It's time to abolish the race watchdog

This time it should be curtains, not just for Gurbux Singh, the beleaguered head of the Commission for Racial Equality, but for the hopeless and helpless race equality commission itself.

He's had to resign - with a vast Home Office payoff - because of his daft behaviour in a fracas with the police at Lord's after a one-day England-India international. But the commission he's presided over is long past its sell-by date.

This is the moment for David Blunkett, who as Home Secretary is its patron and funder, to disband it.

The episode at Lord's, it has to be admitted, is very strange. If one were as paranoid as many people involved in the commission usually are, one might wonder if the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were getting their own back in taking Gurbux Singh to court, and ending his chairmanship of the commission, over such a minor matter. The paranoid will argue that those who made claims about " institutional racism" and the like were given their comeuppance at Bow Street magistrates' court yesterday. Gurbux Singh was nailed.

I think the paranoia might, in this case, be justified. All the same, the deed is done. It remains an obvious moment to decide whether the commission is also a dead duck.

It's been a dying duck for some considerable time. It has been criticised from both left and right. On Newsnight last night, Jahangir Mohammed, director of the Centre for Muslim Affairs in Bradford, thinking back to that city's riots, dismissed the commission as a waste of space. Why, he powerfully asked, couldn't more of its £20 million budget go towards funding low-profile, but deserving cases, locally? He reckoned the commission spent far too much of its money on its own staff and on self-indulgently publicising itself.

IT IS due, shortly, to move into new headquarters for its 200 staff, near London Bridge. Every student of Parkinson's laws knows that the moment of truth for any corporation occurs when it shifts to a spanking new building with a fancy reception area. Bankruptcy is always just around the corner. Moral bankruptcy has been hovering over the commission for years.

The end is now nigh. The commission is one of those things - like many of life's disasters - which seemed, to many, like a good idea at the time. It was created by Harold Wilson's Labour government in the 1970s as a gesture towards stronger action against race discrimination and conflict. It has had some concrete achievements, like badgering the Army into being fairer to ethnic minority servicemen and women. It was shameful, of course, that such badgering was ever necessary. But, over the years, it has become increasingly inward-looking and bureaucratic.

Anyone going into their headquarters in Victoria could immediately tell that this was a failed organisation. This is something you can smell in the air. It was like going into a Marks & Spencer store in the worst of the bad days. A feeling that staff were standing around in corners, more interested in talking about their own problems, than in dealing with customers or inquiries.

And the commission has even been accused, very plausibly, of racial discrimination in its own internal workings. It's an error to think that a group of people from backgrounds as diverse as Benin and Bangladesh will immediately hit it off. Shared experience of prejudice doesn't necessarily make you into blood brothers. Trying to balance between the rivalries became a managerial nightmare.

The commission has also shared a poisonous predicament with many well-meaning charities and voluntary bodies. This is what's known in such circles as the "MHG problem." The initials stand for Moral High Ground. In these circumstances, even the mildest difference of opinion or approach becomes a fraught ethical and personal issue. Tempers rise, like a mad thermometer. Meanwhile, nothing gets done.

Chairman after chairman at the commission has arrived in hope and left in near-despair. Gurbux Singh's despair will be assuaged by his £115,000 Home Office payoff. His predecessor, Lord Ouseley, was also recruited from one of London's less well-run boroughs - Lambeth, rather than Gurbux Singh's Haringey. Looking back to his time as chairman, Ouseley has been quoted as saying: "You feel like topping yourself, most of the time." Fortunately, he never did. But the moment has come to top the commission.

Many local authorities have already wound up their race equality committees. They began to feel that they were more trouble than they were worth. Their solution was to wrap everything up into a general equality committee, bringing discrimination on grounds of sex or disability under the same watchdog. This is what's been batted about for some time both within Whitehall and outside. Roll together the race commission-the Equal Opportunities-Commission (which handles sex discrimination) and the Disability Rights Commission.

It has not been done, till now, for one simple reason. These things are seen as deeply symbolic. Every group has its lobbyists and its devoted advocates. The MHG problem arises in triplicate. Everyone stands on their ethical dignity. Ministers have plenty of other issues to contend with. This one, they've reckoned, can rest gently on the back burner.

UNDER the Thatcher and Major administrations, the Commission for Racial Equality was, by and large, simply ignored, and its budget shrank. With Jack Straw's advent as Home Secretary, and especially in the aftermath of Stephen Lawrence's murder, the commission's role was expanded. But there's little evidence that it's been up to this wider task. It's been more like the load of hay that broke the spavined camel's back.

David Blunkett should take a tougher line. The commission should be put out of its misery, and merged. The broader question is whether all three commissions mayn't have had their day. Couldn't the issues involved, however fraught, be left to the workings of the laws of England? Do we even need a combined Equality Commission? That bit of boldness will have to await another day, and another government. Let's make a start with Gurbux Singh's tattered empire now.