Visit Scotland ..... then again, maybe not if you are a Catholic ?

VisitScotland has an odd take on equality.

Not so long ago, when creating a campaign in support of that infamous 21st century reprise of Brigadoon, otherwise known as the Homecoming in 2009, Visit Scotland were caught out portraying Scotland as a whites-only country.  When this was pointed out to them, they barely blushed before reaching for the air-brush and adding a token BME face to their poster campaign.  

Just 4 years on, Visit Scotland published a number of reports required to show how it was meeting the specific equality duties, which help guide public bodies towards eliminating discrimination.  One of the duties is to do with discrimination in the workplace and requires public bodies to gather data on the profile of people who work for it, using identifiers [known as protected characteristics] such as gender, race, religion and others.  The public bodies are then required to show how they have used the data gathered to better meet their general equality duty - in other words, they need to work out what the data tells them about discrimination through, say, not employing any or enough BME people and setting out plans to remedy the shortfall and so eliminate discrimination.  Simple.

Not, it appears, for Visit Scotland.

Employing 763 staff, you would expect them to publish around 10 pages of a report which would provide details, in numbers and pictures, on who works for Visit Scotland in terms of protected characteristic.  Some of the pages would set out an analysis of where Visit Scotland thinks discrimination may be the cause of some protected characteristics being missing from or under-represented on the payroll.  Some pages might even offer evidence of how good an employer Visit Scotland is in terms of, say, the number of disabled people employed.  Maybe even a couple of paragraphs at the end setting out an action plan to eliminate any discrimination the figures showed could exist ?

Here is the Visit Scotland report.
Read it and weep for equality.

Here is the Visit Scotland report.  Read it and weep for equality.

I contacted Visit Scotland, wondering if the data showing they employed just 1 Catholic might be evidence of sectarianism, and wondering that their ever-so-brief report might be non-compliant with the specific equality duties.  Their response - a serious case of corporate denial - serves simply to confirm that Scotland struggles to accept that sectarianism exists, or that anyone outside of Glasgow football clubs needs to take action to eliminate it.  

I have passed all of this over the the Equality & Human Rights Commission in Scotland and asked them to investigate.  I will also pass it on to the government minister responsible for Visit Scotland.  If you want to world to have a non-airbrushed picture of Scotland and want Scotland to welcome people here, irrespective of their religious belief, you might want to be asking Malcolm Roughead, Chief Executive of Visit Scotland, just why only 1 Catholic works for the organisation and why he cannot see that this might be as a result of discrimination against Catholics.