Secondly, the agenda is not restricted to issues of race, but is inclusive of the much wider range of public governance. Black people cannot expect the society to have an interest in them if they do not have an interest in the society. To obtain the dullest benefits, all must participate in the process of societal development. The agenda therefore seeks routes of entrance to areas from which Black people have hitherto been excluded.

Finally, part of the unfairness and inequality in society has resulted from structural and organizational weakness. These will need to be corrected, and agenda 2000 seeks to make a start with the more important of these.

The first steps will involve the coming together of the various Black organizations to forge an alliance. This should not be along political party lines, but along community lines so that people could gain the broadest possible insights into community needs and concerns and how these relate to the wider community. The alliance should largely be an educative and supportive mechanism. It should provide the focal point for determining areas for research, setting the terms of reference for such activity and the dissemination of the results.

Black people have suffered severely and disproportionately from the Government's strategy of seeking to control the unions through a mix of legislative instruments and the rather crude device of high unemployment and a squeeze on public sector pay. The Black community must argue for higher levels of employment and for a programme designed to cut the level of unemployment in the Black community to the level of employment in the society as a whole within the decade ending in 2006. It must also seek a level of average pay for Black workers in line with average pay nationally. To achieve this, they will need to support efforts to achieve minimum pay levels by statutory means if necessary.

In the last decade, more and more women have been drafted into the workforce. Because a high number of Black women workers are also single parents the community will need to be pressing strongly for workplace or a child care voucher system. Black women have to be rescued from the part-time, low pay, ununionised environment in which so many of them have found themselves.

People know all too well the consequences of high inflation, but they also know the trauma of unemployment. While they argue for control of inflation, they must campaign for jobs. For many this may mean retraining. The days of spending ones entire working life in one job are now largely past. Three is the current average and it is gradually going up.

The ECONOMIC AGENDA

Black people must push to be included not only as recipients but also as providers of any skills development programmes, linked to local needs, which are developed. The success of any economy

depends on the productive skills of its people and its ability to use all its talents. Black people must enter wholeheartedly into all the training opportunities that present themselves. They will often have to achieve these goals in spite of an institutionalized system of discrimination. A collective approach will none the less

prove advantageous in making progress.

PRIVATISATION

The Conservative Government has turned the process of privatization into a form of political correctness. We have seen that privatization does not necessarily yield efficiency. Efficiency is not a function of ownership but of management. Nor indeed is it necessary to have competition in order to be efficient. To break up a natural monopoly in order to achieve a spurious competition far from being efficient is wasteful. There is no right way of doing the wrong thing, and in many instances privatization is simply wrong.

It may be too late and surely too costly to re-nationalize many, if any, of those public sector industries that have been privatized over the Thatcher-Major premierships. However we should ensure that they are clearly uncontrollable by national governments and who are likely to abuse their market position.

The Black community must therefore argue for stronger powers for the watchdogs of the privatized industries. They should ensure that efficiency is balanced with effectiveness, cost efficiency with quality and managerial expediency with customer satisfaction. Competitiveness ought not to be sought at the expense of fair pay nor the conditions for workers sacrificed for exorbitant bonuses for top management. The competitive output is achieved as much by the workers as by the skills of the manager. There should be some element of fairness in how these rewards are determined.

A MATTER OF GOVERNMENT

The first past the post system of electing members of the House of Commons while reasonably safe in a two party environment is not adequate to serve a society where there are more than two national political parties. What has happened in the last four elections, and likely to happen in the next if the rules are not changed, is that a minority of the popular vote has produced a majority in parliament who could then proceed as Thatcher did, to govern as an elected dictatorship.

As a matter of equality and fairness Black people should be arguing strongly for proportional representation. A people who have suffered from being excluded and marginalized in society ought to be campaigning strongly for inclusiveness. If Tony Blair's stakeholder society is to mean anything at all, then it must mean the end of the first past the post system which so marginalizes the contribution minority groups can make to the governance of society.

Black people should also be proposing a fixed term parliament and bring an end to the phony war between the government and the opposition which is neither serious polities nor good theatre. A system where MPs have ceased to be representatives of the views and concerns of their constituents and on most occasions appear as voting fodder for their respective front benches is a matter that should be seriously looked at again. The role of select committees should be strengthened as part of the development of greater control over the executive by the House of Commons.

Tony Blair should get the support of Black people in the revision of the House of the Lords but they should be pressing all main parties to parliament to ensure that greater access is achieved by Black people, who are under-represented in both houses of parliament.

While the Industrial Tribunal ruled that the women only short list as a means of selecting parliamentary candidates was unlawful, we at least saw a demonstration on the part of the Labor Party to set a target and a time frame in which to achieve it in so far as women were concerned. In the absence of any similar process of target setting, are we to assume that the Party feels at ease with the number of Black people in parliament?

Black people should press home the point that the abolition of the Greater London Council and the six other metropolitan county councils was an act of unpardonable political vandalism. London remains alone among the major capital cities in the democratic world without a democratically elected authority. They should demand that an elected Greater London Authority be re-established.

The Regionalization of England, each with its own assembly, the Scottish Parliament and assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland would take the first steps in rolling back the centralization of Britain . Britain is now the most centralized country in western Europe. It is important that people are made to feel more involved in the decisions which affect their lives and devolved government is the first move in that direction.

DEALING WITH DISCRIMINATION

Most Black people suffer from at least one other form of discrimination in addition to discrimination on the grounds of race. The Commission for Racial Equality has been trying for over a decade to get the Home Office to make certain improvements in the Race Relations Act 1976. The lack of a broad based Black led Civil Rights movement strongly supporting the Commission's case has been a serious handicap which must be rectified.

Equally important is the fact that although the UK government is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights the government has not as yet incorporated the convention and its protocols into British law. This should now be done as a matter of urgency through the passing of a Bill of Rights.

Black people should also be pressing for a Freedom of Information Bill. One of the major ways in which Black people have been discriminated against is in the prejudicial information that is held on them and disseminated about them without their knowledge and in the difficulty they have in access information to which they are entitled.

Another area of discrimination which needs urgent attention is that of Nationality and Immigration Law. Black people must be assured that Immigration procedures are open and fair. They must be convinced that when they carry a British passport they can expect same treatment as other British passport holders. Seekers of asylum will want to know the color of their skin is not going to prejudice the outcome of their applications.

LAW AND ORDER

Black people are like all other groups in society largely law abiding. They are concerned at the failure to establish an unquestioned total rapport with the police. As a community, they wish to play their full part in the development of an acceptable level of confidence between themselves and the police. The community however has not arrived at a consensus of how this may best be done. However the balance of support in the argument is in favor of seeing the numbers of Black people in the police force increase substantially over the next few years.

They will continue to urge the police forces not only to speed up their recruitment of Black officers, but to look at the ways of ensuring promotion and retention among those they have recruited. They also want to see the police do something about dealing positively with issues of racial abuse and harassment which they see as a major deterrent to progress.

Local community groups must seek to identify and promote Black people in their area who are committed to the criminal justice system and who would be willing to serve as magistrates, probation assistants or prison visitors. The aim being to ensure that there is a constant supply of new people going forward in these areas where at the present time there is great under representation. Another exercise should be focused on young people who have the academic background to pursue a career in the legal profession. Each area should develop its own targets and pursue them assiduously.

EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

The linking of the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Employment into one mega-department should assist in a more coherent response from education to the needs of employment. Black people must now develop a strategy of intervention to secure the interest of their children's education. It is not enough to sit down and complain about the inadequacies of the system.