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Political scientists generally pay great attention to the creation of policies, but relatively little to the absence of policies. This article examines the reasons why Great Britain has not developed affirmative action policies, and in doing so, tries to shed some light on why the United States has. The author finds that both institutional and cultural factors explain the absence of preferential treatment in Great Britain, in particular the salience of the immigration issue, the absence of a leading oppressed group, the structure of the Labour Party and the electoral system, and the centralization of the British political system. The author argues that Great Britain seems to be moving along a different trajectory from that of the United States and that although their antidiscrimination policies are less developed than those in the United States, they may be more effective in the long term As a result, the British experience may hold lessons for the United States.
The most fundamental thing to understand about affirmative action in Britain is that there is none.' Or, rather, that there is no "hard" affirmative action as we understand it in the United States, which involves majority group hiring goals and timetables required of government contractors, accepted in consent decrees, or ordered by courts, and often involving the deliberate adjustment of standards in employment and education to permit racial minorities to be more proportionately represented in those fields.2 In Britain, using differential standards to benefit minority groups is called positive discrimination and is forbidden by the Race Relations Act of 1976 (RRA). Of course, under a reasonable interpretation of the Civil Rights Act (CRA), affirmative action is also illegal (Gold, 1985). In fact, the CRA makes no provision for any exceptions to race neutrality, whereas the RRA does, permitting special recruitment and targeted training for underrepresented racial minorities (RRA, 1976, Part VI, Sections 35-38). To understand why hard affirmative action has not developed in Britain (and conversely, to gain some insight into why it has developed in the United States), some attention to the different ways that issues of race get on the agenda and are culturally and politically framed in different countries is essential.
THE STATE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN BRITAIN
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OR POSITIVE ACTION?
The keystones...