Comment: Don't leave equalities stranded
Thursday, 28, Jan 2010 12:01
Government and local authorities seem unable to talk to people as they actually are. They shove us in boxes which no longer fit our far more fluid identities.
By Simon Fanshawe and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah
They 'consult' with 'communities' whose leaders hang on to these big categories because it has become their power base. Furthermore these broad brush identities no longer describe the problems in society that we need to solve. Yesterday's National Equality Panel report about growing inequality in the UK made for grim reading. It was particularly grim because it showed how outdated the ways in which British policymakers try to understand let alone address inequality have become. The panel points out "that much of the story of changing income inequality is about changing income differences within groups, however they are defined." The 457-page report repeatedly points out that focusing on differences between say religious groups or ethnic groups risks missing out on large and sometimes growing differences within them.
As we argue in a report published by IPPR today, this is further proof that the belief that our identities fit neatly into 'tick boxes' or that equality issues fit neatly into 'strands' (which may have helped us in the past to identify the problems) is now in danger of inhibiting the very equality it seeks to promote. It produces a simplistic and sometimes false picture of disadvantage. It distorts the process of 'consultation'. It runs the risk of patronising those in the previously disadvantaged groups who do not feel that their aspirations and achievements are any longer foreshortened by the mere fact of being black or disabled or gay or whatever. And, worse than that, an approach to equalities that is based solely on 'minorities' risks excluding further those in the broader population who already feel that they are not being listened to. It is not so difficult to join the dots from this kind of political approach to one of the reasons why people vote BNP.
There is absolute evidence that in certain situations certain groups experience persistent bias. But discrimination, while it may still be an everyday event, is no longer an all-day event. We need new ways of thinking and more nuanced interventions if we are to make further progress on equalities. We have reached the position where the very categorisations that we have relied on to understand equalities challenges tell us less than ever about who people are, what lives they lead, who they identify with or what services they need from government and society.
For example, ethnic categories such as 'black African' hide such huge differences that they become almost pointless. Overall some 66 per cent of black African-born people in the UK were employed in 2005/06 but Ghanaian-born people had an employment rate of 80 per cent while Somalia-born people had a rate of around 20 per cent. Knowing the overall black African employment rate would tell you almost nothing about what was going on in two very different communities within that group.
We need to be able to get to the heart of these issues. More robust analysis, not tired assertions, are what the equalities world needs. We need to be prepared for the fact that, for instance, the most effective way of addressing gun crime among young black kids in London may be to extend a Tube line to improve people's access to work, not through dishing out patronising pocket monies to black youth groups.
Grouping people according to such broad categories neither works particularly well as an analytical tool nor indeed as an expression of felt identity. Being black, gay, disabled, a woman etc does not automatically blight our ambition or our chances of success any more. The variations within these groups are so enormous that they are often more important than those between groups. To be blunt poverty and class will always trump identity when it comes to real disadvantage.
The assumption of persistent bias across the whole of these groups needs to give way to a more subtle approach to get to the actual heart of the most difficult social issues. We need analyses that start with the problem and not with a presumption about the type of solution. We must design our public services to be accurate in tackling discrimination where that is the problem, but where it is not, to deliver services to individuals, without making assumptions about their need and lives. If we can personalise public services, then we can personalise our approach to equality.
There is a long way to go before we achieve anything like true equality in the UK but we have no chance of getting there until we drop our simplistic, tick-box approach to how disadvantage and discrimination work in society. We have to stop treating people to a kind of cruel reductionism about who they are and start treating them as human beings, in all their glorious complexity.
Simon Fanshawe is a gay rights campaigner. Danny Sriskandarajah is the director of the Royal Commonwealth Society.
You Can't Put Me In A Box by Simon Fanshawe and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is published today by the
Institute for Public Policy Research
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