ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evolution of policy in an area where most of the concerns that have dominated the post-war debate on the evolution of the Welfare State have generally had little or no application. The decade of the 1950s is often portrayed as a period when the policy makers slept – the first and crucial example of indifference to the growth of a significant social policy issue. During the latter part of the 1960s the apparatus of the Welfare State began to come to terms with the fact of ethnic diversity and the different needs generated by that fact. The distance travelled over the course of the 1970s is perhaps best measured by looking backwards and comparing the expectation of policy makers and analysts with the reality as it emerged during its course. Successive defeats inflicted on successive governments in that struggle had by 1981 undermined most of the progress of race relations policy.
