Ahead of the General Election on December 12, 2019, Runnymede's Nick Treloar lays out the pledges relating to race equality and those directly impacting black and minority ethnic (BME) communities made in the major national parties' manifestos.

N.B. This list is in alphabetical order and does not represent any endorsement of a political party.

Conservatives

1. Tackle prejudice, racism and discrimination and address the complex reasons why some groups do less well at school, earn less or are more likely to be victims of crime. 
2. An Australian-style points-based system to control immigration 
3. Overhaul the current immigration system, and make it more fair and compassionate – ensure the Windrush scandal never happens again. Commitment to the Windrush compensation scheme.
4. Increased use of stop and search as long it is fair and proportionate.
5. Tackle unauthorised traveller camps. Give the police new powers to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of trespassers who set up unauthorised encampments. 

You can read the Conservative Party manifesto here

Green Party

1. End the hostile environment which puts migrants, from the EU and further afield, at risk and increases racism and anti-immigrant.
2. Replace Prevent with cohesive community policing which engages rather than antagonises BME communities and addresses concerns about the use of stop and search powers.
3. Create new support for entrepreneurs and small business owners from BME backgrounds.
4. Scrap the Home Office, and end its decades-long creation of a hostile environment for Black Minority Ethnic (BME) and other minority communities. Create a Ministry for Sanctuary and a Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry for Sanctuary will be responsible for enforcing migration rules with compassion, and due regard for human rights, as well as providing recompense for those affected by the Windrush scandal.
5. The Ministry of Sanctuary’s will abolish income requirements for people wishing to come to the UK to join a loved one, oversee domestic security with full regard to human rights and the needs of diverse communities, and protect the fundamental rights of Travellers.
6. Make a ‘Windrush Day’ bank holiday, to celebrate the contribution that migration has made to our society. 

You can read the Green Party manifesto here

Labour

1. Work to eliminate institutional biases against BME communities.
2. Extend pay-gap reporting to BME groups and tackle pay discrimination on the basis of race.
3. Implement recommendations of the Lammy Review to address the disparity of treatment and outcomes for BME people within the criminal justice system.
4. Commission an independent review into the threat of far-right extremism and how to tackle it.
5. Review the Prevent programme to assess both effectiveness and potential to alienate communities and consider alternatives including safeguarding programmes to protect those vulnerable to the recruitment propaganda and ideologies of the far-right and others who promote terror as a political strategy.
6. Build a society and world free from all forms of Racism, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
7. Create an Emancipation Educational Trust to educate around migration and colonialism, and to address the legacy of slavery and teach how it interrupted a rich and powerful black history which is also British history.
8. Eliminate racial inequality in our economy.
9. Introduce equal pay audit requirements on large employers.
10. Launch an inquiry into names-based discrimination and consider rolling out name-blind recruitment practices.
11. Implement the Parker Review recommendations to increase ethnic diversity on the boards of Britain’s largest companies.
12. Bring an end to the excessive use of stop and search powers and deliver policing by consent. The high proportion of ethnic minority deaths in police custody and poor mental health provision in prison must be addressed.
13. Establish a Race Equality Unit based within the Treasury which will review major spending announcements for its impact on BME communities.
14. End the Home Office’s practice of high charges for passports, visas, tests and other documentation.
15. Launch a wide-ranging review into the under-representation of BME teachers in schools.
16. Scrap the 2014 Immigration Act.

You can read the Labour Party manifesto here

Liberal Democrats

1. Reduce the overrepresentation of people from BME backgrounds throughout the criminal justice system
2. Uniformly record data on ethnicity across the criminal justice system and publishing complete data to allow analysis and scrutiny
3. Introduce principle of “explain or reform”: if the criminal justice system cannot explain disparities between ethnic groups, then it must be reformed to address them.
4. Extend the Equality Act to all large companies with more than 250 employees, requiring them to monitor and publish data on gender, BME, and LGBT+ employment levels and pay gaps.
5. Develop a government-wide plan to tackle BME inequalities and review the funding of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure that it is adequate.
6. Fix the broken immigration system by scrapping the Hostile Environment, ending indefinite detention and taking powers away from the Home Office.
7. Implementing the recommendations of the Parker review to increase ethnic minority representation on the boards of Britain’s largest companies.
8. Extend the use of name-blind recruitment processes in the public sector and encourage their use in the private sector.
9. Develop a free, comprehensive unconscious bias training toolkit and make the provision of unconscious bias training to all members of staff a condition of the receipt of public funds.
10. Tackle the rise in hate crimes by making them all aggravated offences, giving law enforcement the resources and training they need to identify and prevent them.
11. End the disproportionate use of Stop and Search.

You can read the Liberal Democrats manifesto here 

The Brexit Party

1. Reduce immigration 
2. Reduce annual immigration through a fair points system that is blind to ethnic origin 
3. Provide a humane welcome for genuine refugees

You can read The Brexit Party manifesto here



Featured image: Anti Racism March 2018, London
Featured image credit: Tim Dennell Flickr