Scotland's Councils as employers being run by and for WASPs with privilege - government and EHRC decline to intervene

Ten years ago, in the dying days of Gordon Brown's government, the Equality Act 2010 as rushed through the last stages of parliamentary scrutiny and scrambled on the the statute book.  Over the period of time that followed, David Cameron's government ripped sections out of the Act, watered down other sections, and performed crude dentistry on the powers of the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC].

As with any law, valuable time could be wasted in picking over the mistakes in drafting the Bill, mourning the opportunities lost in Cameron's filleting of the Act, and denouncing the massive funding cuts to the EHRC budget.  Or we could look at what public bodies have actually done in a decade of work focused on delivering the core aim of the Act - to eliminate discrimination - and decide whether the Act is delivering for the people it aimed to help - those discriminated against on an almost daily basis.

Over the intervening decade since the Equality Act 2010, 'Equality Here, Now' has carried out regular research into what Scotland's public bodies have been doing to rise to the challenges of the Act and eliminate discrimination through change in the polices, practices and cultures of how they deliver services and operate as employers.  Most recently, this has involved scrutiny of what Scotland's 32 local authorities [Councils] published in their function as employers on the workforce profile of people employed by them, and by the protected characteristics of disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

What that research found was that the fundamental flaws in how Councils are gathering and using employment data are unchanging from what data they published in previous years and that the often marginal movements/improvements in percentages reported against each protected characteristic are simply a result of modest improvements in data gathering and reporting.  Put simply.  There has been for some years and continues to be today a complete lack of evidence that Scotland's Councils are actively seeking out discrimination within their cultures, practices and systems and eliminating the root causes of that discrimination.  For these reasons, the research report published in May 2020 offered no analysis of why discrimination continues to be evidenced, sometimes conspicuously, in the 32 workplace data profiling reports published by Scotland’s Councils in 2019.  It has all been said before in previous research reports since 2013 and nothing in what Councils are still doing – and still not doing – has changed in any meaningful way.

At the most basic level of scrutiny, we know that Scotland’s Councils have 2.16% of all workers identifying as disabled.  The Scottish government’s equality evidence finder reveals that Scotland, at 2018, has a national average of adult people identifying as disabled at 32% of the population.  

Glasgow Centre for Population Health estimates, in a study from 2017, that Scotland would have, by 2020, an average of over 5% of the population identifying as Black Minority Ethnic [BME] and increasing to 7% by 2031.  Councils in Scotland are reporting an average across all Councils of 1.29% of the workforce identifying as BME.

Councils also reveal that in 2019 the proportion of the Scotland-wide workforce identifying as Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual [LGB] is 0.69%.  The government’s equality evidence finder reports that the proportion of the Scottish adult population identifying as LGB as at 2017 is 2%.  The final protected characteristic tracked in the research report was religion or belief and with a particular focus on the employment of people who identify as Catholic.  Data published by the 32 Councils reveal that 6.54% of their workforce identify as Catholic people.  The equality evidence finder on government’s web site provides the wider context that in Scotland 14.3% of the adult population identifies as Catholic people.

These basic numbers reveal all too clearly that Scotland’s Councils are light years away from being even close to delivering employment equality, after having had 10 years of opportunity to make the aims of the Equality Act 2010 a reality for people looking to escape discrimination and gain equal access to employment.  There are no obvious reasons why this should be the case.  Applying Occam’s razor would suggest the most likely reason for the complete and sustained 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.

Rainbow flags no substitute for hard data evidence of LGB employment equality - flags offer nothing but a feeble flapping at the relentless orthodoxy of discriminating against anything which is different

One of the many changes in virtue signalling common in the UK in the 21st century is that the rainbow flag has been hi-jacked in 2020 by the movement to celebrate the NHS and those who work in it, leaving the LGB community uncertain whether their version of the rainbow flag can retain brand distinction.

Scotland's universities were not slow in climbing on the Stonewall-driven bandwagon of the early rainbow flag waving as a high-vis message that of course they were fully paid-up members of the Stonewall bus and very active in support of LGB rights for students and for staff and would, just as soon as possible, eliminate discrimination wherever it was unearthed.

Between 2010-2012, legislation on equality required a bit more than getting on the right bus and waving the right flag during the right month.  Employers were required to gather data on the people who worked for them, by protected characteristic, and publish the information, in an accessible form.  As well as this they were required to publish what they had learned from gathering the data and to report on how they would use what they had learned to improve their performance in eliminating discrimination as an employer.  Easy-peasy, one would think.  Especially at universities which take the finest minds and polish them into even finer minds.  Identifying and eliminating discrimination can be done by mid-morning coffee while solving Fermat's Theorem might take them until late-lunch.  

And yet, in 2016, Fermat's Theorem was solved, while in 2020, Scotland's universities have still not managed to identify and eliminate discrimination against employees who identify as LBG.  It does not help universities achieve their goal on eliminating discrimination when half of the workforce [49.73%] on average across the sector refuses to identify their sexual orientation to their employer.  Two of Scotland's universities do not even publish data on the sexual orientation of their workforce.  From that sort of baseline it can be no real surprise to find that, on close inspection, the colours in the rainbow flag of LGB solidarity have been washed out by the rain of distrust expressed by staff and instead reveals a sector which has surrendered, waving the white flag of apathy and indifference on LGB equality.

We do know that in 2019, Scotland's universities employed 1,378 people identifying as LGB, just over 2.8% of the sector workforce total of 48,933 people.  

What we don't know is whether Scotland's universities think 2.8% of the workforce is evidence that LGB equality exists or that it has not yet been achieved.  Not one of the universities provides a reasoning for what their workforce would look like if discrimination against LGB people were eliminated.  In brief, universities don't know where they are [half the workforce don't trust them enough to identify their sexual orientation] and don't know where they are going [none of them have worked out their optimum profile in terms of people identifying as LGB].  

Most of Scotland's universities have got on the rainbow bus and paid their fare to Stonewall [free flag included].  Trouble is, no one bothered to check the destination board before buying the ticket and grabbing a seat up the back of the bus.  The lack of data on half of the university workforce means the bus tires on one side are almost flat, pulling the bus off the straight line to eliminating discrimination and into a circular journey where universities simply keep arriving back to where they started out from.  Flag waving - a favourite hobby of nationalists across the world - may look pretty, but in the face of the relentless orthodoxy which discriminates against anything which is different, it tends to obscure the reality that nothing has changed.