Time to topple the statues to structural racism in Scotland's public sector ?

For several decades now - starting in the 1960's - there have been a variety of legal obligations on public sector bodies to find and eliminate race discrimination in how they operate.  The most recent re-visit to legislation on race equality was in the Equality Act 2010.

After more than 50 years of effort, one would imagine that the public sector in Scotland would have undertaken the bulk of the work required to identify and eliminate the shameful practices, systems and cultures which provided the foundation to racism in how they delivered services and how they recruited as employers.

If these 50+ years of effort have revealed anything, it is that simply bringing laws into being will not change the structural nature of racism.

At or around 2019, the NHS in Scotland was reporting that 3.32% of their 168,194 workforce were identifying as Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people.  Scotland's Councils were reporting that 1.29% of that 258,680 workforce identified as BME, while Scotland's universities reported 6.03% of the 48,933 workforce identified as BME.  Scotland's other public bodies, not in any of these other major sectors, reported 1.57% of the aggregated 33,429 workforce identified as BME.  Scottish government itself, expected to act as a beacon and flag-bearer towards race equality, reported that 2.1% of its workforce identified as BME.  These figures were being reported against a demographic backdrop in the form of the Scottish government's Equality Evidence Finder which reveals that BME people formed 4.6% of the adult population in Scotland in 2018.

The level of employment of BME people in Scotland’s universities is obviously underpinned by recruitment from abroad. That being the case, any benchmarking of performance on BME employment equality cannot use, for example, Scotland’s BME population [4% at the 2011 census] as a key indicator [as is done by St Andrews University] . 

The poverty in performance of the public sector, after over 50 years of effort, in delivering race equality in employment is pitiful, especially at a time when the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has been pushing hard for a faster pace to the dismantling, sometimes literally, of structural racism across the UK.  The toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue earlier this year helped trigger a serious questioning of the sloth-like progress towards race equality in the UK.  It appears that public sector employers in Scotland need to urgently review their own monuments to organisational systems, practices and cultures which clearly continue to chain them to structural discrimination on the grounds of race.

Whether those who lead in the public sector have the desire or willingness to recognise their white privilege and unpick the lock they have on jobs and power is a question to which there is no clear or obvious answer.  Just part of the obstacle to race equality is the busted flush that is accountability in the running of the public sector.  Each of the 20-odd NHS Boards in Scotland has a group of Board members appointed by Jeane Freeman, Cabinet Secretary for Health, with the main remit for them being to hold the senior paid staff in each NHS Board to account.  These Board members know how their paid staff are performing poorly on race equality [they get reports which show this] - and do nothing to change that poor performance.  Jeane Freeman and her senior civil servants know how poorly all NHS Boards are performing on race equality [she gets reports which show this] - and do nothing to end that poor performance and speed up the delivery of race equality in Scotland's NHS.  In both these scenarios, the general public/electorate has no tools with which to hold each NHS Board or the Cabinet Secretary to account.  Until such times as politicians build in effective and independent enforcement to such as the Equality Act 2010, racism in employment [and services] in the public sector in Scotland will continue to be an inevitable consequence of unchallenged white privilege.