This is an interesting viewpoint (by Brian Cox on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site) on discrimination and “affirmative action” – a name I don’t like, although the term “positive discrimination” is no better.
It highlights the issue of what exactly we are trying to achieve with our discrimination legislation. Those in the private sector can’t use race as a characteristic when recruiting, and few would disagree with this. In the public sector it goes further than this: with race, for example, there is a duty on public sector employers to take steps to eliminate unlawful racial discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups.
But how do you measure the results? What, from a concrete view, are you trying to achieve? The logic often used is that you should simply look at employment figures. If all our public sector employees are white, then surely there’s an impediment to ethnic minorities becoming civil servants. The shortcomings of this simplistic analysis are shown by looking at some extremes. Let’s take Leicester – one of the UK’s most diverse cities. Of its 280,000 inhabitants over 100,000 are non-white. Leicester is on target to be a city where whites form an ethnic minority by 2015. Its police service on the other hand has a mere 5.8% ethnic minority officers. Even allowing for the fact the constabulary covers the county as well, which will presumably be less diverse, this is a huge difference. The question is therefore why there are so few ethnic minority officers. The answer must be, as Brian Cox says, that they just don’t want to do it. Our attitudes are culturally provided, and at the risk of judging the issue by stereotypes the number of ethnic minority entrants into law, accountancy, pharmacy and other professions will be at a much higher proportion.
So what do you want to do? Ensure equal opportunities, or modify people’s aspirations – basically social modelling? Is the latter even moral, let alone practical?
