A race relations half-century

Fifty years on from the Race Relations Act 1965, can we say that anti-discrimination law has worked well? Geoffrey Bindman QC, who served as the Race Relations Board’s legal adviser for the whole of its 10-year existence, assesses the effectiveness of anti-discrimination law and the choices that were made in its introduction, in an article in this week’s NLJ. The 1965 Act imposed civil rather than criminal sanctions since the introductions of criminal sanctions in the US was judged to have failed. However the British version was “narrow in scope and the sanctions were weak”. Legislation requires enforcement, he writes, and while equality has improved there is still some way to go.