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  3. When Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP, gave a speech in 1968 calling for an end to immigration, he received so many letters of su

When Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP, gave a speech in 1968 calling for an end to immigration, he received so many letters of su

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问题     When Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP, gave a speech in 1968 calling for an end to immigration, he received so many letters of support that the Royal Mail had to assign him a special van, which made several deliveries a day. Race relations in Britain have since improved, in part thanks to laws passed at the end of the 1960s that criminalised racial discrimination. Laws against other types of discrimination followed. Gay, disabled, old, female—most conditions are covered. But what looks like unfair treatment is often hard to distinguish from the choices made by individuals. The Equalities Review, a semi-independent report that came out on February 28th, shows this all too clearly.
    The review matters more than many of its kind because it will guide Britain’s new super anti-discrimination agency when it begins life later this year.
    Britain relies not only on its laws to prevent unfair treatment but also on specific bodies charged with enforcing them. People need not bring discrimination cases against palaeolithic employers on their own, or club together to bring class-action suits; government-funded organisations sponsor their cases through employment tribunals. The three main quangos, which cover race, disability and sex discrimination, will in October become the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, under the guidance of Trevor Phillips. In a presentation to an all-party parliamentary group last year, Mr. Phillips wryly predicted that this new arrangement would bring "universal happiness" some time in 2009.
    In fact the best of all possible worlds may slowly be coming about without the help of the new agency, if a separate report released this week by Richard Berthoud and Morten Blekesaune of the Institute for Social and Economic Research(ISER) at Essex University is right. The Equalities Review suggests that mothers with young children trail the pack in terms of employment; but a far bigger proportion of them are working than 30 years ago.
    Women are paid less than men, but the main reason is not that potential employers see an oversized handbag stuffed with nappies and ask the next candidate to come through, but that time out of the workforce reduces wages later on. Bangladeshi and Pakistani women have low levels of employment. But this may reflect a cultural preference for women to stay at home (which plenty of them break) rather than covert racism.
    As for the oldies, the ISER report shows that the chances of someone aged between 50 and 60 being in work have picked up a bit since the late 1990s. The one group that has made no progress at all is the disabled, a broad category that includes anyone with a "limiting longstanding illness". They are the hardest to help, due to a combination of time spent out of work, which sometimes means getting stuck on incapacity benefit, and the fact that people with severe disabilities, simply cannot do some sorts of work.
    That makes the job of Mr. Phillips and his new organisation harder. The "long-term strategies, with phased targets" that the review calls for will count for little if the wrongs they are designed to right arise from individual choices, unequal results at school, spotty employment histories—or, indeed, from the condition that often underlies all of these: poverty.
    Undeterred, Mr. Phillips argues for changes in the law to permit positive discrimination where it benefits the public. When he was head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Mr. Phillips says, he had to prevent London’s police force from running a programme to recruit black officers, which would have been illegal. He also exasperated intelligence officials by asking how they could seek to hire more Muslims without breaking the law.
    Mr. Phillips reckons that it might occasionally be necessary to discriminate in favour even of whites. One of the review’s findings is that boys from poor white families are "probably the single group most likely to be shut out of higher education in future decades". Mr. Phillips thinks universities where most of the students are from ethnic minorities and disproportionately female should, for example, be allowed to seek out white boys. As discrimination goes, the notion sounds relatively benign—but out of such good intentions come perverse results.
The word "palaeolithic" in the 2nd paragraph refers to______.
选项 A、vexed
B、ill-mannered
C、reprobative
D、stale
答案D
解析
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