Lest we forget

Today’s Guardian article about BME housing associations demonstrates two key factors:

First, over a thirty year period Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities, often as one, fought back against racial injustice and institutional prejudice. Organisations such as the West Indian Standing Conference, the Southall Black Sisters were set up. They and many others defended individuals and their communities. They successfully lobbied local and national Government to recognise a problem and with them help solve it. Whilst David Cameron was still in school uniform these activists were the Big Society. And now all that was won, including the considerable gains that we now take for granted, are in danger of disappearing.

Look at the prospects in housing: No more long term social housing; fewer BME housing associations; private landlords charging high rates and or refusing BME tenants; banks not lending money for mortgages. These scenarios are not farfetched, they either here or around the corner. We may not go as far back to the bad old days of brutal race inequality but the idea that we now live, as some suggest, in a post racial society is frankly fanciful.

Yesterday we highlighted the race penalty within education. Today it’s housing, tomorrow it might be employment. The fact is there are still many more battles to be won before we start dismantling the organisations that defend us or help us find some dignity.

The second and perhaps most crucial aspect not necessarily highlighted in the Guardian piece is to ask ourselves what is our role? Are we only able to fight for justice when things get desperate? Has Margaret Thatcher’s and Tony Blair’s Britain turned us into self serving individuals who cannot see beyond our own self interest? I hope not. But we constantly need to remind ourselves that our experience dictates we need constant vigilance and a growing caucus of activism.

If you’d like to be more active in a number of ways contact please contact us at info@obv.org.uk

Simon Woolley