Come an event like the Smethwick election, and a wave of feeling persuades the Government to introduce legislation banning discrimination in public places. Come a survey like last week’s PEP report on the extent of race prejudice, and another such wave looks like jogging the Government into introducing legislation dealing with housing and employment.
We tend to assume that the problem of the immigrant community is solving itself. Which, of course, it is not. For what is disquieting about the PEP report is not so much the present extent of discrimination in housing and jobs which it reveals. More disturbing is the survey’s evidence that the sons and daughters of immigrants, born and educated in this country, experience as much discrimination as their parents – and to the extent that their qualifications and expectations are higher, suffer even more bitterly.
So it is no use hoping that time will of itself do the trick of getting rid of prejudice and discrimination. It plainly won’t.
Nor will damming the remaining trickle of immigrants remove the problem. It was obviously right to limit entry. But the justification for these restrictions was that they gave us a better opportunity of helping those immigrants who were already here.
So far, we have not done so. Can we do any better?
Key quote
“Madame Callas is not a vehicle for me to drive. She has her own brakes and her own brains.”
Aristotle Onassis
Talking point
About 8,500 political leaders and “known leftists” have been arrested by the Greek Army since the coup on Friday, according to reports from Athens yesterday. They are being held in custody in military detention centres.
Front-page story – “Greek Army arrests 8,500”