Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

For a long time the music of the Pogues was an essential daily feature of my life, along with too many fags and jugs of black coffee, spiked with the odd drink or four at the end of some very long days in my trade union work during the 1980's.  Shane MacGowan was, for me, an heroic figure during that twisted time, when the rich got obscenely richer and the poor were just ignored.  He captured the rotten, twisted, poison of society then and gave voice to some profound discontent and dissent.  He articulated what it was like for so many whose lives were not just touched but torched by Thatcher.   Many a night I found myself shattered after dealing with the human carnage of yet another round of cuts, re-organisations and worst of all redundancies.  After a few beers, I would find some kind of solace, some maudlin comfort, some understanding, in the sound, the passion and the lyrics of the Pogues.

Recently, as I have been excavating my way through and under the keech which passes for what public sector bodies call workforce employment monitoring in relation to equalities, I have found my mind more and more turning to a Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.   The cover of that album [see below] always seemed as if it was a potent comment on the toxic wasteland of society which Thatcher and her boys were creating, with those who were not part of her infamous 'one of us' cadre being cast adrift, like the crew of the shipwrecked Medusa, wondering if safe haven would ever be reached in our lifetime.

One of the equality communities I have been digging for data on is that of disabled people.  It is one of the many communities I personally identify with, along with having an ethnicity I describe as mongrel European, and one who consistently fails the ever-changing nationality tests set by government. In the NHS in Scotland, my calculations are that if all the NHS Boards employed the proportion of people - 13.1% - cited by the Equality & Human Rights Commission as being the available disabled adult working population, then across the entire NHS in Scotland there would be over 20,200 people on the payroll identifying as disabled.  The reality?  As published by NHS Scotland itself?  722.  

I shovelled around in the keech of what are the published employment data sets of Scotland's 32 councils.  They employ 254,800 people.  If they met the 13.1% level, that would mean 33,379 people being employed across all councils and happy to identify as being disabled.  The reality?  From data made available by councils themselves [19 out of 32] the average employment rate for disabled people is 2.04%.  This translates across all 32 councils as meaning there are just 5,198 disabled people employed in councils.  Yes, some 28,000 people short of being able to say that councils don't discriminate against disabled people. So while government, the media and others combine to demonise, marginalise and stigmatise disabled people as shirkers and a burden on the state, the state itself is ensuring that there are institutional barriers in place to disabled people being in work and contributing to the economy.

For some disabled people [deaf and hearing impaired] our ability to take part in the democratic process is being blocked at the very heart of that process.  Both the UK parliament and the Scottish parliament fail to provide sub-titling or signing of the parliamentary tv broadcasts from the main chambers and committees.  When I challenged this as discriminatory it was suggested that referring to Hansard was a suitable alternative.  In these days of social media enabling rapid response, rebuttal and influence on policy within seconds of such as government ministers uttering their statements, being told I can just wait a few hours and then read what they said is to be very explicitly treated like a piece of shit on the shoe of government.

And so, back to Shane and back to the Pogues.  If you want to hear how they told the story of those who had fallen from grace [drug users], listen to 'The Old Main Drag'.  It sounds like the wretched story of many people in the UK today.  I believe we are not far from where disabled people, and many others who are being marginalised and monstered by the coalition government [with help from the Sun and the Daily Mail], will be openly talked of as being a unfair burden on the state, of being somehow less than 'pure' [the cricket test], and that somehow it is all our fault.  The last verse of 'The Old Main Drag' could almost be read as as a prediction of the fate which awaits those of us who dare to be different and who are decidedly not 'one of [Thatcher/Cameron's] us'  :

And now I'm lying here I've had too much booze

I've been shat on and spat on and raped and abused 

I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg

For some money to take me from the old main drag

Scotland - a land of unlimited potential - but not if you are black, disabled, LGB, religious, or a woman

Some of my more recent blogs have been taking a long hard look at the workforce equalities monitoring performance of the two major public sector employers in Scotland - the NHS and councils.

You might have thought than government ministers would have wanted to do the same and some years ago.  You might think that in order to give reality to the First Minister's claim that Scotland is "a land of unlimited potential" that ministers would want to have in their hands the evidence that people from the major equality communities are able to cast aside discrimination which limits their potential.  You might think that.  I can find no evidence of them doing so.

It was only when I started to look at NHS Scotland's own data on disabled people on the payroll and then the numbers of BME people on council payrolls that I started to uncover the scale of the discrimination and the impact it has on individual people's lives.  And how the First Minister's slogan 'a land of unlimited potential' is a damned lie when it comes to people from the equality communities in Scotland.

In the NHS in Scotland, and using the data published by them, there is evidence to show that 19,000 disabled people are missing from the payroll, and missing the opportunity to live to their full potential by being in work.

For BME people, the same data tells us that just 2.3% of the NHS workforce in Scotland is from the BME community.  The EHRC calculates the UK public sector, on average, has a BME employment rate of 8%.  With a workforce of 154,366, that should equate to over 12,300 BME people working in our NHS.  The NHS data tells us that at March 2012 just 4,385 people identified as BME.  That represents a shortfall of some 8,000 posts which should be filled by people identifying as BME - if the NHS wanted to evidence race equality.
On LGB equality, the NHS has 1,276 [0.8%] workers who identify as being LGB.  The EHRC workforce has 8% of its staff identifying as LGB.  HM Treasury calculates that the LGB proportion of the UK working population is 6%.  If you use 6%, the total number of LGB staff in our NHS should be 9,262.  That would suggest that almost 8,000 LGB people are missing from our NHS workforce, and are having their potential suffocated.

In the context of religion and belief, the NHS offers no safe haven as an employer.  Staff are so scared or reluctant to identify their religion that over 73,000 people refuse to identify themselves in this way.  If the NHS had created a workplace culture where religious tolerance and respect was obvious and an everyday reality, I doubt if 73,000 staff would still be scared to identify in this way.

Then I started to look at councils in Scotland.  They are reported to employ, between them, 254,800 people.  One of my recent blogs suggests that if we apply the EHRC estimate of the BME employment rate in the public sector at 8% to the profile of councils in Scotland, we find something like 17,800 BME people are missing from the workforce of councils.

And then we have women.  The NHS Scotland employment data doesn't offer anything on women in the context of equalities monitoring.  Another NHS Scotland report from 2009 offered a comprehensive snap-shot of where equalities work was across all the equality communities.  When it came to equal pay, 3 out of 22 NHS Boards claimed to be meeting their legal duty.  Only 1 Board offered evidence of meeting the duty.  Even with a woman in charge of the NHS in Scotland and in charge of equalities, equal pay is not happening in the NHS.  

The potential of women in Scotland, like all other people from the equality communities, is being crushed by the apathy of government, by its paucity of ideas with which to eliminate discrimination, and its deep-rooted reluctance to cascade power-sharing from those who have equality to those they routinely discriminate against.  If government can't deliver equality for all, it has clearly reached the end of its own potential and should make way for a government which can deliver equality.

Thousands of BME people 'missing' from payrolls of Scotland's councils

Scotland.  The '"land of unlimited potential" said First Minister Alex Salmond, just before attending the world première of an animated Disney film in Los Angeles in June this year.  

After several decades of law on race equality, you would expect that Scotland's BME community would be demonstrably fulfilling their potential, equally with everyone else, on the payrolls of Scotland's major public sector employers.  You would expect.

Scottish government statistics tell us that in the first quarter of 2012, the total number of staff employed in local government [excluding police, fire services] was 254,800. These statistics do not, sadly, tell the reader much beyond the bald figures.  For reasons which are not clear, equalities profiling of council staff is not mainstreamed into the links between councils and government when gathering the data.  Odd, given government has been pushing the mainstreaming specific equality duty on public bodies.

At the moment, the only way to find out the ethnic [and everything else apart from gender] profile of all Scotland's council workforce is to search 32 council web sites for the monitoring reports, which should already be routinely published and accessible.  The reality is somewhat different.  

Not all councils follow a similar template for reporting, nor do they all follow a similar pattern of location for web site publishing, they do not all have up to date reports [some are still stuck on a 2006 version], and some are so well hidden I have had to ask for the reports to be sent to me.  Out of the 32 councils, 11 do not provide readily and easily accessible data on ethnic profiling.

At the moment, based on the self-reporting of 24 councils and with the data being anything up to 6 years out of date, the data across these councils shows that :

• the total workforce for 24 councils is 210,251
• the average %age of workers across those councils identifying as 'white' is 81.41%
• the average %age of workers identifying as BME is 0.99%
• the average %age of workers declining or too scared to identify their ethnicity is 17.30%

A helpful context to this is provided by the employment monitoring reports published by the Equality & Human Rights Commission.  For 2010-11, the Commission reported on the ethnicity profile of its workforce, saying that :

• 78% of employees were from a white background
• 20% of employees were of an ethnic minority background
• the proportion of their ethnic minority employees is significantly higher than in both the UK public sector, at 8 per cent, and the overall UK workforce

So, "unlimited potential" for BME people in Scotland ?

Scottish government's own confused and complicated race equality framework has, deep in the bowels of what has to be the most inaccessible policy on race equality in Scotland, a series of targets in its capacity as an employer.  These are now a bit stale in that they still aim for 2011.  No matter.  For BME workers, Scottish government aims to have 2% across all grades [this is based on census data from 2001 - well out of date].

Apply that 2% target to the entire Scottish council workforce - 254,800 - and you get 5,096 BME people who should be working in councils.  But the average in councils is 1.02% - which means the real number of BME people working in councils will be closer to 2,599.  Looks like a shortfall of about 2,500 people.  Only two councils exceed the 2% 'target' of BME staff on the payroll - Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh.

If we were to use the EHRC data of 8% BME employment rate in the public sector, then the total figure of BME people working for all councils should be 20,384.  That being so, over 17,700 BME people are being kept out of working for councils in Scotland.

Scotland's councils are supposed to be major partners with government in delivering change in Scotland, including the elimination of discrimination.  The data shows that councils as employers are failing to deliver equality for BME people.  After decades of race equality law, this can be no accident.  This data represents clear evidence of structural and institutional discrimination against the BME community across councils in Scotland, with thousands of BME people paying the price and being kept out of work as a direct result.

19,000 disabled people kept out of work by Scotland's NHS

Recent blogs here have used data supplied by NHS Scotland to show that there are such huge gaps in the equality profiling data it has on its workforce that it cannot evidence any equality being achieved for BME people, LGB people and people who subscribe to a religion or belief.

And what about disabled people?

Before we go there, some context.  Some employment facts on disabled people.

• There are currently 1.3 million disabled people in the UK who are available for and want to work
• Only half of disabled people of working age are in work (50%), compared with 80% of non disabled people
• Employment rates vary greatly according to the type of impairment a person has; only 20% of people with mental health problems are in employment
• 23% of disabled people have no qualifications compared to 9% of non disabled people
• Nearly one in five people of working age (7 million, or 18.6%) in Great Britain have a disability
• The average gross hourly pay for disabled employees is £11.08 compared to £12.30 for non disabled employees.

The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] estimates that the proportion of disabled people in the workforce population across the UK as a whole is 13.1%.  The Commission itself reports that 23% of its staff identifies as having a disability.

So, what is the score in the wannabe world-leading health service, NHS Scotland ?

Just 0.5% of the workforce.  In other words out of the 154,366 people employed by NHS Scotland at March this year, a paltry 772 feel confident about identifying as disabled.  If NHS Scotland had just managed to employ the proportion of disabled people in the working population, that would mean it would employ 20,222 people who are disabled - over 19,000 more than are there at present.  If NHS Scotland had become a world-class equalities employer and managed to mirror the EHRC's approach to disability equality, our NHS would provide employment to 35,504 people, instead of the shameful figure of just 772 people.

NHS Scotland as an employer is failing to deliver equality for disabled people.  If it is a world leader, it is in a dive to the bottom on disability equality.  This can be no accident.  This represents a clear case of structural and institutional disability discrimination at the heart of the NHS, with over 19,000 disabled people paying the price and being kept out of work as a direct result.

NHS can't get over some people being gay - and can't evidence any LGB equality

For some years now, people who identify as lesbian, gay or bi-sexual [LGB] have been able to claim the same legal protection from discrimination in the workplace as has been available for a longer time to people from the BME community, disabled people, and women.

Not that many years after, the NHS in Scotland created a dedicated central directorate, with a budget of around £1 million a year, to support the rest of the NHS in Scotland deliver equality for people identifying as LGB, along with all the other communities of people who regularly face discrimination.  This directorate's role is in delivering the elimination of discrimination against people from the equality communities, both as service users and as employees in the NHS.  

Another part of the NHS collects data on the equality profile of people employed in the NHS. You can read page 35 of the report they have published on the equality profile of all NHS employees at March 2012.

It is not enough, in law or in any other context, to simply claim that there is no discrimination in the workplace.  Evidence is required.  This evidence needs two core elements.  Firstly, you need data which profiles the workforce according to those criteria which identify communities of people who are known to face discrimination, with people who identify as LGB being just one such community.  secondly and with that data, employers should then set it alongside other data - such as who got promoted, who was funded to attend training, which people were disciplined, pay rates for everyone, and who has been bullied - and through analysis of both data sets discover if discrimination is taking place and resulting in, say, LGB and other people being barred from promotion, not getting access to training, being disciplined more often than other people, being paid less than others, or being bullied more than others.  That provides you with evidence of whether or not equality thrives in your workforce, or if you have a redneck bigoted culture where only 'people like us' [White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant] can get in and develop a career all the way past minimum wage.

Easy.  Doesn't require a degree in quantum physics.  Nor do you need to fiddle either the Libor rate or the waiting lists.

And yet.  In our NHS, which employs 154,366 people [that number excludes GPs], we don't have the first crucial element.  

As at March 2012, 56.7% [over 87,000 people] of staff working across NHS Scotland are unable, unwilling or perhaps just too afraid to identify their sexual orientation.  

At NHS Scottish Ambulance Service, the data gap is 75.1%, at NHS 24 it is 86.1%, and at NHS Dumfries & Galloway, it is 83.9%.  

Out of the 22 health boards which make up the NHS in Scotland, 13 are unable to persuade more than half their workforce to safely and positively identify their sexual orientation.  

Stonewall recently campaigned around the slogan, 'Some People are Gay, Get Over It'.  It would appear the NHS In Scotland just can't get over the fact that some people who work in our health service are indeed gay, or lesbian, or bi-sexual.

NHS offers no sanctuary for religious equality

It started with me taking a look at the Scottish Government's 'equalities evidence' portal on its web site.  I sampled some 'evidence' on race equality and concluded: 'Bollix, this is a con'.  For more on that, read my blog 'NHS unable to evidence race equality as an employer'  

Having discovered huge holes in the data needed to evidence race equality in the NHS, I thought it would be worth looking at that other area not much talked about over the dinner tables in polite company in Scotland - religion.

I returned to the same data source I used before - published by the NHS in Scotland on an equalities profile of its workforce at March 2012.  You then have to follow a link on page 35 to get the figures.  I thought the lack of data on the ethnic profile of the NHS workforce was pretty bad.  With religion, we have massive data gaps, with barely enough to stitch together for a cover up of Nicola Sturgeon's equality shortcomings.

Across the whole of the NHS in Scotland, 47.3% of staff [over 73,000 people] do not want to reveal their religion.  There are wild variations within this overall picture.  

In NHS 24 the data gap is at 83.4% - less than a fifth of staff feel ready to share the identify of their religion.  In NHS Scottish Ambulance Service the data gap is at 69.9% - less than a third of the staff in that Board feel comfortable about identifying their religion.  In NHS Lothian, the gap is 68.1%, whereas in NHS Health Scotland the gap is a thumping 66.8%.  In NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, Scotland’s largest Board, the gap is 51.9%.  Overall, 10 of Scotland’s 22 health boards are unable to persuade more than half their workforce to positively [and safely ?] reveal their religion.

On the basis of this data, it is obvious that the NHS in Scotland as an employer is a long way from being able to claim, through evidence, that it has eliminated discrimination on the basis of a person's religion.  That it has not managed to build good quality data on the religious identity of its workforce would suggest that NHS staff feel unsafe about disclosing this information, and that part of their concern is an apprehension about facing discrimination.

NHS unable to evidence race equality as an employer

It started with someone pointing out to me that Scottish Government had added an ' equalities evidence' portal on its web site.  My reaction was 'Wow, that will put us at the top of the class in the context of equalities' and couldn't wait to explore it. I did.  My 'Wow' was quickly replaced with 'Bollix, this is a con'.  


What government has done is bring together a wide range of existing research and data sources, some of them directly, some of them indirectly, offering access to data on equality.  You will struggle to uncover 'evidence' that the experience of people who encounter discrimination on a daily basis has been or is being changed.  This is mostly because in order to show evidence you have to have systems in place to capture data on people, their equality profile, and their experience of services or their outcomes from accessing those services.  Very, very few public bodies are anywhere near having these systems in place, either temporarily through such as surveys or, if they are mainstreaming equalities, as a permanent feature of how they work.


Take just one example.  Using the 'evidence finder' offered in the portal, you can end up looking at data published by the NHS in Scotland on an equalities profile of its workforce at March 2012.  You can end up looking at some of the workforce equalities data [age and gender are not apparently recognised in the report as equalities criteria] but what you will find is a total lack of analysis of what the data means and thus an equally total lack of evidence that equality is happening in the NHS Scotland workforce.  Don't just take my word for it, have a look for yourself - follow the link shown on page 35 of this report.

The head count of staff employed by NHS Scotland at March 2012 was 154,366 [excluding GPs].  35.6% of the workforce did not identify their ethnicity.  In some Boards this reluctance or even fear of identifying ethnicity is at astonishing levels.  In NHS Lothian the lack of data on the ethnicity of the workforce is said to be at 57.4%.  In NHS Education Scotland, the gap is 53.8%, while in NHS Scottish Ambulance Service it is at 57.2%.  Across the entire NHS in Scotland, just 2.3% of people identify as being BME.  In other words, out of 154,366 staff, just 3,859 people are comfortable about identifying as BME.

On the basis of this data, it is simply not possible for the NHS in Scotland to claim, through evidence, that it has eliminated racial discrimination.  That it has, after decades of legal obligations on race equality, not even managed to build good quality data on the ethnicity of its workforce would suggest that it remains institutionally and structurally racist.