New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations

This ‘debate piece’ discusses issues of equality and diversity in a period of changed circumstances and emergent challenges. The first part notes shifts affecting equal opportunities, the accommodation of ‘difference’, and the position of low-income groups, and reflects on implications. The second reviews issues around labour market migration and social rented housing. The third comments on the rise of particularism. Finally, the closing section refers briefly to a policy path creating space for localised autonomy and ‘consumer insulation’ via social housing. This highlights the potential clash with equal opportunities that is implicit within particularism as manifested in the idea of localism. Underpinning the commentary throughout the paper is a view that certain assumptions and apparent certainties in equal opportunities and ethnic relations scholarship appear less reliable than previously.