Data from the Workforce Race Equality Standards (WRES) show that 82.7% of NHS Trusts report a higher percentage of ethnic minority staff experiencing bullying, harassment, and abuse from colleagues than white staff over the previous 12 months. This ignores documented disparities that exist in society and within the NHS, where many of us have spent a considerable part of our lives. Justification for its findings is emphasised on the basis that the people holding four senior positions in the government, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Business Secretary, the Home Secretary, and the Attorney General, are from an ethnic minority background. The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism.” Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. The dangerous narrative in the report includes: “Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The Sewell Report similarly seeks to write that history again, and threatens to turn the clock back on the fight against racism by 40 years in the UK. The Scarman report concluded controversially that institutional racism did not exist. The report draws heavily from key policy documents, but with one significant omission, the Scarman report, which was commissioned in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots. The authors suggest that the report is the first to use data from the Cabinet’s Race Disparity Unit and the first government commissioned study on race to seriously engage with the impact of the family unit on outcomes. It examines the intersectionality between these and the following: ethnicity, socioeconomic background, geography, and culture and degree of integration. The 258 page report looked at four key areas: education and training employment, fairness at work, and enterprise crime and policing and, health. While we acknowledge that there are elements in the report which provide a useful narrative, we are deeply disappointed that it seeks to ignore the reality of racism in the United Kingdom. The Sewell report released on 31 March 2021 has significant implications for race relations in the UK. Under the chairmanship of Tony Sewell, the commission was set up to investigate race and ethnic disparities in the UK.
After the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in the US, the UK government established the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
0 kommentar(er)
