Introduction

Over 30 years ago, Williams (1987: 7) argued that ‘mainstream Social Administration has largely marginalised the issue of “race”, and ignored the racism institutionalized within the practice and provision of the welfare state’. Notwithstanding disciplinary distinctions between Social Administration and Social Policy, in so far as these distinctions remain, it is a complaint that would not look wholly out of place if it were directed at Social Policy today. Indeed, the recent Social Policy Association (SPA)-commissioned report The missing dimension (Craig et al, 2019) broadly concurred with the assessment of one Social Policy academic that, ‘overall the picture was that “race” teaching within social policy courses was, as one lecturer put it “a drop in the ocean” and not regarded in any sense as mainstream features’ (Craig et al, 2019: 17). This is not unique to Social Policy of course; as the Royal Historical Society's (RHS, 2018) Race, ethnicity & equality in UK History: A report and resource for change makes abundantly clear, and as Alexander (2016) has argued of Sociology too, racial inequality is an overlooked feature across a number of disciplinary homes in UK universities.

For Social Policy, it seems an especially unfortunate tendency when so much research beyond, as well as allied to, Social Policy disciplines documents a variety of gross ethnic and racial disparities across sectors typically deemed its terra firma. Indeed, while the report of the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights resonated loudly with Social Policy scholars – not least the assessment that ‘much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos’ (Alston, 2018: 1) – its sister report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance went largely unnoticed. The findings in the latter were no less damming, reporting that ‘the United Kingdom has adopted sweeping austerity measures that have dramatically cut public sector funding and services and public benefits, including changes to tax policy that have consequences on access to welfare for racial and ethnic minority communities’ (Achiume, 2018: 9). It continued: