In the opening months of 2010, the Communities Secretary, Lord Denham, launching a review of government policy on ‘race’, posed racism as somehow unproblematic in the light of the fact that we are all now ‘comfortable with diversity’ (The Guardian, 14 January). Denham suggested ‘we must avoid a one-dimensional debate that assumes that all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged’ and argued that factors of class probably outweigh racism as the contemporary issue of inequality. Denham sees a Britain that has changed ‘immeasurably for the better’ and argued that ‘sustained action over the last 10 years has promoted racial equality and better ‘race’ relations, dismantled unfair barriers faced by many and helped to nurture a society more comfortable with diversity than ever before.’

These proclamations chime with an evident and sustained government trend systematically to rework and reposition ‘race’ in public policy. In three terms of new Labour administration there has been a gradual but consistent retreat from targeting ‘race’ and racial inequality as a distinct issue. This identifiable shift commenced with a reworking of the public policy discourse in which policy makers and policy papers preferred to use terms such as diversity, communities, cohesion and inclusion as euphemisms for the ubiquitous word ‘race’ and policy speeches more overtly signalled a distancing from what has now been dubbed old style and outdated multiculturalism (Phillips, 2005). In 2008 the establishment of the new Equalities and Human Rights Commission amalgamated the equality strands into a single enforcement body thus ending some 30 years of the Commission for Racial Equality and effectively ensuring the gradual demise of local ‘race’ equality councils as originally constituted. The Equality Act adopts a generic approach to tackling equalities dismantling the so-called ‘silos’ approach which has been branded as out of step with contemporary demographic realities. These manifestations ride on the back of a more fundamental and sustained neoliberal assault on the ‘black’ political constituency in the post 9/11 society in which a number of strategies have ensured the fragmentation and dissipation of any critical or sectional edge in the light of a ‘crisis of integration’ (Bloch and Solomos, 2010, p 223).

Social work is accordingly and inevitably deployed in this contemporary mission, if perhaps unwittingly. This repositioning echoes with much of the rhetoric that has come from our own ruling body in social work, the General Social Care Council, in its not-so-subtle shift away from what might be called the radical moment in anti-racist social work.