Herman Ouseley, who has died aged 79, was a public servant and campaigner who worked at three levels of government to bring an understanding of the challenges faced by the UK’s black population into the heart of the political establishment.
He did so by creating a link between the neighbourhood-level impacts of racism and the possibility of using the institutions of government to deliver change, during a period when Britain was moving on painfully from the early post-Windrush decades to the multiracial society it is today.
Working in community relations in south London in the 1970s, Ouseley became head of a pioneering ethnic minorities unit at the Greater London council under Ken Livingstone in the 80s and was appointed in the 90s as chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, where one of his most high-profile achievements was to establish the Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football programme to tackle the racial abuse of professional footballers.
Despite other possibilities open to him, Ouseley chose the government route to tackling racial discrimination, and it was only after a career in government administration that he went on to become a campaigner, albeit within politically non-aligned bodies. This approach allowed him a degree of independence that made it easier for the establishment to accept someone with radical aspirations in terms of equality and racial justice.
Ouseley was born in British Guiana (now Guyana). His father, a baker, died when he was seven, after which his mother remarried and moved to the UK to work as a nurse. Initially Herman remained in British Guiana, but at the age of 11 he moved to live with his mother in Peckham, south-east London, attending William Penn school in Dulwich and then Catford College.
This was a London where race riots took place in 1958, two years after his arrival. Gangs of young white men, spurred on by far-right politicians, rioted in Notting Hill against the local Caribbean population. Black people in Britain were the object of virtually unchallenged racism until the passage of the Race Relations Act, 1965, and Ouseley recalled that “I was called a black bastard and beaten up on the way home from school.”
He started his local government career as a clerical officer at Middlesex county council in 1963, then became a community relations worker in a Lambeth council-supported organisation helping young black people. By the end of the 70s he ran Lambeth’s community relations unit, which proved a stepping stone to the GLC, where he became head of its ethnic minorities unit from 1981 to 1984.
Livingstone was leader of the GLC at the time, in charge of a radical administration that prioritised initiatives and funding for minority communities. Like Livingstone, Ouseley believed in the need for deliberate policies to promote more black people and, among other things, to confront racism in textbooks. Such policies were often lampooned at the time but are now seen as mainstream.
No less radical and controversial than the GLC was Lambeth council, to where Ouseley next moved, as assistant chief executive in 1984. At the time “Red” Ted Knight was leader, engaged in a full-throttle fight with Margaret Thatcher’s government over rate capping.
But the council’s administration was in a poor state, with its leadership more interested in ideology than running services effectively, and Ouseley left in 1986 to become director of education at the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea).
The GLC was abolished that year, leaving Ilea as a residual curiosity, running schools and colleges in the inner London boroughs. Ouseley went on to be its chief executive from 1988 to 1990 until it, too, was abolished. After Ilea he became chief executive of Lambeth council, starting the long process of rebuilding its poorly run services.
He was thus employed throughout a decade of political struggle between an ideological Conservative government and radical Labour local authorities. It is hard to exaggerate how bitter the political mood was. Running complex public services in a vast city is difficult at the best of times, but Ouseley was adept at surviving, in part because he treated politicians on all sides with respect.
In 1993 the Conservative home secretary Kenneth Clarke appointed Ouseley to chair the CRE, feeling that his performance in starting to turn Lambeth around showed that he might be able to get to grips with the CRE’s own internal strife. Ouseley’s greatest mark at the CRE came to be seen as his creation of Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, later shortened to Kick It Out, which he formally launched alongside the Chelsea player Paul Elliott, with support from the Professional Footballers Association chair Gordon Taylor and black players, including Wimbledon’s John Fashanu.
Ouseley explained at the time that when he himself started playing club football in the 60s “changing rooms were filled with talk of the N word … You had to keep your cool or leave. I wasn’t prepared to walk away.”By getting high-profile clubs involved, Ouseley was able to encourage others to join, though it proved hard to convince some clubs and managers that there really was a problem. He fought not only for black players but against antisemitic chanting, and remained chair of Kick It Out for 25 years.
Ouseley’s willingness to confront controversial issues affecting the politics of race relations was clear in a report he wrote in 2001, the year after he left the CRE, about race relations in Bradford, commissioned by Bradford Vision, a local organisation chaired by the Conservative council leader Margaret Eaton.
Ouseley pointed to communities’ ignorance of each other and the influence of segregated schooling within the city. “Different cultural communities believe they get nothing, while others get all the benefits,” he said, in remarks that could easily be applied to many parts of Britain today. West Yorkshire police were criticised in his report for being afraid to tackle ethnic minority crime for fear of being labelled racist.
From 1997 to 2019 Ouseley chaired the London-based Chandran Foundation, which provides education and employment opportunities for disadvantaged young people. He was also a longstanding council member on the Institute of Race Relations, and chaired the Ujima and Carib housing associations.
Knighted in 1997, he was made a peer in 2001, sitting as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, where he spoke mainly on equality, policing, education and sport. He sat on the board of the Manchester United Foundation and was a fan of that club as well as Millwall and Dulwich Hamlet.
In 1972 he married Margaret (nee Neill), a teacher. She survives him, along with a son and a daughter.