Sign up to access the complete lesson and track your progress!
Unlock This CourseBy 2010 Britain had many laws against discrimination. Yet some barriers to change remained. This lesson looks at two of them, and then at the law that tried to tidy everything up.
Key terms:
Earlier lessons in this option were mostly about race, sex, sexuality and disability. By the 2000s religion had become a major source of prejudice too, and it often overlapped with race. Many British Muslims, whose families came from places such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, were targeted.
After the terrorist attacks on the USA in September 2001, and the London bombings of 7 July 2005, which killed 52 people, there were reports of a rise in abuse and attacks on Muslims in Britain. Most Muslims had nothing to do with the attackers.
Regulations in 2003 banned religious discrimination at work. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006) made it a crime to stir up hatred against people because of their religion.
Laws helped, but they could not remove suspicion overnight. That is why religious intolerance counts as a barrier: it was still there after the law had changed.
Laws against discrimination do not, by themselves, make people equal. Where you were born, your family's money and your school still shaped your chances. Class was an old barrier, as in 1914, and it had not gone.
So the law could ban unfair treatment, but wider unfairness in money and opportunity was much harder to remove.
By the 2000s Britain had many separate laws, including the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act, the Race Relations Act and the Disability Discrimination Act. They were hard to follow and did not always match. The Equality Act (2010), passed by Gordon Brown's Labour government and given royal assent on 8 April 2010, drew them together into one Act.
Age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
It had limits. Class was not a protected characteristic. The Act also included a duty to reduce inequalities caused by money and background, but the government that took office in May 2010 did not bring that part into force.
A breadth study is about change over time. Use these themes to organise your thinking.
Women over 30 won the vote in 1918, and the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts followed. Racial discrimination in public places was made unlawful in 1965, with jobs and housing added later, and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry (1999) tackled institutional racism.
The Disabled Persons (Employment) Act (1944) was followed by the Disability Discrimination Act (1995). Class barriers shrank but did not vanish.
From Windrush (1948) onwards, immigrants changed British food, music and sport, though immigration laws often tried to limit them.
Protests such as Bristol (1963) and Dagenham (1968) pushed for change, and Parliament turned it into law.
What changed: unequal treatment became unlawful in work, schools, shops and services, and the law covered more groups by 2010.
What stayed the same: prejudice, unequal chances and gaps in money and power.
This is a Paper 2, Section B type (c) question. In the real exam you answer either (c)(i) or (c)(ii); here you have one question. Cover at least three aspects and end with a judgement.
How far did the experiences of ethnic minorities in Britain change in the years 1914-2010? [16 marks]
You may use the following in your answer:
You must also use information of your own.
The experiences of ethnic minorities changed a great deal in these years, mainly because racial discrimination went from being legal to being increasingly unlawful. However, prejudice and inequality continued, so I will argue that the change was large but incomplete.
In the early part of the period there was no legal protection. After the First World War there were riots in places such as Liverpool and Cardiff, and in 1943 a London hotel refused the cricketer Learie Constantine a room, so in 1944 he took it to court and won. Even after Caribbean migrants arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948, many met signs saying there were no rooms for coloured people.
Change then came through protest and law. The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 ended the colour bar on the city's buses, and the Race Relations Act (1965) banned discrimination in public places and set up the Race Relations Board. Later Acts extended this to jobs and housing, and the Stephen Lawrence case led the Macpherson Report of 1999 to name institutional racism and to make many recommendations. The Equality Act (2010) then made race a protected characteristic in one clear law.
Yet continuity was strong. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) and the Immigration Act (1971) limited migration, and Enoch Powell's speech of 1968 won wide support. The need for the Macpherson inquiry shows that unfair treatment lasted long after the 1965 Act. Racial prejudice also overlapped with religious intolerance, so abuse of Muslims increased after 2001 and 2005.
Overall, the legal position of ethnic minorities changed completely, from no protection in 1914 to the Equality Act in 2010, and public attitudes moved too. But the Stephen Lawrence case came 28 years after the 1965 Act, which shows that laws changed faster than behaviour. Judged by what people experienced day to day, change was real but only partial.
What lifts it to the top level: it uses both bullets and own knowledge across the period, weighs change against continuity, and reaches a judgement based on a stated criterion.
For a whole-period question, plan a "then, middle, now" line of argument and name your criterion, such as law versus everyday experience, in the first paragraph.