ABSTRACT
The legislation that seeks to limit an employer’s power to discriminate on the basis of sex or ethnicity has existed for nearly 30 years. The passing of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976 (hereafter the 1975 Act and the 1976 Act respectively) had been necessary to ensure Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community, but their enactment had not been without legal or political controversy. The Acts represented a departure from the common law position, under which an individual was entitled to enter, or not enter, into contractual relations with whomever he or she wanted, on whatever terms the parties agreed, and the terms of their contract were sacrosanct. As Lord Davey had put it in Allen v Flood (1898):
It was not for the law to enquire into the motives behind one person’s refusal to contract with another, and it was certainly not the law’s role to interfere with the agreed terms and conditions of it.
