Special measures usually designed to help people from disadvantaged ethnic minority groups into jobs must also be targeted at white working-class families in the current economic downturn to avoid an anti-immigration backlash, according to the chair of the government’s equality watchdog.
Speaking at a Confederation of Business Industry conference last week, Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the “best defence against prejudice against immigrants” would be to give those who resent them “a place in society”.
Phillips said: “We may need to do so with the sort of special measures we’ve previously targeted at ethnic minorities. But the name of the game is to tackle inequality, not racial special pleading.”
He added that there needed to be “a clearer understanding of who might be the disadvantaged”. He said that, while ethnic minorities and women were “historically the people who are most hit in (downturns)”, in “some parts of the country the colour of disadvantage isn’t black or brown. It’s white.”
Phillips said that an average of two-thirds of Chinese-heritage children got five good GCSEs, as did three out of five children from Indian backgrounds, but 85 per cent of poorer white boys did not.
His comments come after suggestions that the UK population should be “capped” at 70 million. Phillips said such a cap was wrong and unenforceable.
Dr Tahir Abbas, director at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture at Birmingham University, said: “Many of the areas suffering from industrial decline, political disaffection and abandonment (by the state) are areas like Middlesbrough and Liverpool, which are made up of predominantly white English communities.”
But he added that there had to be “proportionality” when dealing with white working-class families and ethnic minority groups. “It’s about a balance. Racism, post- colonial historical baggage and media vilification are all issues that will affect ethnic minorities more than white groups.”