Race equality after Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell's infamous speech casts a long shadow over race equality in the UK. Looking back to the 1968 Race Relations Bill and then forwards to the present social and political landscape this article explores how an uneven race equality story has been characteristic of the UK approach since Powell's intervention. If the intended objective of the initial and later race equality bills was to reduce ethnic and racial disparities to a marginal or ‘negligible’ level, then we are a great distance from success. If the objective was slightly different, but not unrelated, and sought to reshape public conventions on racism (and ethnic and racial diversity more broadly), then the answer is more complicated but also unfinished.