3 - Widening the gaze: institutional racism, social policy and conceptual diversification

Summary

Introduction

If you were trying to characterise developments in social policy in recent years, the chances are that you might select a series of key events and trends to define the attitudes of policy makers and political narratives. The list might include the febrile Brexit debate regarding controlling our borders (HM Government, 2018), the Grenfell Tower tragedy (Davies et al, 2017), the Black Lives Matter movement (Dray, 2021), COVID-19 (Nazroo and Becares, 2021), continued welfare retrenchment (Edmiston and Thakkar, 2021) and the Windrush scandal (Williams, 2020) partly inspired by Theresa May's ‘hostile environment’ (EHRC, 2020) as an intent to delineate between citizens and aliens. While the inventory might not be definitive, these events would feature on many people's lists. At the heart of this list lies the portrayal of a modern Britain as increasingly divided and polarised, not just across class and income lines but also in terms of race and ethnicity.

At the heart of the Brexit debate, one of the most divisive periods of British politics, was the vision of a Britain that had become lost in a ‘global hegemon of the capitalist world economy’ and a ‘deep-rooted nostalgia for the British imperial project’ (Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1805, 1809) where racisms continue to be a part of British values (Patel and Connelly, 2019). While the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ may have begun as a statement of intent to tackle illegal immigration, it says a great deal about British political narrative that it so easily spread to include a problematisation of immigration in general. The fact that the term ‘hostile environment’ is not formally included in white papers nor in policy documents (Griffiths and Yeo, 2021) illustrates the potentially nebulous nature of the concept. Furthermore, an intersectionality of race and class is demonstrated in the fact that most of the Grenfell Tower fatalities were of minority ethnic people, and the way in which COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the Black and minoritised population (Otu et al, 2020; Nazroo and Becares, 2021).

With this in mind, it might be presumed that race and ethnicity are key elements within a discipline such as Social Policy, which has a rich history of studying and analysing inequality.