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Mr. Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West): I confirm that what the Home Secretary has discovered in the Home Office was known in the Department of Employment in 1986, when the race relations employment advisory service produced a report. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the encouragement that he is giving to the Association of Black Police Officers to remove what some have seen as a concrete ceiling. Others have also been encouraged to do what they know is right. I suggest that those who doubt these things read an article in the British Medical Journal last week in which an Asian consultant wrote about having been told inadvertently that some jobs were for Indians and others were for whites.
Mr. Straw: The hon. Gentleman, who brings great commitment and experience to the subject, is right: it is still going on, and it will go on for as long as we are blind to the fact that it is going on or take the view of the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis)--I say this with respect to him--that there is an exact similarity between the way institutions behave and the way in which individuals in that institution think they behave. We ought to know enough about institutional culture to know that that is not the case.
I shall deal briefly with national security. The Bill amends the national security provisions in the Race Relations Act, and that is achieved by clauses 6 and 7. For anyone who is worried about that, it is to bring the provisions into line with the European convention on human rights--not to detach it. The intelligence and security agencies are covered in terms of employment, and we thought that those agencies were quite keen on the provision. We considered whether they could be included in the Bill as a whole, but we did not find a way in which it would be possible for people to put in section 65 requests for information and to have those compatible with the basic purposes of the intelligence and security agencies and their need for secrecy.
Mr. Gerald Howarth:
Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw:
No, I have answered the hon. Gentleman.
In conclusion, the House will be aware that, as Home Secretary, I am responsible for a significant number of the Bills that are being considered during this parliamentary Session. None, however, gives me more personal satisfaction than this one. The Bill comes out of a personal tragedy--the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence, which brought to the attention of the white majority what it is like to be a member of a black or Asian community in Britain today.
The report into the death of Stephen Lawrence led the Opposition to welcome my announcement on 24 February 1999 of the Government's intention to carry out the first major update of the Race Relations Act since 1976.
The Bill is a very important one, and I am very proud to be responsible for it. It meets the commitments that the Government made in response to the Lawrence inquiry. It is an important part of this Government's wider agenda for achieving race equality and promoting the potential of a modern, multicultural society.
Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald):
We on this side of the House remain unreservedly and absolutely opposed to racial discrimination. For that reason, we will support the Second Reading of the Bill today. However, we have some concerns about the implications of various aspects of the Bill, and I look forward to hearing the Minister's response to those aspects which I shall raise. I hope that there will be a proper opportunity to explore them in detail throughout the Bill's later stages, because we believe that some have serious implications. It is important that the effects should be those intended, rather than those not intended.
Everybody in our society has the right to expect equal treatment from every institution, and that includes the public services. I welcome any sensible and practical measures to assist in the fight to eradicate discrimination from our society. I say "sensible and practical" because while no one would dispute that the intentions behind the Bill are honourable, we are concerned that the practical implementation of certain of the measures contained within it--and, perhaps more importantly, some of the measures that we know will be contained within the Bill when it comes back to the Floor of the House--could serve as a hindrance, rather than a help in the elimination of racial discrimination.
I wish to refer to the police service, which has become subject to intense scrutiny since the publication of the Macpherson report into the aftermath of the tragic death of Stephen Lawrence. The police service is an effective force in the fight against crime in this country. I pay tribute, as would the Home Secretary, to the courage and dedication of the men and women of our police service. They, as individuals, feel that they have been subject to much unwarranted criticism in recent months. They feel that because the service has been branded "institutionally racist" that that rubs off on them. That is a serious consideration.
The Macpherson report says:
We have already witnessed a rise in London crime rates at a time when the number of stop and searches has fallen dramatically. I believe that there is a clear link between those two facts. The August 1999 summary to the interim Fitzgerald report into stop and search noted:
There can be no dispute that it is right to act swiftly against any police officer intent on conducting his or her duty in a discriminatory manner. However, it is plainly wrong for members of our police service to feel that they cannot carry out their duty solely because their actions could be portrayed as discriminatory, even if that was not in their minds--or even if discrimination had never crossed their minds at all.
I hope that the Home Secretary will reassure the House that the operational effect of the police service, and of other public services, will not in any way be threatened by the interpretations that could be placed on the contents of the Bill.
Mr. Straw:
I thank the right hon. Lady for allowing me to intervene. I can give her the assurance that she seeks, but I should like to take this opportunity to make two points. First, the changes in the Bill to make chief officers vicariously liable for the actions of individual officers will greatly help those individual officers, who as a result will not feel isolated, as used to be possible. It was an eccentricity of the courts that treated police officers--for these purposes, if not for any others--as office holders rather than employees. The change proposed in the Bill will help that.
"We accept that there are dangers in allowing the phrase to be used in order to try to express some overall criticism of the police, or any other organisation, without addressing its meaning."
The report goes on to define institutional racism. It says that it is the collective failure
of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
Sir Paul Condon, the former Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, told the inquiry that labelling the police as "institutionally racist" would mean that the public
will assume a finding of conscious, wilful or deliberate action or inaction to the detriment of ethnic minority Londoners. They will assume the majority of good men and women who come into policing . . . go about their daily lives with racism in their minds and in their endeavour.
He said that the use of the term "institutional racism"
would undermine many of the endeavours to identify and respond to instances of racism which challenge all institutions and particularly the police.
No matter how it was conceived, I believe that the way in which the term "institutional racism" has been bandied about has done a great deal of unnecessary and unhelpful damage to the image of the police service in this country. However, I would go further. I ask the Home Secretary to consider whether the very use of that phrase--which effectively absolves individuals from responsibility for racist acts and lays the ultimate blame on the institution--can hamper the fight against racism at a personal level. Might it not also have an adverse effect on the morale and public image of the men and women in the police service, the vast majority of whom do not act with racism in their minds?
This fall in searches is also directly related to a rise in crime over the same period.
We have even heard the Prime Minister, in response to the first rise in crime since 1993, personally urge police to step up the use of stop-and-search powers. I am sure that the police would like to carry out as many stop and searches as they deem necessary, but they say that they are reluctant to do so because of the what they consider to be the climate of hostility directed at them. A recent survey found that 71 per cent. of Metropolitan police officers had become more reluctant to use stop-and-search powers since the publication of the Macpherson report.
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