The New Serfdom

by Angela Eagle

  One in five LGBT people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity in the past twelve months.

  Two in five trans people (41 per cent) have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the past twelve months and one in six LGB people, who aren’t trans (16 per cent), have experienced a hate crime or incident due to their sexual orientation in the same period.

  Four in five anti-LGBT hate crimes and incidents go unreported, with younger LGBT people particularly reluctant to go to the police.

  More than a third of LGBT people (36 per cent) say they don’t feel comfortable walking down the street while holding their partner’s hand. This increases to three in five gay men (58 per cent).

  One in ten LGBT people (10 per cent) have experienced homophobic, biphobic or transphobic abuse online directed towards them personally in the past month. This number increases to one in four for trans people (26 per cent) directly experiencing transphobic abuse online in the past month.

  Beyond outright hate crimes, LGBT people still have to deal with negative depictions in the media and the press. It is noticeable that as communities become more visible, confident and accepted, reactionary elements of society – the forces of conservatism – increase their opprobrium: in recent months and years, the number of anti-trans headlines seem to have flourished. In November 2017, The Sun newspaper, outraged at children being taught about transgender rights and tolerance, splashed their front page with an enormous headline: ‘The skirt on the drag queen goes swish, swish, swish.’ In playgrounds, pubs and elsewhere, words like ‘poof’, ‘faggot’ and ‘dyke’ are still in common parlance. Even the word ‘gay’ has come to mean ‘bad’ in street slang.

  The battle against homophobia has been long and hard; there has been great progress, and society has been changed in many ways, yet we have a long way to go if we are to change the equal rights that been legislated for into a reality for every LGBT person in our country.

  RACE

  Just fifty-four years ago, in 1964, Conservative MP Peter Griffiths campaigned to win his seat in Smethwick with the slogan: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.’ Forty years ago, white people in Britain could walk into a pub past signs reading: ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.’ Just fifteen years ago, Imran was assaulted in London for no reason other than being a ‘Paki’ by a skinhead with a key held between his fingers, hitting with such ferocity that it shattered the bony orbit that surrounds his left eye and sliced into his face. We may not have had legalised racism, segregation or discrimination, as in the United States under its Jim Crow laws, but it existed nonetheless throughout society. Hailing a cab, trying to get a job, renting a house or even going to an unfamiliar barber would be fraught with the potential for racial discrimination.

  We should be glad, therefore, that Britain has done more than almost any country in the world to deal with racism over the past few decades. The Race Relations Act 1965 was a Labour Act, opposed ferociously by the Conservatives, that made it illegal to refuse access on racial grounds to public places such as hotels, restaurants, pubs, cinemas and public transport. Refusing to rent accommodation to people because of their race was banned, and inciting racial hatred became a criminal offence. Eleven years later, the Race Relations Act 1976 introduced offences of direct and indirect discrimination and the Commission for Racial Equality was created to take a hard look at the state of race relations. More controversially, the Macpherson Report into the Metropolitan Police response to Stephen Lawrence’s murder was brutally direct in accusing the entire organisation of being ‘institutionally racist’. Those who have worked with the police since know how hard they took those words and how much they have worked to reform.

  Racism appears, at times and in some places, to be in remission in the UK. Spectator journalist Clarissa Tan wrote about this retrenchment in an article entitled ‘Britain has many major problems – racism isn’t one of them’:

  In the 1990s, the British Social Attitudes survey found that 44 per cent of people said they would be uncomfortable if their children married across ethnic lines. But that is changing dramatically: according to a recent British Future report, only 5 per cent of those aged between eighteen and twenty-four would mind their children marrying someone of a different ethnic background.

  That’s a heartening statistic, and yet a study by the University of Manchester (Equality, Diversity and Racism in the Workplace) found that a third of the 25,000 employees they surveyed had witnessed or experienced racism. One Indian respondent said he was called a ‘Paki’ by his office manager, and another witnessed colleagues making ‘monkey noises’ and placing bananas on a Ghanaian colleague’s desk. Another respondent said that his team ordered sharing starters at a restaurant, but opted for pork-based dishes so their Jewish boss could not eat them.

  The Race Disparity Audit commissioned by Theresa May, at the urging of black groups such as Operation Black Vote, reported in 2017 and found that while ‘the gaps between groups have narrowed significantly, there is still a way to go before we have a country that works for everyone regardless of their ethnicity.’

  Operation Black Vote’s Simon Woolley, writing in The Times on the launch of the audit, said:

  The beauty, however, with having a lot of data in one place is that you can cross-reference. You see that young black men are three times more likely to be unemployed, and yet much more likely to have a university degree. So these young men and women are doing everything society tells them to do – ‘if you want a good job, then study hard’ – and too many of them still can’t find employment. But it’s not just the data that should inform this discussion but also those personal stories about black men and women changing their African and Asian-sounding names just to get a job interview.

  Discrimination imposes a huge toll on its victims, making them question their identity and appearance. There is a significant market for skin-lightening creams and treatments in the UK among the BME population. Some of the treatments contain harsh chemicals that can have horrible, scarring side-effects. Even Nivea and L’Oreal have faced controversy after marketing products that purport to lighten skin, an extraordinary example of capitalism’s amorality in pursuit of profit. The unfairness of racial discrimination is so damaging to the psyche that it can lead to the very segregation that racists then use to justify their suspicion and ‘othering’ of minorities.

  Across various headings – including Communities, Poverty and Living Standards, Education, Employment, Housing, Policing, Criminal Justice, Health and the Public Service Workforce – the Race Disparity Audit found signs of progress, signs of retrenchment and clear opportunities for improvement. In a book that seeks most of all to find solutions to the inequality that blights our society, it’s worth citing its findings on poverty.

  Asian and Black households and those in the Other ethnic group were more likely to be poor and were the most likely to be in persistent poverty. Around 1 in 4 children in households headed by people from an Asian background or those in the Other ethnic group were in persistent poverty, as were 1 in 5 children in Black households and 1 in 10 White British households. Households of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Black, Mixed and Other backgrounds were more likely to receive income-related benefits and tax credits than those in other ethnic groups. The ethnic minority population is more likely to live in areas of deprivation, especially Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi people.

  The TUC’s 2015 report, ‘Living on the Margins’, found that BME people are disproportionately affected by the growth we identified earlier in precarious work with fewer employment rights.

  TUC research also indicates that workers from ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately engaged in agency work in the UK following the recession. While just 11 per cent of UK employees are from black and ethnic minorities, they hold 17 per cent of temporary jobs and 21 per cent of agency jobs.

  Over forty years since the Race Discr
imination Act was passed, it is clear that we still face an enormous task to make Britain a less hostile, more welcoming, better integrated, fairer place to live. This is compounded by an apparent surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in the US and Europe. For those of us committed to a Britain free of racial prejudice, we will need to consider whether more robust intervention will be necessary to rectify the imbalances in our society driven by prejudice. Ideas like name-blind job applications and the setting of binding targets for the elimination of race-disparities have their place to play in righting historic wrongs.

  RELIGION AND BELIEF

  Both of your authors are atheists and humanists, and yet we’ve watched with genuine concern over recent years as a surge of – in particular – anti-Semitism and Islamophobia has washed over British politics and society. Britain is not an especially religious country overall. Over a quarter of British people hold at least one anti-Semitic view, according to a study conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. More than half of Muslims questioned held at least one anti-Semitic attitude. Meanwhile, when British people were asked by YouGov in 2015 if they held a positive or negative view of Islam, 61 per cent said their view was negative.

  We both believe that it is wrong for institutions or individuals to discriminate based on religion or belief. We both believe that people have the right to practise their religion in any way they see fit, within the confines of our laws and as long as they are not directly harming others. The UK is unusual in that it has an established Church and a head of state who leads that Church. But we also have many religious traditions and have largely developed a climate of respect and co-operation between them. We may not have a formal separation of Church and State, as America purports to have, but as the US proves through its frequent, deliberately visible, grandiose and often quite hypocritical displays of religiosity by the ruling classes, legal status is irrelevant unless secular, tolerant values are at the heart of all our communal institutions and interactions.

  The dangerous Islamophobia of groups such as Britain First – whose page has nearly 2 million ‘likes’ on Facebook – some of UKIP’s upper echelons and provocateurs such as Katie Hopkins need to be actively resisted and countered through both inter-faith and community displays of co-operation and mutual understanding. Similarly, the appalling rise in anti-Semitism within society has to be constantly and vehemently challenged.

  Where Muslims, Jews, Christians and people of all faiths and none should be in agreement is that there is more that unites the moderate many than divides us; we have more in common with each other than we do with the intolerant purveyors of hate who seek to divide, destroy and reverse decades of progress.

  DISABILITY

  According to the charity Scope, there are around 13.3 million disabled people in the UK, almost one in five of the population. Only one in six disabled people were born with their disabilities. The majority acquire their disability later in life. Seven per cent of children, 18 per cent of working-age adults and 44 per cent of adults over state pension age are disabled. In January 2016, the UK employment rate among working-age disabled people was just under 50 per cent, compared to 84 per cent of non-disabled people. Scope calculate that a 10-percentage point rise in the employment rate among disabled adults would contribute an extra £12 billion to the Exchequer by 2030.

  Discrimination against the disabled is a pernicious social and economic problem for Britain. Despite Parliament having passed legislation to deal with disability discrimination, we are still chronically under-serving our disabled citizens. The trade union movement has done much to make workplaces and public spaces more accessible and yet MPs hear every day from their constituents about the iniquities suffered by those who live with a disability. Since the era of austerity this has become much worse.

  The most commonly reported impairments by disabled people are mobility (52 per cent); stamina, breathing, fatigue (38 per cent); and dexterity (27 per cent). It is surely not beyond the ken of humankind to design spaces that can accommodate these disabilities, yet such reasonable accommodations are often touted as part of ‘Elf ‘n’ safety gone mad’, sneered at by right-wing pundits and so-called taxpayers’ lobby groups (actually funded by vastly rich plutocrats who don’t want to spend their money on such changes). There is also a serious pay gap between the disabled and non-disabled. An Equality and Human Rights Commission report found that ‘the disability pay gap in the period 1997–2014 was 13 per cent for men and 7 per cent for women.’

  The public-sector union UNISON has outlined how we might evolve to deal with disability in Britain through its ‘social model of disability’. They explain that

  it is the way society organises itself and people’s attitudes that stop disabled people from taking an equal part in life, rather than their physical or mental conditions or ailments. As a union we campaign on important issues such as:

  Inaccessible workplaces;

  Information systems that are not designed for disabled people;

  Negative attitudes and prejudice from employers.

  This can be extended beyond ‘employers’ and ‘workplaces’ to all other spheres of society. It makes sense for shop-owners to make their shops open to more people who might purchase their goods, just as it makes sense for museums and galleries to allow more visitors to get inside. It is actually not so much ‘health and safety’ as it is good old-fashioned British common sense.

  CLASS

  Possibly one of the clearest forms of discrimination in the UK today is class. At a middle-class dinner party, outright racism, sexism or bigotry against LGBT people would be less likely to be tolerated now, but class discrimination is embedded in our society. From education, to the job market, to access to services, to their ability to get on the housing ladder, people from a lower socioeconomic status are less advantaged than those from higher classes. Both of your authors were born into working-class families, and we have both witnessed the levels of disadvantage and discrimination against working-class people, as well as the ebb and flow of improvements with change as governments change.

  The Conservatives’ Social Mobility Commission, formerly headed by Alan Milburn, a New Labour Cabinet minister, did a considerable amount of work to analyse the nature of class disadvantage and make recommendations for its improvement. Alan eventually quit the Commission when he realised its recommendations were being ignored for the main part and often undermined by policies set by the government. In his work, however, he found disturbing facts.

  On housing, for example, Alan concluded:

  Home ownership helps unlock high levels of social mobility but it is in free-fall among young families. Owning a home is becoming a distant dream for millions of young people on low incomes who do not have the luxury of relying on the bank of mum and dad to give them a foot up on the housing ladder. The way the housing market is operating is exacerbating inequality and impeding social mobility.

  On jobs for young people that have worked hard and succeeded economically, Alan found:

  Unpaid internships are a modern scandal which must end. Internships are the new rung on the career ladder. They have become a route to a good professional job. But access to them tends to depend on who, not what you know and young people from low-income backgrounds are excluded because they are unpaid. They miss out on a great career opportunity and employers miss out from a wider pool of talent.

  Even if those young people get a job, the Social Mobility Commission found that people from working-class backgrounds who get a professional job are paid an average of £6,800 (17 per cent) less each year than colleagues from more affluent backgrounds. Access to Britain’s traditional professions such as medicine, law, journalism and academia are dominated by those from advantaged backgrounds. The Commission found, for example, that ‘nearly three quarters (73 per cent) of doctors are from professional and managerial backgrounds with less than 6 per cent from working-class backgrounds’.

  Class discrimination even exists in our most privileg
ed institutions, like the City of London. There is a pub by London Bridge in the City of London called the Barrow Boy and Banker. ‘Barrow boy’ was a term used for street-hawkers, selling fruit and veg from a cart. Their quick mouths and faster-still mental arithmetic were iconic. When those young men managed to get a professional job in the City, they found themselves on the trading floors. The bankers, by contrast, were the posh folk running the merchant banks. Whenever anything goes wrong in the City, we rarely see the bankers being blamed; quite the contrary, they remain feted and have caps doffed to them wherever they go. It’s the Cockney-accented ‘spivs’ on the trading floor that are the focus of intense hatred, despite the fact that the rules and operating models are set by the bankers upstairs and their public-school and Oxbridge contemporaries in government. Class runs through every aspect of our society from the top to the bottom.

  Class, race and gender are also deeply interlinked. The assault by Margaret Thatcher’s government on single mothers was both gendered and class-based discrimination. The persistent targeting of Muslims by right-wing newspapers and political groups is both race-based and class-based: the Women and Equalities Select Committee published a report in 2016 explaining that Muslims suffer serious economic disadvantages, with an unemployment rate more than twice that of the general population.

  The persistent failure to address class is unsurprising when you consider the extent to which Parliament has been dominated by those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. It is still rare for someone born into a working-class family to find themselves in Parliament. This is partly due to structural exclusion, partly because working-class people are not given the encouragement in either our educational system or life in general to aspire for high office. Both our politics and, more importantly, our country are much the worse for it.