Ministers urge race body to sue companies

BRITAIN'S RACE watchdog should become a "more forceful and aggressive" organisation that vigorously pursues legal cases against firms and institutions seen to be discrim-inatory, ministers say.

BRITAIN'S RACE watchdog should become a "more forceful and aggressive" organisation that vigorously pursues legal cases against firms and institutions seen to be discrim-inatory, ministers say.

The Government wants to transform the Commission for Racial Equality so that it spends less of its budget on campaigning, after a series of controversial poster adverts spectacularly backfired last year. It is also anxious to reduce the commission's expenditure on ineffective local race equality councils, which currently receive more than £3m a year from the organisation.

Instead, ministers want the commission to have a similar standing to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which has won a succession of legal victories for civil rights in America.

The new-look commission would come into place next year, after its chairman, Sir Herman Ouseley, stands down after seven years in the post. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, tried to persuade Sir Herman to remain in charge of the refocused organisation. But Sir Herman described the plans as "not in the real world".

The retiring chairman said the commission already lost more legal cases than it won and that taking greater risks could damage its reputation and leave it open to press criticism.

He also expressed deep frustration that Labour had failed to meet the expectations of ethnic minority communities and had "wasted the golden opportunity" to transform British race relations provided by the Lawrence inquiry. "The Lawrence report was a golden opportunity, self-created by the Government, which they failed to grasp and act with the urgency which would have taken us forward. It's an opportunity which seems to me to have gone," he said.

Sir Herman said that with popular opinion behind him, Tony Blair should have put in place a national race relations strategy to take Britain into the next millennium. "With the nation stunned by what it had read, the opportunity was there to be right up front and say, 'We have the moral authority' on the back of this report," he said. "I think issues of race are not seen as electorally popular. The closer you get to an election, the harder it is to do something radical which makes a difference for ever."

Sir Herman believes ministers were committed to fighting discrimination, but he said some of their policies were actually undermining race relations. Disproportionate numbers of black boys were being excluded from schools and Labour had kept in place penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants. The measure, he believes, will harm the employment prospects of ethnic minorities.

Sir Herman also said the dispute over Mr Straw's attack on gypsy criminals earlier this year has done lasting damage to the travelling community.

Sir Herman was born in Guyana in 1946 and came to England when he was 11 to join his mother, who had found work as a nurse. His father, a baker, had died four years earlier. Growing up in a one-bedroom flat in Peckham, the south London district where he still lives, he was exposed to violent racism as bricks and bottles were thrown through the windows of the family home.

Ken Livingstone recognised Sir Herman's potential when he headed the local authority-run race unit in Lambeth and recruited him to the Greater London Council in 1981. There, he put in place ethnic monitoring procedures designed to ensure that the workforce reflected the racial mix of the capital - procedures which are only now being followed by police forces and other public service organisations.

His campaign to rid schools of textbooks that used racial stereotyping was denounced in some quarters as political correctness, but he pursued the policy as chief executive of the Inner London Education Authority between 1988 and 1990.

Sir Herman, who is married to a teacher and has two children, became the first black chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality in 1993. While in the post he has raised the organisation's profile to an unprecedented level. His successes include a campaign to eradicate racist abuse from football grounds and a long battle to transform the military's attitude to race relations.

But the commission has also been the subject of much criticism, notably last year when it produced a controversial series of racist posters designed to prick people's consciences. The campaign led to the commission becoming the only organisation to have to submit its poster campaigns in advance to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Despite his frustrations, Sir Herman believes that there will be a time when there is no longer a need for a race relations watchdog in Britain. "I am not depressed. In fact, I am optimistic," he said. "The business we are in is about trying to change things for the better for everyone. The nature of race relations is not about just doings things for blacks or Asians but about making British society better for everyone."