Scotland has, particularly after 10 years of SNP-style government, achieved a vast conceit of itself in relation to equality. Simply by declaiming, loudly and often, that Scotland is a hugely 'tolerant' country, Scottish government ministers trade heavily on a mythology rooted deeply in some Brigadoonian myth that Scottish people are but a hair's breadth away from some tartan Nirvana where all can quote extensively, and in the approved accent, from the government-sponsored poet Laureates such as the sexually incontinent Burns and fascist-loving MacDiarmird.
Tolerating difference is a dangerous, misleading, and Trumpian, forked-tongue concept. Tolerance puts up with difference, as long as the source of the difference accords respect to the established nature of things - like the elevation of deep-fried Mars bars to haute-cuisine. Tolerance does not embrace difference. Instead, tolerance points to difference as an amusingly, sometimes quaint, folksy and even eccentric way of living - this from a country where men fetishise a form of national dress invented for her amusement by an English queen in the 19th century.
What Scotland's political cadre seem incapable of understanding is that the status quo, the management class which runs Scotland, has zero interest in changing how things have been in Scotland for some generations. It would appear that the Scottish public sector management apparatchik is genetically incapable of operating in any way than the default, where white, protestant, middle-class men run things for 'people like us'. They have become adept at creating a sense of industry and activity suggesting discrimination is being uncovered and uprooted on a daily basis and equality of opportunity is to be ushered in for all within the almost graspable future.
Why then does the biggest public sector employer in Scotland, NHS Scotland, have just 2.44% of its workforce identifying as Black Minority Ethnic [BME] ? Statistics show that at 2014, 3.4% of the adult population was BME.
NHS Scotland shows no evidence that it accepts the reality that it is institutionally racist and lacks the courage to even recognise the concept as a possibility. The same NHS workforce data published earlier this year also shows that disabled people account for just 0.85% of all who work in the NHS. This at a time when the government's own equality evidence finder reveals that in 2014 23% of adults
living in Scotland had a disability, in 2010 12.5% of degrees were held by
disabled people, and that 8.6% of people starting in the 2016/17 Modern Apprenticeships
identified as disabled
When it comes to the historical marginalisation of Catholic people in Scotland and the discrimination they face in areas such as employment, the cold, clammy Calvinist heart which beats in the white, protestant, middle-class management cadres continues to ensure Catholics remain at the margins in the workforce of the NHS. With a national population where 15% are Catholic people, the NHS in Scotland employs just 6.9% of staff identifying as Catholic.
These figures act as a stark reminder that simply asking those who currently hold positions of privilege, such as the ranking well-paid jobs in the public sector, and wield power and influence, to cede this to the have nots is up there with simply asking men to stop abusing women. Legal penalties for abuse of privilege and sustaining institutional discrimination, strictly enforced, alongside lengthy interventions at schools, colleges and universities to embed, over several decades, concepts of equality in tomorrow's adults is a must do for Scotland's all too many 'sans culottes'.
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