Question Author
Sqad....Your knowledge of the NHS is vastly superior to mine, so I am not able to gainsay you, nor do I have any desire to do so.
But I would contend that we have indeed come a long way since those days before the Race Relations Act. My father once literally chucked a black family out of his small corner shop, purely because they were not white. It was something that even as an eleven year old I thought just wasn't right, but he was somewhat of a tyrant, so my Mum and I just humoured him. Not a very proud moment in my families history I'm afraid. What made it rather difficult to understand was that as young Irishman in the 1930's, coming to Kilburn with his mother, to find work, he was subject to appalling racism himself, like the signs outside boarding houses which said " no blacks, no dogs and no Irish"
The passing of the Act was a watershed for Britain. You can't easily stop racism, as we can see from our news media on a daily basis, but we can outlaw it, which is what the Labour did in 1965. The law had its defects, however, so another law was passed in 1968, and again in the years following.
An interesting aspect of the 1965 legislation may not be widely known....Northern Ireland was not included in its remit. I wonder why !