You can be free only if I am free

Just a few days ago, Stonewall published its eighth annual guide to what it coyly describes as a Workplace Equality Index [WEI] of ‘Britain’s most gay-friendly [sic] employers’.  Credit to Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive, of Stonewall and his crew for getting employers to buy into the concept of benchmarking their work on delivering lesbian, gay and bi-sexual [LGB] equality and using the publication of the results to leverage further improvements in workplace equality for people who are LGB.  The WEI wheeze also generates income for Stonewall, as well as lots of column inches in the media. 

 

Who would have guessed, for instance, that MI5 would have been persuaded to enter the Stonewall WEI after decades of scaring the shit out of LGB people in government and public services as being a threat to national security ?  In the year past the spooks secured 62^nd place in the ‘top 100’ employers, beating [but not at Guantanamo Bay one hopes] such as the Royal Navy at 77^th and the Scottish Prison Service at 94^th.

 

So far, none of the other major equality communities have managed to come up with a similar initiative which has been quite so successful as Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index.  Leastways, if you count success as getting into bed with such fragrant company as Goldman Sachs, merchant bankers, and persuading them to host a reception for those working in LGB equality where champagne cocktails were served on the rooftop garden of the Goldman Sachs offices in London’s Covent Garden [I may have got some of the fine detail on that blurred – it was the champagne – but the overall thrust – rooftop gardens and merchant bankers - is accurate].

 

And who wants to be peer reviewed on equality when the peer group includes MI5 who are linked to people have been illegally imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo Bay and held without trial for a number of years? 

 

Stonewall friends and occasional hosts Goldman Sachs – in at number 6 – have been cited as discriminatory in relation to gender, with three former female employees claiming in 2010 that the firm has a testosterone-driven culture of press-up contests on the trading floor, male-dominated golf outings and scantily clad escorts at an office Christmas party.

 

In at 90 and way behind the merchant bankers [why do I keep itching to use a ‘w’ instead?] and spooks is the Scottish Government.  Yes indeed, that same organisation which routinely discriminates against disabled people when publishing information in printed form or on its web site.  And the same government which steadfastly delays, delays and delays again the delivery of equal pay for women working in Scotland’s NHS. 

 

In the top half of the ‘top 100’, at 45^th place, is Morgan Stanley, yet another merchant banker.  There may well be a link between dealing in and holding on to obscene amounts of money at the same time as causing world economic disater, but Morgan Stanley are no strangers to discrimination, having paid out $54 million in settlement of a class action on sex discrimination in 2004.

 

I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig further beneath the glossy and glittery surface of what Stonewall’s WEI purports to tell the reader on equality.  There is already a strong enough whiff building up around the buried evidence of real discrimination and I do not want to lose my lunch.  It would appear you can blag your way into Stonewall’s ‘top 100’ of ‘gay-friendly’ employers while at the same time being discriminatory against people from other equality communities. Duplicity ?

Clarence Darrow

You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can be free only if I am free.

It was Clarence Darrow who first coined what I consider to be a robust truth : 'You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's [sic] freedom.  You can be free only if I am free.'  I would commend this truth to Ben Summerskill and all others who strive to secure equality and freedom from discrimination for people from all of the communities of people who experience discrimination on a daily basis.