News

Countdown to crisis:

13 July: Gurbux Singh, chairperson of the Commission for Racial Equality, is arrested outside Lords cricket ground in London for threatening police officers after a one-day international between England and India. It is alleged a drunk Singh tried to headbutt a police officer. 

7 August: Singh pleads guilty to threatening police officers at Bow Street magistrates court in London, and pays a £500 fine plus £55 costs. He later resigns from the £120,000-a-year job, saying: "I deeply regret this entire incident."

8 August: News that Singh is to receive a pay-off of about £100,000 is heavily criticised.

9 August: Mashuq Ally, head of the CRE in Wales, resigns amid claims he behaved inappropriately towards staff. Ally cites "petty politics within the commission" as among his reasons for leaving.   

news analysis:

The past few weeks have not been among the Commission for Racial Equality's finest.

First, its chairperson Gurbux Singh resigned after pleading guilty to a public disorder offence. Then days later he was followed by Mashuq Ally, head of the CRE in Wales, who left amid allegations that he had behaved inappropriately towards his staff.

Criticisms of the commission have come thick and fast since the resignations of Singh and Ally, prompting a debate about the future of the organisation itself.

It has been said that the CRE spends a disproportionate amount of its £20 million budget on marketing, has become remote and inaccessible to those it is meant to help and has not been a true critic of government policy.

To even the most charitable observer it would seem that the future of the organisation, which this year celebrated its 25th birthday, now looks uncertain.

This latest run of bad publicity follows an attack earlier this year by director-general of the prison service Martin Narey. He criticised the CRE for its slow progress on a report into racism in prisons.

It was also reported that about 60 interviews conducted as part of an investigation into Feltham Young Offenders' Institution had been lost, an allegation that the CRE declined to comment on.

For Ronnie Moodley, general secretary of the Refugee and Migrant Forum, the CRE "lost its track after Sir Herman Ouseley". Singh's predecessor was more interested in finding out what was happening at grass roots level, he says, adding that, increasingly, "the CRE has been operating in a vacuum."

He believes the commission was not as involved in the race and housing inquiry, which the forum conducted with the National Housing Federation and Housing Corporation, as it should have been.

According to Moodley, the inquiry often failed to exploit the knowledge that local race equality councils had to offer.

But Moodley does not attribute the commission's failings solely to the personal qualities of its former leader.

He believes that the CRE should be disbanded and replaced by a centre for democratic renewal, which he describes as a body that would combine the interests of all members of society and deal with all equality issues.

But he adds that if it stays, the CRE should adopt a policy whereby an older person is appointed on an annual basis as its leader, preventing problems of political allegiance.

Too often, he says, the head of the CRE allows decisions to be influenced by the government of the day for fear that to oppose it would be tantamount to career suicide.

Singh was criticised for being unwilling to voice strong opposition to Labour policy when people expected it. His slow response to the government's stance on asylum seekers, for example, was seen by many as an occasion on which he toed the party line.

Many people from Asian communities were angered that he focused solely on issues of segregation after last summer's riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham.

Some believed his comments that ethnic minorities should make more of an effort to integrate and learn English ignored the influence of racist practices in education and employment.

Shajid Hashmi, chief executive of Calderdale Voluntary Action, says he has met Singh on a number of occasions and the views he expressed publicly in his capacity as chair of the CRE were not the same as those he held privately.

"I think the way Singh was talking he was trying to please his salary payers," he says.

He adds: "Anyone who takes on the job will have to do that because you wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds you."

Like Moodley, Hashmi believes that the CRE has lost touch with what is happening locally.

"It's interesting that in the three places where the riots happened they had got rid of their race equality councils," he says.

In Calderdale, West Yorkshire, it looks likely that the race equality council (REC) may be phased out as well (race equality councils are local bodies funded in the main by the CRE). If that happens, says Hashmi, people who have been victims of racial harassment or are frustrated about race issues will have to undertake a 45-minute train journey to Manchester or Leeds to one of the main CRE offices to make a complaint.

However, Sharmila Gandhi, chief executive of Bradford Vision, the city's local strategic partnership, points out the community cohesion agenda has moved beyond looking at equality issues separately.

Community cohesion, she says, is not just about race relations but a whole host of equality issues, such as gender and age.

In the current climate the local REC does seem outdated and at odds with contemporary thinking and work being done on community relations as a whole.

This, more than any adverse publicity about the CRE, looks likely to be the reason for its demise. Through the community cohesion agenda, communities are increasingly encouraged to tackle problems of discrimination in an integrated way.

The government looks set to combine the functions of all the discrimination watchdogs with the proposed creation of a single equalities commission.

In May, the government announced a Cabinet Office project to consider possible models for a single equality body, which would be responsible for enforcing a single equality act. The act, which is still at bill stage, would remove inconsistencies between current anti-discrimination laws.

Gandhi is in favour of such an organisation because it would "integrate all equality issues and provide a more holistic approach to tackling them".

Even those who believe the CRE is doing a good job, such as Dr Cyriac Maprayil, director of Tower Hamlets race equality council in London, believe that a single equalities commission would have much to offer, provided that it is properly co-ordinated and resourced.

The CRE itself has voiced support for a single commission on the condition that the priorities of tackling racial discrimination are not lost.

Seamus Taylor, director of strategy and delivery at the CRE, says: "There should be provision for an integrated approach but a single commission should still have specialists within each field, such as race and disability."

Taylor adds that it is important that any new body has a commitment to community cohesion. "The CRE is the only one of the commissions that has a public duty under the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 to promote good relations between members of society," says Taylor.

Details on how the commission will be structured and operated are at this stage sketchy, as it is unlikely to come into being before 2006 when a set of European directives come into force that will make it unlawful to discriminate in employment on the grounds of sexual orientation, religion and age.

Despite this, it seems likely that government will probably replicate the model for a single equality commission introduced in Northern Ireland in 1999. However, that has not been a completely smooth transition with many disabled groups voicing concerns that disability issues have fallen off the agenda since the commission's inception.

The CRE will have to work hard over the next four years to restore its tarnished image.

But for whoever the Home Office appoints to replace Singh - the commission's acting chair is Beverley Bernard - this will be an unenviable task. Even if the commission manages to ride out the current storm, it is, with the planned single equalities commission a certainty, doomed.