Introduction
In March this year the devolved Welsh Labour government issued a consultation on their new Race Equality Action Plan. Originally intended to end in June before the publication of the final draft in September, its closing was delayed until July and it has failed to materialise yet.
Introduced by Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford and Minister for Social Justice Jane Hutt, the Plan is an explicit response to the killing of George Floyd in America (p.4). It is intended to be “practical” and they say that once the Plan is finalised “the Welsh Government will be committed to and held accountable for it” (p.4).
Amongst the goals they set out to be achieved by 2030 are making micro-aggressions “a thing of the past” (p.27), a commitment that “hate crime in the media, including social media, will no longer occur”, a BAME First Minister (Wales was at the last census 95.6% white), and that BAME people will have “stimulated conversations that white people needed to have” so they can “come to terms with white privilege and white fragility” (all p.28).
What is the Plan about?
The Plan explicitly states that it is not enough for Wales to be “non-racist”; it must be “anti-racist” instead (p.5). This tiny difference is important because it marks the divide between a personal moral aim (not being racist) and a political aim (being pro-actively anti-racist). The Plan is therefore an active political project not to encourage others to behave better but instead to change the way they think and are able to act.
It was developed through “dynamic dialogues” between academics, activists, NGOs, government officials, trade unionists, and community / religious leaders. The co-chairs of the Plan were Professor Emmanuel Ogbonna (a management specialist at Cardiff University) and Dame Shan Morgan (Permanent Secretary Welsh Government, who has had a long career in the Civil Service, especially dealing with the EU). The authors thank the Wales Race Forum and the Black Asian and the Minority Ethnic COVID-19 Health Advisory Group for their “expertise and support” (both are official parts of the Welsh Government). Other groups who offered their support include the Wales Centre for Public Policy (funded by the ESCR and the Welsh Government), the Ethnic Minorities and Support Youth Team Wales (whose most recent annual report, from 2019, revealed that almost all of their £1,000,000 in income came from the Welsh Government or foundations and only £429 in individual donations), and Wales TUC (pp.6-7). The Plan secured the “buy-in of senior civil servants (led by the Permanent Secretary)” (p.18) who even went so far as to commission anti-racist training for civil servants and others from the Labour peer Lord Simon Woolley (p.20).
Other “partners” include Cindy Ikie (Black Lives Matter Wales), Diverse Cymru, TGP Cymru, Romani Cultural & Arts Company, BAME Women (MELA, WCF, Hayaat WT, Henna Foundation), Islam UK Centre & Muslim Council of Wales, Neath Port Talbot Surveys, and the Hindu Cultural Association (Wales) (p.8). Some of these “stakeholder” groups were found by the the Ethnic Minorities and Support Youth Team Wales and the evidence sourced by having the Wales Centre for Public Policy hold a review into the issues (p.18). Some of the individual “community mentors” who contributed their “lived experiences” were paid a “small fee” and 25 “Community Engagement grants” were provided to some of these groups to fund “engagement” (p.20).
They cite the controversial Runnymede Trust to claim that “racial inequalities persist in almost every arena of British society, from birth to death” (p.9), claim that “Wales is not an equal country” (p.11), and praise the efforts of the National Library for Wales and the Welsh Government to “decolonise” the Library’s cultural assets (p.10).
The Plan was therefore developed through a combination of academics, civil servants, and third sector organisations (almost all heavily reliant on Welsh Government funds) together with community groups and individuals (almost all of whom were recipients of community grants and other public funds to facilitate their involvement).
What does the Plan call for?
The Plan calls for “white people” to “engage in challenging (their white privilege) and enriching themselves (by being curious about cultures and traditions different to their own)” (p.25). As part of this it sets out a series of goals to achieve by 2030, including:
Making micro-aggressions “a thing of the past”.
Ensuring “white leaders” are “not resentful” of BAME talent.
Recognising that BAME people shouldn’t have to carry “the emotional burden of racism”.
Ensuring that hate crime in the media, including social media, “will no longer occur”.
Electing a first BAME First Minister.
Educating people to know what is “banter” and what is “unacceptable language”.
Tacking institutional racism in pop culture and sport.
Making sure the media can’t “shoehorn us [BAME people] into a box as entertainers and slaves”.
Teachers and headteachers must “take our [BAME people’s] complaints of racism/hate crime seriously”.
Ensuring that mixed race people don’t have to choose a “white” identity to hide behind due to racism.
Reducing the stigma of disability in BAME communities.
BAME people will have “relinquished the emotional labour of supporting racist behaviours and institutional racism”.
Asylum seekers will be given the right to work.
BAME people will have had “courageous conversations about white racism and internalised racism”.
BAME People won’t compete but will “speak with one voice”.
BAME People will no longer be “carrying the emotional toil that triggers us daily”.
The Welsh Government will “avert a backlash from Brexit onto our communities”.
BAME People will be provided with a “culturally appropriate service”.
BAME people will no longer be asked where they come from.
BAME people will have “stimulated conversations that white people needed to have” so they can “come to terms with white privilege and white fragility”.
Although some of these may be desirable, many are beyond the beyond the ability of any government to offer unless it is totalitarian in nature. Mandating the emotional states of others or dictating what counts as “banter” is highly authoritarian. Similarly, how can BAME people “speak with one voice” except by forcing them to?
How will the Plan be implemented?
The Steering Group from the Plan will transform into the Accountability Group, who will hold the Welsh Government and others to account on how they implement the Plan. A Race Disparity Unit and an Equality Data and Evidence Unit will be launched to monitor progress and to spread best practice (p.30). However, when discerning this success or failure, “lived experience” will be as important as data (p.29).
The Welsh Government will publish annual data on “the number of complaints by and grievances against ethnic minority people, with the outcomes and consequences also reported publicly”. The Welsh Government will also create “co-designed learning and development provision” for community leaders, “link this to the growth of a pipeline for both public appointments and for employment in the public services”, and it will also “remunerate their efforts” (p.33).
All public bodies will be made to have one “inclusion and diversity objective, with a focus on anti-racism” whilst all public sector boards will be mandated to appoint an “equality, diversity and inclusion champion”. In addition, there will be “mandatory” training for managers to “tackle micro-aggressions, encourage allyship and bystander intervention” (pp.37-39). By 2022 all serving councillors will be made to “sign up to being anti-racist when they take up their office” whilst the Welsh Government will “explore the options” for quotas for minority groups in local elections (pp.43-44).
All teachers are to have a role “promoting race equality and being anti-racist” (p.70). The Welsh Government will also make “race equality an integral and focused aspect of the transformation of homelessness services” (p.95). Furthermore, they will work with “hate crime perpetrators” to “covert potential and convicted perpetrators to anti-racist members of society”. These “converted perpetrators” will then be used in order to convince others (p.111). To help in all this, the Welsh Government will create and maintain a single giant “map” of all BAME groups in Wales to be used for “different policy purposes” (p.121).
The Plan will therefore create a huge bureaucracy to measure racism and implement anti-racist outcomes. However, the equal value offered to lived experience means that the scale of racism measured is dependent on individual feelings. Furthermore, it will create a huge bureaucracy of quantifiers, trainers, and community leaders who are all reliant on the continued existence of racism in order to keep their jobs. In many cases their work takes on a totalitarian aspect, with teachers turned into ideologues.
Comment
The Plan represents nothing less than a giant attempt to reshape Welsh society and its attitudes. Despite this, no serious attempt is made to work out how prevalent or entrenched racism is within Wales. The evidence, such as it is, consists of a series of quotes from partners about issues they have faced; a brief reference to the impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities; an even briefer references to George Floyd (who had no known connection to Wales), to the unspecified number of black lives “lost” in Wales, to an unspecified number of miscarriages of justice, and to “the work of rights-based organisations in Wales”. In other words, the incitement for the report is largely anecdotal, unspecified, or a result of campaigning by self-interested groups (pp.8-9).
The changes set out by the Plan are wide-ranging and probably unachievable. In many cases they involve achieving subjective things, such as BAME people not carrying the “emotional burden of racism”. Others are unenforceable without a massive expansion of the Welsh Government, such as ending hate crime in the media, which could only be achieved by effectively ending the freedom of the press, especially as hate crimes are currently defined subjectively according to whether the ‘victim’ feels ‘victimised’.
The consultation on the Plan reveals how the sausage of policy is made. The work of activist groups is cited as a reason for its creation; those same activist groups are then consulted on the drawing up of the plan, even being paid for their work; then the Plan promises to create new publicly funded jobs and opportunities for these same activist groups. Despite them holding no democratic role and the extent of their community support being unspecified, they have been allowed to influence and benefit from the Welsh Government’s policy, despite their obvious self-interest in it. Dissenting views weren’t canvassed and the open consultation has barely been publicised.
The likely result of the Plan, if implemented, will be an expansion of the bureaucracy; an expansion of state-funded activist groups; a growing politicisation of society; and the creation of a negative feedback loop in which the anti-racist organisations have a strong self-interest to keep finding more poorly defined examples of racism for them to tackle, requiring the continued or accelerated provision of public funds.