission (Warner et al, 2000) found that 23 out of 104 units had developed ‘policies procedures or guidelines on training in race equality and anti-discriminatory practice for staff, indicating some degree of NHS engagement with this area of work.

The Commission's use of the term anti-discriminatory practice, though, was informed by the input to the visit of specialist academic researchers. Equal opportunities remains the government's preferred conceptual framework for addressing discrimination in the NHS against both women and minority ethnic groups – as it was in 1973. The Vital Connection (NHS Executive, 1999), for example, a strategy for both human resources in the NHS and the deployment of the service in ‘local partnership action for community renewal, tackling social exclusion and health inequalities’, has a focus on ‘equality’, ‘fair treatment’, ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘fair access’, and ‘fair outcomes’.

The origins of UK anti-discrimination in terms of 'race’

Kushnick (1971) distinguishes the negative concerns of UK politicians with immigration control, culminating in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, from the growth, in the mid 1960s, ‘mainly from the Labour Party, but also from some Conservatives’, of interest in what he calls more positive government activity, including anti-discrimination legislation. Kushnick dates the origins of British efforts at anti-discrimination activity to 1950, when Sorenson introduced a bill to make discrimination in public places a criminal offence. Sorenson's efforts were followed by those of Brockway, starting in 1956, when he introduced the first of nine unsuccessful bills to make discrimination in public houses, lodging houses and dance halls a criminal offence, and, in addition, to criminalise acts of discrimination in the hiring and firing of employees by all employers of more than fifty people. These bills were significant, Kusknick points out, in that Harold Wilson, for the Labour Opposition, twice promised, during 1963 – once in a House of Commons debate and once in a public meeting – that if Parliament continued to reject the Brockway bills, then when there was a Labour majority in the House of Commons the measure would be enacted.

Solomos (1989) suggests that throughout the period from 1945 to 1962 an increasingly racialised debate about immigration took place, focusing on the supposed social problems of having too many black migrants and the question of how they could be stopped from entering given their legal rights under the 1948 British Nationality Act. As Bourne (1980: 332) points out, even in the early UK studies of black immigrant communities – such as those of Kenneth Little (1948), Anthony Richmond (1954) and Michael Banton (1959) which took place in the locations where black settlement long preceded the Second World War: those of Cardiff, Liverpool and London's East End respectively – the focus was on how far cultural assimilation of the ‘stranger’ was taking place, ‘almost as if white hostility was an inevitable and understandable part of human nature’.

Solomos dates the history of anti-discrimination policies in Britain back somewhat later than Kushnick, to the early 1960s,

when first the Conservative governments of 1958-1964, and then the Labour governments of 1964-1970, developed a view of race and immigration which combined acceptance of the demands for controls on immigration with the proclamation that those migrants already resident should be protected from discrimination and benefit from government action to give them ‘equality of opportunity’ with their white counterparts.

(Solomos, 1989: 35)

The Race Relations Act 1965 made it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origins to those seeking access...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Tilte
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From equal opportunities to anti-oppressive practice: the historical and social context
• 2 The campaign against anti-racism in social work: racism where? You see it … you don’t
• 3 Developing anti-discriminatory practice
• 4 Changing agendas: moving beyond fixed identities in anti-oppressive practice
• 5 The political challenge of anti-racism in social care and health
• 6 Managing diversity and countering discrimination in health services
• 7 Frameworks for anti-discriminatory strategies in the health service
• 8 Disability and oppression: changing theories and practices
• 9 Anti-discrimination, work and mental health
• 10 The significance of anti-discriminatory practice: non-discriminatory discrimination and social advocacy
• 11 Making a difference? From anti-racist to anti-oppressive practice in social work education
• Author index
• Subject index