“The last four years have felt pretty momentous,” says David Isaac, who left his position as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission on Saturday. “There’s Brexit, there’s the pandemic, there’s Grenfell, Windrush, #MeToo, and George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.”
Not to mention the commission’s unprecedented investigations into allegations of antisemitism within the Labour party and the Home Office’s hostile environment immigration policy, the results of which are pending.
Isaac took over two months before the Brexit referendum but now finds himself surplus to requirements because the government wants someone who, as he describes it, is “more like their agenda”.
A government spokeswoman puts it another way: “It is usual for chairs to change periodically to allow new perspectives and fresh thinking on issues.”
That the chair of the watchdog is a political appointment highlights what critics say is its limited independence.
Not only does the government fund the commission, it appoints its commissioners, of which there are currently 10. Astonishingly, the commission currently has no black commissioners.
“I’ve been calling for lots of black and BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] people to apply so we as a commission look more like the people we seek to represent,” Isaac said. “We put forward names but they [government] make the decision.”
He points out that the entire commission – an umbrella organisation set up to protect the rights of marginalised sectors of society including disabled people, BAME communities, women and LGBTQ+ groups – now has a budget of just £17m, a fraction of the £70m it had at its peak and £2m less than the Commission for Racial Equality alone was allocated in 2006. “Inevitably it means we can do less,” Isaac said.
The rise of Black Lives Matter has been seen by some as evidence of just how much less, with the commission accused of failing in its duty to promote racial equality.
The government spokeswoman pointed out that BAME representation in the EHRC workforce has itself dropped over the last four years, from 16% to 13%. She said the minister for equalities, Kemi Badenoch, had met Isaac and the commission’s chief executive, Rebecca Hilsenrath, twice in July “and at neither of the meetings did they raise criticisms of HMG on race policy, or the new commission, or the alleged lack of BAME EHRC commissioners.”
But Isaac defended the commission’s record on race, pointing out its successes fighting discrimination on a case-by-case basis. The death of George Floyd, which has sparked worldwide protests, has, though, he acknowledged, become a tipping point.
“The nation has started to talk about Black Lives Matter and the issues arising from that in a way that I don’t think we were talking about things even in March.”
The government’s response to the emergence of BLM – it is setting up a new commission on race and ethnic disparities to “improve our evidence base to change lives for the better,” the spokeswoman explained – is a foot-dragging exercise, Isaac believes.
“I’ve said to government that the time for making recommendations is over. There’s a coherent strategy we’ve set out, a lot of the data already exists and we want government to take action.”
But the “big, unspoken” issue in the debate about race, Isaac said, was how it related to “inequality of opportunity and poverty”, and he lamented the fact that the commission does not have the power to investigate such factors.
In Scotland, public bodies now have a legal duty to consider socioeconomic factors when making decisions about how they allocate resources.
Wales is pushing through similar proposals which “could really result in a different prioritisation of resources” if they were introduced to England, Isaac suggested. “But England has not followed suit. There are provisions that have never been enacted [under the 2010 Equality Act] to look at the socioeconomic side of things but this government has never been keen to introduce them.”
The government spokeswoman said ministers did not believe the act should be used “as a means of social engineering, which would ultimately have significant cost burdens for the public sector”. But the urgent need to examine socioeconomic inequalities has been made stark during the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected the health of low-paid workers, many of whom have not been furloughed and have had no choice but to work during lockdown.
“The very people saving lives on the frontline and keeping our shops open and buses running are people who have less positive outcomes in terms of education and the workplace,” Isaac said.
The pandemic has also exposed the vulnerability of disabled people. “I’ve been shocked in my four years to see quite how badly treated disabled people are in this country. They are treated as second-class citizens, whether it’s in relation to education or employment. Covid has made things much worse.”
It’s a pretty bleak picture, but Isaac is keen to take the long view.
“We’re in a very different place in this country to where we were when the equality and race legislation was set up in the 1970s. But because everyone is shouting and seeing this as a competition for rights, it’s quite difficult to acknowledge that we’ve made huge progress and to deal with the more nuanced positions. It’s all bundled together in these very extreme positions.”
Positions that are unlikely to become less extreme any time soon as the profound social tensions which first erupted during Brexit continue to play out. A problem for Isaac’s successor, whoever the government chooses.