WASP privilege indulged by Scottish government and Equality & Human Rights Commission in the running of local government

Scotland's Councils have had almost 11 years now to meet the legal duties they were given under the Equality Act 2010 and change how they go about their daily business and eliminate discrimination as employers and service providers.

Rather than embrace the challenges and shoot for the Equality Moon, Scotland's Councils have managed to demonstrate that the law can be stuffed into the drawer marked 'too difficult' and know that the enforcers of the law, the Equality & Human Rights Commission in Scotland, will do nothing, or as close to nothing as is possible to get without appearing utterly useless or corrupt.

As employers, Scotland's Councils in 2019 managed to count up that of they employed 258,680 workers and that just 5,592 of them [2.16%] identified as disabled people.  Scotland's adult population has 32% of people identifying as disabled.  Not even close to evidencing that discrimination has been eliminated against disabled people.  Woefully short.

As employers, Scotland's Councils struggle to find the evidence that they have eliminated discrimination against Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people.  Just 3,337 workers identified as BME out of the 258,680 Council workers across Scotland.  That is 1.29% of the total.  Estimates for the BME population of Scotland at 2020 suggest the figure is at 5% of the population.  Once more, Scotland's Councils are failing to show that discrimination, this time against BME people, is being eliminated.

Looking at the data for Scottish Council workers identifying as Lesbian, Gay or Bi-sexual [LGB], shows Scotland's Councils are not particular about who they discriminate against.  Just 1,789 workers identify as LGB.  That represents just 0.69% of the whole Council workforce across Scotland.  This at a time when the government itself reckons that 2% of the adult population identifies as LGB as at 2017.  

Another cohort of people who have experienced discrimination in Scotland for decades, if not longer, are Catholic people.  All of Scotland's Councils managed to find 16,907 workers who identified as Catholic.  Just 6.54% of the whole workforce.  The government's own Equality Evidence Finder shows that 14.3% of the adult population in Scotland identifies as Catholic.

In their role as service providers, Scotland's Council were given a chance late in 2020 to provide evidence that they were gathering data on their service users by protected characteristic [as they do with employees] and so demonstrate clearly that their services are equally accessible to all, that the experience in using services was equally useful to all, and that outcomes from using those services was equally available to all.  Thousands of pages of evidence were received.  Those thousands of pages showed all too clearly that Councils across Scotland are unable to evidence that their services are in fact equally accessible to all.  The consequences of this corporate laziness mean structural discrimination in the key functions of the bulk of Scotland’s Councils is going untraced, unchallenged and unchanged.

The basic numbers on employment and the complete lack of numbers in service provision reveal all too clearly that Scotland’s Councils have barely bothered to scratch the surface of discrimination in their functions as employers and as service providers.  Given there are no obvious reasons why this should be the case, applying Occam’s razor would suggest the most likely reason for the failure is that there is a marked lack of appetite in local government for changing a status quo in a Scotland which is largely run by and for WASP [White Anglo Saxon Protestant] privilege. For Scottish government and the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] to be aware of this and not to actively intervene and drive the real change required, suggests WASP privilege is similarly indulged by government and the EHRC.