Bado kidogo ........ no more

Readers of this blog will know of my admiration for the work of James Cameron, the journalist.


It is thanks to him that I was recently able to extend my vocabulary of phrases from across the world [whatever happened to 'my postillion has been struck by lightning?] to now include "Bado kidogo".


From Swahili spoken in east Africa, it translates, roughly, as 'Not just yet'.


Straight-away I recognised the phrase as being some long lost section of a map for that part of my life's work which continues to baffle, frustrate and exasperate.  "Bado kidogo" is the missing fragment of the map.


I have been for as long as I can remember and in some form or another, seeking out and eliminating the dragons of discrimination, inequality and injustice.  I do so with some vigour and not a little passion.  I do not always hang around and wait on a consensus emerging from my peers on the need to do this or that, and instead will rush off to re-enact 'High Noon' with the outlaw gang who, say, have not started to reduce the gender pay gap and have no obvious plans for doing so.  


There appears to be a universal phrase book which most of those working on equalities use to explain why, say, eliminating the gender pay gap, or having more BME people in senior positions in the NHS, is of course a goal they absolutely and unequivocally share.  It is just that there is so much else to do, so many people to be trained first, so many legal obstacles [even although equal pay is a legal requirement itself], it is too difficult just now, that no-one else is doing it, that the data is not available, that we can't achieve everything by tomorrow, and that surely it is all really rather academic because we are all really nice people and would not discriminate against anyone, and by the way did I know that some of their best friends/colleagues/neighbours are gay/black/Polish?  I now know the map of the territory they have been using to plot the path of their work for decades.  Bado kidogo, Wlad, bado kidogo.


It even exists at senior levels in government.  How many times I have come across reports on equalities which offer the clichéd 'we have achieved much in the last 3 years on [disability/race/gender] equality, but much work remains to be done'.  Bado kidogo.


The duplicity is staggering and goes way beyond anything Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have achieved.  Here we are more than 40 years on from the Equal Pay Act 1970 - yes, 1970 - and we still don't have equal pay.  Just as bad, we can't even routinely find evidence from public bodies of just what their gender pay gap is.  Public bodies have been breaking the law for decades and women have been cheated out of probably £billions.


The Race Relations Act of 1976 has given us 35 years in which to change systems, mindsets, practices, and behaviours, so that BME people can live with, alongside and be part of us and our society, free of discrimination and free of fear.  


Government and the public sector has tossed, wasted, lost, and abandoned the opportunity of those decades.  We still live in a Scotland where you can pay with your life for being 'different', where your employment and career development options are just not comparable to those enjoyed and taken for granted by non-BME people.  Most public bodies can't - 35 years on - give you accurate data on the ethnicity of their workforce, can't give you data on the pay gap between white and BME staff, and very, very few can tell you - 35 years on - what service users think of the public services provided and whether BME and white people enjoy the same opportunities to use the services or get the same quality of service when they are able to use them.


On race equality as with gender equality - government and public bodies have been breaking the race equality law for decades and BME people, their children, and their children's children have been cheated out of life opportunities and been denied the right to live a life free of fear and abuse.


It is time, long overdue, for government and the public sector to stop clinging on to the comfort blanket that is 'bado kidogo' and its many variants.  For those who are unable to imagine that equality can be delivered in their lifetime, I would suggest it is time they moved aside and made way for people who want to construct a society where equality for all exists today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.  It is time, as the Proclaimer's might once have sung, for 'Bado kidogo no more'.

Awk, Awk, Awk ......

A couple of decades ago I stumbled over some brilliant writing by James Cameron, a journalist from the mid-twentieth century and one for whom the old title, 'foreign correspondent', was minted.


I lost the book - well, I loaned it to a friend who never got around to giving it back.  Recent events in the shape of the tidal wave of duplicity routinely passed off as journalism in the News of the World and now engulfing journalism more widely and our political system, made me find another copy and re-read it, for I was sure Cameron would have something to say from his coverage of events then which would have relevance now.  I managed to find a copy.  Not the print I had or wanted [which contained chronological references to when Cameron originally wrote many of the pieces in his anthology] but a print nonetheless, with a glowing Foreword of respect from Andrew Marr in 2005 - pre-dating his [Marr's] super-injunction.  Even that brief 'issue' [the abuse of super-injunctions] has been swept aside in the torrent of almost daily revelations about who News International bugged and if they were still alive at the time.


I digress.


Cameron's book.  Get it.  Read it.  Read it again.  Called 'Point of Departure' it is a revelation, a window into how journalism used to be.  It covers the world and the events and issues which focused minds in the middle of the last century.  It also finds Cameron cross and re-cross a world where RyanAir and EasyJet had yet to arrive and make flight today almost as common place as getting a train or bus.  Cameron's trip to Enver Hoxha's Albania illustrates this difference, albeit indirectly, when he describes having upset his hosts and being expelled from the country forthwith.  The drama of the moment was somewhat lessened by the reality of there only being two flights every 15 days in and out of Tirana.

James Cameron - India 1967

Cameron is clear that probably the biggest issue for him in his lifetime was the nuclear bomb.  It is his story and he tells it well.  Suffice to say he was one of the founding members of CND.


Prior to this he was one of the few Brirtish journalists to be witness to a test, by the US, of a nuclear bomb.  If I remember right, he has some unique claim in having witnessed 3 such tests.


His first relates to the US navy testing the effect of the overhead detonation of a nuclear bomb on their fleet.  In short they parked a load of ships in and around the Bikini atoll and dropped a bomb.  Amongst thousands of others, Cameron was there as witness.  


In the debriefing afterwards, journalists were provided with an overload of data as to the immediately observed effects of the bomb.  

"I had listened to every conceivable exponent of the obscurer isms, down to the underwater specialist whose contribution to the sum of human knowledge was the fact that the shrimps at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon could talk.  They made a sound, he said, resembling : "Awk, Awk".  Questioned after the explosion as to the behaviour of the atomised shrimps, he replied : "They are still saying 'Awk, Awk', only shriller."  It was one of the merriest of occasions, for those who took their fun out of the world's despair."

When re-reading this recently it struck me that this piece could well have been written very recently in a study of the banking failures of these last few years and how these had affected you and I, only this time it is not shrimps at the bottom of Bikini lagoon who are shrilly crying 'Awk, Awk', it is humanity itself.

NHS 'failing in performance' on equality

In July 2011 the Equality & Human Rights Commission quietly published a report on how well the NHS in England has been doing in meeting its existing, pre-Equality Act, public sector equality duties.  You might have missed it in all the hubbub of reportage around the farce/tragedy engulfing News International, the Met, unopened bin bags, and the government.

Remember, the NHS is huge. In England it serves over 51 million people, employs more than 1.3 million people, and has a budget of around £100 billion.

With that kind of presence you would expect that the NHS has been trailblazing and showing the rest of the public sector how to meet if not exceed the general duties on race, gender and disability equality, as well as delivering person-centred and measurable, permanent changes in the actual experiences of people when they use the health service.  That would give the NHS a fabulous foundation from which to tackle the new general and specific equality duties covering all the protected characteristics, as set out in the Equality Act 2010.  It would give real hope to millions of people who still encounter discrimination on a daily basis, that the tide was turning and that the daily insults and indignities they face would soon be history.  It would offer real chances to the same millions that maybe, just maybe, they could soon expect to get a fair chance at getting a job and developing a career, as many others have and do.

You would expect that. 

Read the report.  On page 7 you will find that :

‘no [health] authority or trust included in the sample was likely to be fully performing on all the three duties, and most were likely to have significant failings in performance’.

On page 27, you will read :

‘…combined with the concerns regarding the ability of schemes to enable authorities to meet their general duties outlined above, increases the likelihood that inequalities across commissioning, services, and employment not only remain but also become more pronounced’.

And on page 35, the report offers :

‘given that a key intention of this assessment was to move the focus from the content of equality schemes to the achievement of equality outcomes as a key measure of performance, the lack of evidence of implementation and impact is of serious concern’.

These findings come at a time when the government has been casually butchering the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, with no real opposition being offered up in the House of Commons.  The protections offered in the detail of the first draft specific equality duties have been shredded by George Osborne in a brief frenzy of blood-thirsty, Texas chainsaw-style editing being sold, spiv-like, as removing red-tape.  Again, the inactivity of the opposition is puzzling.

George Osborne - blood-thirsty
shredding of specific equality duties

In Scotland’s NHS, we don’t have the advantage of that kind of report.  We have not a clue whether we are miles better than England – in which case we should offer to help – or that maybe we are we just as desperately bad in what we have done, and seriously ill-prepared for what we now have to do.  We are, as ever, blundering around in the dark.

Nicola Sturgeon could change that

Nicola Sturgeon could change that.  As Cabinet Secretary for Health [and she also has Equality in her handbag], she could commission a report which tells her what NHS Scotland has managed to achieve on the previous equality duties covering race, disability and gender.  It would be easy.  She has already signed off a benchmarking report in 2009 which provided a fair amount of self-assessed detail on where the NHS in Scotland was with that work. 

Before getting her officials to draft another attempt at specific equality duties for Scotland, you would expect that Nicola Sturgeon would ask them to do a fast update to that 2009 report. 

You would expect that.

Equalising the water levels on which society floats

This piece was first commissioned from me by a guy called Kurt April and printed in a South African journal he publishes early in 2007.  I believe it remains as relevant today as it did then.

In the formal and popular history of the 19th century, Abe Lincoln is often credited with ending the fundamental inequality that was slavery in the US.  Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, Martin Luther King struggled and died in pursuit of freedom for his brothers and sisters from that century’s mutation of plantation slavery into racial apartheid.

WLADYSLAW MEJKA argues that Lincoln’s legal remedy did not deliver equality, and King’s dream remains unrealised.

Our hesitant and uncertain opening of the gift of opportunity that is the 21st century finds us reaching for ever more legal remedies as we scrub away at the shame of inequality in all its forms.  With these we believe we can create passports to the heart of society for those people and communities who have been systematically excluded and, sometimes brutally, marginalised from the choices and options many of us take for granted – a home, paid and satisfying work, healthcare based on need, and the opportunity to have our minds educated and our horizons of personal possibility widened.

Part of the inherent flaw in the use of legal remedy is to be found in the dynamic which occurs when those with power to legislate bestow carefully and complexly constructed rights on those people who are huddled at the margins of the society we create and recreate daily.  The enactment of any law providing for equality and human rights is merely a formal announcement that a legislature wants to adjust the more overt and embarrassing imbalances in how society provides equality of opportunity for all. It represents a careful and calculated ceding of some of the power and privilege which our society elites accumulate as by-products of their class, profession, financial and material wealth, or inherited privilege.  Offering to allow, however enthusiastically, a share of the opportunity cake cannot and will not create equality.  Ending inequality, from whatever limiting restraints society imposes on people, is not realised when the barriers themselves are declared unlawful.  It can only be realised when excluded people themselves refuse to accept there is a legal or moral basis for their continued exclusion and assert their equal right to live, work, and play in, as well as shape the heart of, our society.

We can no more assert that a person has equal rights and expect that to be the reality for them, than we can assert, no matter how loudly and with whatever passion, to those who ponder suicide that they have a right to life.  These are not the only flaws in the legal remedy approach.  Adding to an already crammed statute book actually triggers the creation of additional barriers to equality, as the various cadres of the elite use the opportunity of more regulation to create commissions which will publish guidance, codes with their own unique jargon, secondary level regulations, more guidance, performance frameworks, good practice notes, research and monitoring reports on how inequality must be removed – eventually, at some indeterminate point in the future, possibly, just maybe, but not today.  Real ownership of the commissions remains firmly in the hands of government using patronage of appointment to ensure a malleable board of friends.  Carefully controlled dilution of such boards allows the token appointment of someone already passported in from the margins and who provides the all too illusory window dressing that this time it is not just the usual suspects.  Courts, tribunals, the judiciary and lawyers strengthen their role as interpreters of law, put a brake on the pace of any change, and aid and abet commissions in maintaining the elaborate fiction that permanent change is taking place.

Thus the transfer of power is weakened, the devolution of decision making delayed, and the distance which many must travel from the margins to the heart of our society is, in many cases, actually increased.

ILLUSION OF CASCADING EQUALITY

This grand and elaborate illusion of cascading equality continues to mesmerise as the ripples spread from the law makers, interpreters and enforcers, and laps up against the labyrinth of flood barriers – a.k.a. the voluntary sector, which prevent the equalisation of the water levels on which our societies float.

The western model of work on delivering equalities and human rights has mutated through various evolutionary cycles and social influences – religious missions, work houses and poor houses, charitable “good” works, the co-operative movement, nationalisation and, in the latter half of the 20th century, the arrival of the voluntary sector or, for that brief moment in time, the “third way”.  Tellingly, one of the common ways this sector uses to describe itself and its role in our society is to talk of the number of people it employs and the value of resources it handles, often estimated at billions of pounds.

Encompassing everything from unpaid individuals working out of their spare room to multi-million pound businesses, often with a chain of fund-raising charity shops and a chief executive on a six-figure salary, the “third way” has forged a near-monopoly in working with people who are excluded, marginalised or simply forgotten by society.  As with any other monopoly, this has come with a price tag of its own.  The voluntary sector has created, and sustains to this day, a dependency culture between it and the very communities of people on whose behalf it exists.  Some organisations have been around for over a century and plan, without any trace of irony, on being around for some time yet.  Many have seen the original energy and righteous indignation which founded their organisation, morph into a mission which borrows heavily from 21st century business-speak – market share, cost-benefit analysis, balance sheets and bottom lines.

It can be no surprise that the priority for much of the sector is to stay “in business”.  A common denominator for many organisations in the voluntary sector is in rescuing people once they have become trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare that society becomes when any crisis can trigger an implosion of our fragile existences.  Over time, voluntary sector organisations become expert in negotiating what can often seem a perverse maze of rights and entitlements, often understanding the application of the law better than those who originally created it.  Some end up advising government, with secondments into the permanent civil service being so common as to be unremarkable.

Substantial amounts of government funding now goes direct into the voluntary sector, and the relationship between the two sectors is inescapably tainted and compromised.  And what about the knowledge and expertise accumulated over decades of working at dismantling the exclusion experience by particular groups of people?  Has it been cascaded down and out into society itself so that more and more people likely to be at risk can self-identify the beginning of a crisis and take avoiding action themselves, without the intervention and hand-holding of experts?   Has there been robust and rigorous analysis of models, systems and methods of working at, say, eradicating the need for people to experience homelessness or end up sleeping rough on our streets?

No.  For almost half a century in the UK, charities have created a growth industry in working with people who are homeless.  Not one has debated, analysed and invited questioning about the real effectiveness of their approach, concluded that it was not good enough, that it was locked into a depressing cycle of repeat short-term fixes, and that the best solution was to wind up the business.

Not one has a measurable target or timeframe within which the exclusion or marginalisation must end or a new, more radical approach be encouraged to replace the bankrupt approach currently used.  Homelessness in the UK, 50 years on, remains for many people a very real, personal, and deeply disturbing human indignity.  The all too depressingly large number of women, men and children who are stripped of that dignity each day through being deprived of a home remains stubbornly indifferent to the last 50 years of effort and shows no sign of responding to another 50 years of similar effort.  This wilful inability to recognise that the causes of inequality are continuing to defy the energy and efforts to deal with its outcomes, applies across the vast spectrum of the equality industry.

The industry is failing, on a daily basis, the very people it believes it exists to serve. 

RADICAL REFORM NEEDED

If we are to break the dependency culture between people and the voluntary sector which “rescues” them from crisis, exclusion or marginalisation, radical reform of the sector’s ethos is required.  If we are to build a society in which all have equal opportunity to realise their potential, access what they need, and contribute according to their ability, then the transfer of equality rights from the statute book and into a practical reality relevant to the everyday lives of citizens requires similar radical reform.

Instead of seeing people as being in crisis, excluded or marginalised, we need to reframe our perceptions of what these situations represent and so re-engineer the terms of engagement between agencies and people.  The social model of disability offers a near perfect example of reframing, placing the emphasis on the cause of exclusion as being clearly located in the physical and attitudinal structures of society and not in the person with

disabilities.

Thus when we have a real awareness of daily living for a disabled person who uses a wheelchair to attain  independent mobility, our perceptions of stepped access to a building change, and we see it not as an architectural design feature but as the barrier it is. Instead, with reframing we look to provide a physical alteration which enables all people to use the same physical point of access.  When we come to design new buildings, we provide architects and engineers with client design briefs which ensure that showcase staircases exist only as faint, flickering, black-and-white movie memories in which Fred and Ginger go up the stair, just so that they can sing and then dance down again.

Extending reframing in this way beyond the social model of disability and into other areas of inequality will be directly challenging to the orthodoxy in the equality industry.

For example, reframing how we see a person as homeless or at risk of being homeless could help us devise radical new responses.  Where organisations that lend capital to a person so that they can buy their home find the person can no longer meet the repayments, the traditional response is to repossess the home with the typical consequence that the person becomes homeless or roofless.  It is not in society’s best interests that this happens and yet it does, with many voluntary sector agencies existing solely to pick up and patch up the pieces of those whose lives are fractured in this way.  Reframing would find organisations that lend the money to home-buyers acknowledging that they too are stakeholders in our society and thus it is not in their interests to have people homeless, or to be a significant part of the causes of homelessness.

Having reframed the situation, what practical alternatives emerge?  That the lender instead of automatically moving to repossess, has on its payroll its own expert staff with relevant experience and resources and who will work in partnership with the person, other housing providers and relevant agencies, to identify and secure alternative housing options and other support which will better meet the person’s changed circumstances.  Along with other changes in attitude and practice, reframing the terms of engagement could bring about a dramatic and permanent reduction in the levels of homelessness.  If that is what we want to achieve.

Another reframe has to be placed on how we transfer equality rights from the statute book into what becomes a relevant practical reality for people.  Simply put, our current model is one where working with people who are excluded or marginalised is seen as best left to the voluntary sector experts and specialists.  In social model of disability terms this is the equivalent of leaving the entrance steps in place and hiring a commissionaire to physically lift the disabled person and wheelchair in and out of the building.  Fine for the employment prospects of weight-lifters and governors of California, but continued social exclusion of disabled people.

If we are to equalise the water levels on which our societies float, there are two other areas where we need to reframe what we do and why in making equality happen.

If we accept the voluntary sector is a vast reservoir of knowledge, expertise and understanding of the current systems and practices [including the law itself] in society which are barriers to equality, an immediate and priority objective has to be a large-scale and permanent programme of knowledge transfer from that sector directly to those individual people who will benefit from it.  By distilling all that knowledge and experience down into a series of the kind of “how to ...” guides now ubiquitous in the use of IT software programmes, we can empower people to self-identify the barriers which they encounter and plot their own personal journey beyond those barriers and back into the heart of our society.

By providing people with these and other similar tools of self-determination, we avoid the fatal flaw of asserting a person’s equality on their behalf and instead allow them the oxygen with which to make their own declaration of independence. 

In similar terms, we must reframe our expectations of how and why governments legislate on equality and human rights and so remove the inherent barriers which are a by-product of the processes used to reform and implement the law on equalities.  There exists a presumption that the genesis of new law, its drafting and re-drafting in the various legislature contexts, underpinning it with explanatory regulations, and translating it into quasi-judicial guidance, has to be written for and can only be understood by a limited and exclusive audience.  If we reframe to presume instead that any new law, particularly on equalities and human rights, should be accessible to and useable by the people it is intended to benefit, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that all future legislation should only take effect when plain language “how to” guides, providing contexts and illustrations relevant to non-experts and non-professionals, are universally accessible to all.

Finally, none of these or other potential reforms will assist or hasten our collective arrival at the desired destination unless all of us accept we have a personal, direct and constant responsibility for creating our society in which all have equality of opportunity.  When you buy or rent your next home, will you check that it offers level access suitable for a disabled person who uses a wheelchair and use that information to decide whether it will indeed be your next home?

Time to call in the government's IOU's on Equality

For a long time now, our government has promised much on tackling discrimination and inequality, as well as putting in place equality of opportunity.  They are of course required to do this in law - deliver, not just promise to do it, not just talk about doing it, but deliver it.  With evidence.  


Those of you familiar with the many different forms of government promises are I know exhausted with the effort required to keep up with the volume of promises made.


For instance.  In 2008, government published what it planned to do over the next 3 years to meet its legal duties on delivering race equality.  It published 428 pages of what it was/is going to do.  If you have the energy and the time, you can open it here.


Just in case race equality is not your bag, maybe you want to know what is promised on disability equality.  Again, government has a legal duty to deliver disability equality.  In 2008, government published another hefty 315 pages of promises on what is was going to do over the next 3 years to meet its legal duties.  


Add in the promises on delivering gender equality, also published in 2008 - a modest 303 pages long - and you begin to get an idea of just how difficult it is to hold government to account.  Over these last 3 years there have been at least 1,000 pages of IOU's written and covering what government will do for Scotland's citizens on delivering equality.  With such a blizzard of promissory notes, it is well nigh impossible for anyone to keep track of what they have done, not done, why, and measure what difference, if any, has been made to the daily living experiences of the people supposed to benefit.


Roaming around the government's web site one stumbles on what appear to be random progress reports which may relate to some of those many, many pages of Equality IOU's.


On the health needs of gypsy/travellers, government commissioned the development of a Handheld Health Record.  This approach was apparently developed in partnership between the National Resource Centre for Ethnic Minority Health and gypsy/traveller communities.  The web page telling you about this also explains that the approach will be reviewed after a 'reasonable period of usage'.  If you get on to that web page, scroll all the way down to the bottom and look closely at the small print in the bottom right hand corner.  Got it ?  It tells you when this page was last updated.  Safe to assume nothing else has happened since then, else government would want you and I to know how well they were improving things for the gypsy/travelling community?


It says - or it did when I wrote this in July 2011 - that the page had been last updated on Wednesday October 12th 2005.  Almost 6 years ago.  Nothing new added since.  No more progress to report.  Nothing about how, maybe, it has been a brilliant idea and makes a huge difference to the health of gypsy/travellers.  Nothing about how, maybe, it has just not worked out at all and not delivered any health benefits for gypsy/travellers.  Just a big fat nothing.


This concept of transparency and accountability between government and citizens has failed.  I don't know if it ever worked, but it is clearly unfit for purpose - big time.  It is a spit in the eye of the democratic model of government.


This old paternalistic, inaccessible, tick-box style of pretending to deliver equality is so well past its sell-by/use-by date, the stink is about as bad as that hovering like a mushroom cloud over Wapping.


We need a new model and a new culture for government accountability and transparency in delivering equality – and we need it now, not next year, maybe, after a research study, when the recession is over, and all the other classic establishment delaying tactics. 


The next waves of government promises on equality action have to be set out in ways which describe how a person’s experience of public services will change as a direct result – not tell us that government will train all its staff in being nice to Meerkats.  The days of government casually scribbling another thousand or so IOU's on Equality must end.


Smart technology design should be used to allow citizens to check if the new promises are being kept.  If Tesco can use the web technology to email you to tell you exactly when those must-have, 3-pack,  50% off, sequinned thongs are back in stock at your local store, government can email you to tell you - because you asked - when the gender pay gap has fallen below 3%. 


We also need to create a new culture of policing the big picture of all the promises being made, and fill the gap left by the lack of an effective regulator.  Government needs to fund voluntary sector organisations [with 5-10 year deals] to monitor its progress and performance on delivering equality for all of our equality communities, and not just after the event, but before promised action deadlines are reached.  These organisations need to be independent of government [using the model of Commissioners] and be required to report directly and annually to Parliament, perhaps to the Equal Opportunities Committee.  

Government IOU's on equality being called in

The credit bubble burst round about the time government last scribbled those thousand pages of Equality IOU's.  Government needs to realise the credibility bubble has also burst on what it has been doing - and not doing - on equality.  The debt it owes Scotland's marginalised and excluded people is now toxic.  It is time to call in all those IOU's and deliver what was promised - eliminate the discrimination so many Scottish people are encountering in their daily lives.

Follow the money for equality - for some

It is said to be an aphorism amongst investigative journalists that one should 'follow the money'.  There was money, amongst other things, in Watergate, and there is money in the News of the World hacking saga.


In one of my many attempts to find out why government does what it does [and what it doesn't] on equality, I tried to find out why something called EBAG was given favoured access to government and particularly to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, John Swinney.  

John Swinney

EBAG [the Equality & Budget Advisory Group] claims to do all sorts of good, Mom & Apple Pie, work.  You can form your own view just how good that is by reading the not so plain language web pages on EBAG.  For some odd reason - quirky sense of humour, maybe? - the main EBAG page uses a graphic of money falling into and overflowing from an outstretched hand.  It certainly can't be a metaphor of the government largesse flowing to the voluntary sector which does most of the work in making equalities happen in Scotland.


I have been trying to establish some kind of transparency and accountability for EBAG.  It seemingly influences John Swinney as he ponders how to allocate the Scottish budget and take the likely impact on equalities into account.  A grand concept, but who decides who sits on EBAG and thus influences John's decisions?  I have asked twice now and have yet to get a clear, unequivocal answer.  I've been told :

members of the EBAG have been chosen on the basis of their ability to provide meaningful input into the Group's work

Have a look at the members on the EBAG web page.  6 government divisions have seats.  The government Equality Unit leads and chairs the Group.  COSLA has a seat, though they have a questionable track record on delivering equalities across local government.

The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] also gets a seat on EBAG.  Odd.  The regulator on equalities, the police on equalities, the EHRC, is inside the tent when it comes to influencing financial decisions of government.  So, if the Cabinet Secretary for Finance decides to slash direct government spending on supporting organisations working in, say, race equality, is the EHRC able to critique that decision?  Unlikely if you are part of the process, no matter how ambiguous.


So, that is 7 government seats, a seat for local government, and a seat inside the tent for a body which should be outside the tent.  Or put another way, 9 of the usual suspects.


And how many seats are there for the people who can give oxygen to the views and experiences of Scotland's diverse equality communities, when the rare opportunity comes along to nudge the Cabinet Secretary for Finance?  Count for yourself.  2 seats.  One for the Scottish Women's Budget Group, and one for the Equality Network, an organisation representing part of the LGB & T community in Scotland.


Nobody representing the views and experiences of the Black Minority Ethnic communities.  Nobody allowed to explain to the Cabinet Secretary how a different budget allocation could help get more disabled people into work.  Nobody claiming the rights of older people to be heard in the detailed workings of this group, and equally no voice for young adults and children.


Creating and sustaining unelected bodies, which lack transparency, and which are unaccountable to the public, is part of the wellspring from which flows the structural and institutional discrimination which remains endemic in the public sector.

It is quite simply wrong, and is a stain on Scotland's reputation in the world of equalities.  Access to influencing decisions, or even just nudges towards a maybe, on Scotland's budgets needs to be open and transparent, and the opportunity made equally available to all.

Government has recently been made to accept that it is a human right that the police must not formally interview a person on suspicion of an offence without the presence of a lawyer.  It is surely also a matter of human rights that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance ensures his EBAG does not continue to attempt to nudge his decisions unless people from all the equality communities are properly involved in shaping the strength and direction of those nudges.

Whistling in the darkness of inequality

In our superfast communications age - although people yet to be born will laugh [just like those Smash eejits] at what we now think of as superfast - where such as Google can remind you what you had for breakfast this time last year, how many pairs of shoes you bought in the sales last week, and might even have completed and submitted the census form on your behalf - we can't get a hold of data which tells us if government action on delivering disability equality is really making a difference to disabled people.

You would imagine that government would want to be rushing the statistics out on a quarterly basis to show how the world - well, our small corner of the world - is really a better place for disabled people under their leadership - and that it will get even better this time next year.  

You would imagine it would be easy, after all these years of good practice, legal obligations, the moral case, the business case, for us to routinely know and for us to be able to easily find out without the tedious fan dance of a Freedom of Information request, for instance, how many disabled people are in the Scottish Cabinet.  You would imagine.

Scottish Cabinet at accessible Bute House

You might also imagine that, by this time, we would know what disabled people think about, say, audiology services provided in their health board area.  For some disabled people with hearing impairments, the quality and accessibility of these services could be crucial to their daily lives.  It would also be good to know if their experience of these services has changed for the better over, say, the last 5 years, or has it got worse?  We don’t know.  The information is not being gathered.  I know.  I am a disabled person with a profound hearing impairment. 

And don’t bother asking Nicola Sturgeon if she knows.  She doesn’t.  Her officials will tell you that she/they do not hold this information centrally.

Nicola Sturgeon

Some of you reading this blog will know that the employment rate for disabled people is dire, shameful, and deeply embarrassing for government.  It is also a dehumanising experience for the many disabled people who are out of work.  Just 50% of disabled people are in work, compared to 80% of non-disabled people being in work.  The Shaw Trust can give you a shed load more on what that means for people.

You would imagine then, given this level of structural and institutional discrimination, the years of good practice, legal obligations, the moral case, the business case, the myriad of 3-year £multi-million funded projects, the constant tweaking of the benefit support systems, that we should by now routinely know, or it should at least be easy for us to find out, for instance, just how many disabled people are employed in all 32 local authorities and 22 health boards in Scotland.  That could help us work out who is doing well and so help other public bodies do better.  You would imagine.

That alone would not be enough.  We would need to know how the numbers and percentages have changed over the last 5 or 10 years.  We would need to know how many disabled people are in senior positions [say earning over £30,000?] in local government and in the health service, and how all of that has changed in the last 5 or 10 years.  This kind of data would help us know what was working, what wasn't working, and what we needed to change.  It would provide government with integrity when it engages, yet again, with disabled people over plans to change and improve what life will be like tomorrow, always tomorrow.

Don’t bother asking Nicola Sturgeon if she knows.  She doesn’t.

In case you are wondering if I am randomly picking on Nicola, I am not.  She is the Cabinet Minister in Scotland with responsibility for equality.

But she doesn’t know if the work of her government, the work of local government, the work of the health service, is actually delivering real, measurable, person-centred improvements in the life experiences of Scotland's disabled people.  Without this kind of data, we don’t know if things are changing for the better for disabled people.  Without this data, things could be getting made worse for disabled people.  We don’t know.

There are many indicators we can use to gauge just how serious government is in tackling equality.  One of them is – or should be - easy access to good quality, reliable, person-centred data.  It is not there.

Another would be to drop into government’s web site and browse what they say they have been doing on equality.

Try it.  Get a feel for the urgency with which government is tackling inequality and discrimination.  Or, as it says itself:

This part of the Scottish Government website aims to give an overview of work being undertaken by the Government to promote equality and inclusion for disabled people, and also provides information about how the Government is meeting its duties under legislation.

Scroll down to the bottom of that page.  Read the date when government had anything new to say about what they had been doing on disability equality or what successes had been achieved for disabled people.  September 2009.

If you believe government is doing a good job on delivering disability equality for Scotland’s disabled people, do please let Nicola know.  It is only right we should encourage government.

If on the other hand you believe disabled people have been betrayed by government and that the sloth-like pace of change, amply illustrated in the government’s own web site, is unacceptable, do please let Nicola know.

She and her Cabinet colleagues are there to serve the people of Scotland and to meet the legal duties they have to deliver equality in all that they do.  There is no evidence that they are meeting those duties.  Government is whistling in the dark.