Robin's Blog - Just off the plane?

In Radio 4’sToday programme, broadcast on 8 January, Sandra Kerr, National Director of the Race for Opportunity was interviewed by senior BBC journalist Evan Davis. For readers not familiar with it, the report’s findings are that, “without major and urgent policy intervention and action from businesses” Britain’s BME communities will never hold a representative share of jobs. This gloomy prognosis becomes even more acute when it comes to Black presence in Boards, senior leadership and management roles in all areas of public and private sectors.

At one point in the interview, Davis challenged Kerr by saying “No-one’s going to get off – disembark – from a plane and in a year be running a company, are they. Management is a thing that takes a very long time to come through to a population”. This astonishing statement betrays a clear failure on the part of a senior journalist to understand that the vast majority of Britain’s Diaspora communities from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were born in this country and the fact that they are under-represented in the roles listed above are a function of racism, rather than time spent in the country.

I am reminded of Greg Dyke’s characterisation of the BBC in 2001 as being “hideously white”. It appears that it still is in its staff profile, and more disappointingly in the outmoded attitudes of itssenior journalists. While I can understand that there is a tradition of adopting an adversarial, “devil’s advocate” position amongst BBC journalist, this was an opportunity to interrogate the report’s findings, rather than defend the indefensible. The BBC, evidenced by the at best careless and at worst ill-informed understanding of one of its senior journalists, still has a long way to go in understanding that 21st century Britain is a multi-ethnic, plural society. While these attitudes hold sway, how can the BBC and other companies make progress in opening their doors to representative numbers of our communities?

Read more about  the Race for Opportunity report here http://www.bitc.org.uk/media_centre/comment/race_inequality_is.html