On the second day of UNISON’s national health conference, the union was proud to host Baroness Doreen Lawrence (pictured above) in conversation with UNISON’s head of health, Helga Pile.
Baroness Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, is one of the most prominent anti-racist campaigners in the UK and since 2020 has been race relations advisor to the Labour party. It was her tireless campaigning for an inquiry into the murder of her son in a racist attack in 1993 that brought about the Macpherson report.
The Macpherson report, published in 1999, concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist and included 70 recommendations that aimed to address racism in the police and public services.
“If you look back to when we had the Macpherson inquiry, it felt like institutions were beginning to understand the impact of racism and what they needed to do to change,” Baroness Lawrence said. “But I feel like in recent years racism is beginning to rear its head again. And for more and more young people, it’s getting dangerous.”
“I think we need to go back to where we were after the inquiry came out. It helped institutions, for the first time, understand racism, and the impact that racism can cause.”
Baroness Lawrence has been a member of the House of Lords since 2013, a place in which she says racism is ‘very rarely discussed’. “If we, within in Parliament, are not discussing race, how are we going to discuss race outside?” she said.
The rise in anti-immigration rhetoric and Reform UK
Speaking about the rise in anti-immigration political discourse across the UK, the prevalence of union jack flags, and the ‘polarised’ public conversations on immigration, Baroness Lawrence said, “We need to challenge the government, and challenge our MPs a bit more, for them to start talking more and doing more around these issues.”
“So many of us here are here because of migration, whether because of our parents or grandparents,” UNISON head of health Helga Pile noted, before asking Baroness Lawrence how she thought the union could push back against Reform UK’s hostile narratives on immigration.
Baroness Lawrence advocated for the unions to step in and support workers by challenging the government and its policies. “If you think back to Windrush, and the difference that we were making in the NHS, and the racism we were facing at that time… We’ve gone back to that again,” she said.
Racism in healthcare and the impact of Covid-19 on Black workers
Last month, the government’s third report from the Covid-19 inquiry described workers in the health service as ‘superhuman’. However, as Ms Pile noted, the report did not address the disproportionate impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on Black communities and Black workers within the healthcare system.
Baroness Lawrence (left) and UNISON head of health Helga Pile (right)
In 2020, Baroness Lawrence published ‘An avoidable crisis’, a report into the disproportionate impact Covid-19 had on Black communities, in which she named the healthcare issues as ‘systemic’ and rooted in housing, immigration, education and employment policy.
When Ms Pile asked Baroness Lawrence how far she thought the UK has come on these issues, she replied, “I think those things are still headlines.
“During Covid, when I was asked to look into the impact, I wanted to make sure I was speaking to ordinary people,” she said. “In the early stages, the frontliners, and the first individual to die was from the Black community.
“One of the nurses said, as we were talking, ‘I didn’t go to work to die’. And that has really impacted me.”
Moving on to discuss Baroness Lawrence’s role as chair of the race equality engagement group, Ms Pile cited the statistic that Black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women and asked what other issues were prevalent in maternal health and racial disparities in healthcare.
Baroness Lawrence shared an anecdote from a roundtable she had hosted in December of last year with Roma and Traveller people, where she had met a woman who had become disabled after having twins and now uses a wheelchair.
She also shared her own experiences of childbirth and how she has been treated, which were brought back to the forefront of her mind when she hosted these focus groups. “When I was really young, they didn’t think I was married. So they wanted to treat me completely differently as a single mum. But why would I be treated any differently as a single mum?”
Decolonising education and supporting young people
Baroness Lawrence shared her thoughts on the education system and the importance of decolonising education by teaching about colonial history to fight racism through the education system.
“If you don’t do that, racism continues to exist. Because people think you come here to take other people’s jobs, but that’s not it. They need to understand what happened in the centuries before and slavery. Until children begin to understand that history we’re going to have racism,” she said.
She also spoke about the fight for Stephen Lawrence Day, which is held every year on 22 April, the anniversary of his death. Baroness Lawrence founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in 1998 to promote a positive legacy in his name and support for young people’s ambitions. The day has been formalised nationally since 2018.
“For years I’d been talking about it, and everybody keeps saying to me it needs to be part of Black History Month. That’s not where it needs to be: it needs to be front and centre and for people to use his experience to help other people,” she said.
“It’s been 33 years since Stephen was killed. The impact that Stephen’s name has made has been positive,” said Baroness Lawrence, urging people not to focus on his murder but on how to build positive futures for young people. “I want young people to have ambition and to think about what they can achieve. Stephen was an academic and he would have done really well.”
Concluding her talk, Baroness Lawrence encouraged UNISON members to think about how they can support young people. “They’re our future,” she said.
