Tina Turner not being booked to sing at unveiling of new EHRC Scotland Director

As many of you will know, the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] has been stumbling along these last few years, reeling from the many gratuitous and WASP'ish slaps, head-butts and knee-cappings administered by government, and more recently being forced to smile politely as budgets are butchered and its role publicly rogered as ministers play pass the parcel with the equalities brief in their red boxes.

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve

Trevor Philips has been cast aside as Chairperson of the EHRC and replaced by Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve.  The appointment of someone unknown outside academe and cherry-picked from the crowded cross-benches of the unelected great & good who infest the woodwork in the House of Lords to lead the government's strategy on equality & human rights needs little analysis as to where it is going.

In the midst of this permanent chaos, the Scotland Office of the EHRC lost its leader, Director Roz Micklem.  Sources indicate the vacant post was offered to other senior managers across the re-organising and jobs-haemorrhaging EHRC.  None were willing to venture into the frozen north.  Perhaps no surprise when the Scottish government's track record on equalities is so abysmal.  Further attempts to recruit internally yielded a thunderclap of disinterest in the opportunity to work closely with such as Scotland's 'shovel ready' Alex Neil, Cabinet Secretary, who has to be reminded to put equalities on his web site list of responsibilities.

Faced with enormous upheaval, a butchered budget, barely 10 staff left in Scotland, and a UK government which thinks equality is 'red tape' and bad for business, one would have thought the EHRC would have advertised here and abroad for someone keen to tilt at those windmills of prejudice, inspire the diminished pool of beleaguered EHRC staff in Scotland with visions of real equality being possible, and to arm-wrestle some real action out of government and the public sector to show that Scotland's widespread and oft-denied culture of discrimination can be easily identified, exposed to daylight, and quickly eliminated.

Kaliani Lyle, EHRC
Scotland Commissioner

One would have thought.

With this scale of challenge on halting the growth of discrimination, the resurgence of prejudice and the frenzy of state-sponsored demonisation of those people in society who are simply different, one would have thought the EHRC, under the guidance of Scotland's EHRC Commissioner, Kaliani Lyle, would have demanded the best for Scotland.  Along with the great and good people on the EHRC's Scotland Committee who support Kaliani in her work [Alastair Pringle, Angela O'Hagan, Elaine Noad, Louise Falconer, Morag McLaughlin and Neelam Bakshi] one would have thought that there would be an aspiration that Scotland should seek to attract the finest the world has to offer.  That Scotland's diverse population deserved simply the best the world had to offer.  

One would have thought.

So what happened next ?

Sources indicated that the EHRC was made to follow perversely discriminatory civil service rules and advertise the vacancy widely amongst ..................... civil servants only.  Not the world, not Europe, not the UK, and not even Scotland itself.  At a time when unemployment is at obscene levels, the EHRC was made to recruit not from the biggest and best oceans of talent available, but instead is made to fish in a half-filled thimble of talent and one in which only those who are already employed are allowed to swim.

the EHRC ..........is made to fish in a half-filled thimble of talent and one in which only those who are already employed are allowed to swim.

Alastair Pringle,
EHRC Scotland Director

And just what has emerged from this opaque, constipated, and light years from good-practice, recruitment process to lead the EHRC in Scotland into the critical years ahead ?  None other than Alastair Pringle, until recently part of Scotland's civil service and, curiously, a member of the EHRC's Scotland Committee.