Norman Ginsburg

Institutional racism and local authority housing

Racial inequalities in access to decent council housing have a long history as do paper policies to change the situation. This paper critically assesses the application of concepts of racism by examining the forms of institutional racism revealed by recent local studies of racialised local authority housing management. These studies suggest that a complex web of prejudices, assumptions and managerial priorities is at work and that there are many forms of institutional racism in housing departments which cannot be fully understood by only looking at the internal local authority procedures or expenditure restraints. Institutional racism in housing is nourished and sustained by informal local political pressures backed by racial harassment, both actual and threatened. Anti-racist policies must take this into account. A significant landmark was reached in 1987 when for the first time as far as I am aware a general text on British housing policy addressed in some detail the issue of racism and council house allocation policy (see Malpass and Murie, 1987, ch 10). Despite this it remains the case that neither the leading social policy textbooks nor the specialist housing policy texts address the issues of racism and sexism in housing policy with the notable exception of two recent feminist texts, Pascall (1986), Watson and Austerberry (1986). Racism and housing policy is often not taught as a topic to students because it is alleged that no accessible literature exists within the discipline of social administration. As Williams (1987) says, mainstream social administration has failed ’to acknowledge the gravity of racism in the welfare state’ in general because of ’its empiricism, its idealism, its inherent nationalism and its belief in the welfare state as integrative, universalist and redistributive’ (p 7). The issue of housing and racism is therefore confined to the literature of the sociology of race relations and in the research literature produced by the race relations * I would like to acknowledge the very helpful comments received on the draft of this article from Errol Lawrence. Fiona Williams, Avtar Brah. Michael Hutchinson-Reis, Dave Taylor, Heather Wakefield and Miriam David.

Home ownership and socialism in Britain : a bulwark against bolshevism

This paper suggests that the British working class is roughly equally divided between tenants and home owners, and that the growth of home ownership is likely to continue, encouraged as it has been by both Labour and Conservative govern ments. Nevertheless government promotion of relatively insecure low income owner occupation in the inner city has illustrated the limits of such a strategy. Homeownership has not depoliticised the housing question for the working class but has transformed it into a central part of the politics of prices and incomes. Socialist policies which concentrate on the defence ofpresent-day council housing or an even-handed approach to council tenants and homeowners are doomed to favouring the latter. The problems of a more radical reformist approach to the housing question are outlined.

Racial harassment policy and practice : the denial of citizenship

Racial inequalities in housing, particularly in the rented sectors, cannot be explained simply in terms of the class structure combined with the structural concentration of black people in lower income groups. The sustenance for racialised allocation of rented housing is not simply provided by national and local government housing policies. Nor can it be explained solely in terms of either directly prejudicial or institutionally racist processes within local authorities and housing associations, important as these are. From a review

Striking back for the empire

In Critical Social Policy No 8 (Autumn 1983) we published an extended, controversial review by Jock Young of The Empire Strikes Back: Race & Racism in 70s Britain (ESB) written by the Race and Politics Group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. The review aggressively and destructively dismissed the book’s analysis of complex issues such as the relation between race, gender and class, policing the inner city, Afro-Caribbean culture in Britain. It was the kind of review which is all too common; it distorted, caricatured and ignored much of the book and concentrated on airing the reviewer’s prejudices on some of the issues. Some of the CSP collective were very unhappy about publishing the review without comment. We hoped, naively and rather in the style of Pilate, that it would elicit a strong response from readers, which has not happened, with the exception of a mild riposte from Richard Johnson in CSP 9. This response is prompted now by reading What is to be done about Law and

Critical Social Policy special issue: Vocabularies of citizenship and gender in Northern Europe

to Sage Publications that we would develop a more comparative and international dimension to the journal. This particular Special Issue emerged from the annual seminars of the European Network for Theory and Research on Women, Welfare State and Citizenship organized between 1994 and 1996. One of the concerns of the research groups set up by the Network was the difficulty in pursuing comparative social policy research when key concepts within that research, such

Book Reviews : The Eclipse of Council Housing Ian Cole and Robert Furbey Routledge, London, 1994, 272pp, £11.95 pbk

The presentation of argument would have been better if it had gone beyond a simple reiteration of ’left liberal’ housing policy, and instead had looked at the role of urban policy in general in promoting ill health, with housing policy considered as an aspect of this. Interestingly my preferred approach would have forced analysis beyond the national level of policy formation (which is important) to include the local level of policy implementation, particularly significant here because of the importance of local planning proposals for tenure segregation. A good way of doing this would have been to take up the ’Healthy City’ theme and consider the real impact of public policy on the health of people in declining cities. Urban Development Corporations, for example, have created exclusive and expropriating segregation wholesale, without a peep of criticism from people promoting ’Healthy Cities’ in the conurbations in which they are operating. What are directors of public health, and community health consultants playing at? None of this figures here and it should. This is a worthy and useful piece. It will be valuable for teachers and students, particularly those working on health related courses, but, as with most of the other pieces in the series of which it forms part, it seems to me to have missed an opportunity to force thinking forward, to confront the

Review article : The wonderful world(s) of welfare capitalism

There are three kinds of comparative social policy texts. First there are studies of the origins and features of social welfare in a selected number of states with a chapter devoted to each state, flanked by opening and concluding chapters of a comparative nature. In this approach there is little systematic comparison and almost inevitably implications of the uniqueness of each welfare state to its historical, cultural and social context. Useful examples of this genre include Rimlinger (1971), Rose and Shiratori (1986), Friedman et al. (1987), Morris (1988) and Castles (1989). Secondly there are studies of selected aspects of policy with a chapter devoted to each policy

Book reviews : The Comparative History of Public Policy Francis G. Castles (ed) Polity Press, 1989, £35.Q0 hbk

change in the context of a crisis of ’Fordism’. The other two main theoretical perspectives discussed in block 1 of D314 also surface in the reader. Section two, which focusses on manufacturing change, in particular on the spatially uneven impact of ‘deindustrialisation’, includes Peter Hall’s article: ’The Geography of the Fifth Kondratieff’ which relies on a ’long-wave perspective’. The third section is primarily concerned with developments in the service sector, in particular with regard to producer services. Here Peter Daniels claims that the growth of services is symptomatic of the structural shift from an industrial to a ‘post-industrial’ economy. The post-industrial perspective is the third framework to receive considerable attention in block 1. Section four deals with changes in the labour market and their impact on management-labour relations. This section includes Morgan and Sayer’s excellent essay on the way in which new flexible

Book reviews : Poverty and the State: An Historical Sociology Tony Novak Open University Press, 1988, pbk. Basic Income: Freedom from Poverty, Freedom to Work Tony Walter Marion Boyars, 1989, pbk

welfare elsewhere and is also politically feasible in the medium, if not the short term, would you start out from here? Built into the book is an assumption that the territory of feasible welfare lies somewhere between Marxism and Fabianism. This is not necessarily so, as for example, green and feminist politics have pointed out. However, this is again carping after all it is a significant advance, and a sign of the strangeness of the times, that Marxism and Fabianism sit down together and listen to each others’ conversation with-

Reviews : Mothers at Work: Public Policies in the United States, Sweden and China Carolyn Teich Adams and Kathryn Teich Winston Longman 1980

clearly articulated by another contributor. I could not choose to opt out of a sexist role if I did, my choice was not recognised as a positive decision but just part of being disabled ... Consequently, the silent pressure by society towards my non-sexuafity forced me to take a sexist role in order to demonstrate my womanhood; in fact I needed to be ultra feminine to appear normal. For those who define the disabled woman as sexless, the corollary seems to be to assign the label of homosexual, pervert or at best nurse, to the saintly man living with a disabled woman. Clearly, some of the heterosexual and gay couples in this book have been able to resist and act back on these definitions, but at some cost to their lives. It seems that loving relationships are not expected to last if you are disabled and a woman, and that to assign the role of carer and perhaps the’ double shift’ to the able-bodied man