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Campaign groups have expressed concern that a racial disparity commission created by Boris Johnson may achieve little following a report that one of its main recommendations will be that public organizations no longer use the term “BAME.”
Downing Street has declined to comment on the claim that one of the key proposals of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities, which is due to produce its imminently delayed report, is based on the term, which means black, Asian and ethnic minorities. .
However, Johnson’s spokesman indicated that No. 10 would back any move to end the official use of the term. He said: “The government does not routinely use the terms ‘BAME’ or ‘BME’, because they are not well understood in user research and because they include some groups and not others.”
The report will be sent to Johnson this week, the spokesman said, and the government will receive a response “in due course.”
According to the Daily Telegraph, which cited an unidentified source, the report will say that the term is “useless and redundant,” and too broad to describe the different experiences of people from different backgrounds.
Halima Begum, executive director of the charity Runnymede Trust, said she was deeply concerned that the commission, which was originally due to report its findings in December, would end up doing little to address structural inequalities.
“If the advice on the use of the term BAME is the scope of the commission’s findings, or the most urgent of its recommendations, then Britain’s ethnic minority communities are being insulted by this report and its authors,” Begum said. .
“Regardless of the fact that many UK government departments, including Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] and the Foreign Ministry has been advising for years against the use of the term BAME, we live in a country where black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than their white friends, and young black men are 19 times more likely to die in childbirth than their white friends. more likely to be arrested and searched by the metropolitan police than their young white neighbors.
“These are the kinds of issues that the commission should examine at the institutional and structural level if it wants to have any credibility.”
Maurice Mcleod, executive director of Race on the Agenda (Rota), said he would welcome the suggested language change, but hoped the report would be more than “just a style guide.”
“Many activists working to end racism in Britain have long argued that the use of BAME is problematic, so Rota is pleased to learn that public bodies will not use the term in the future,” Mcleod said. “The term came up as a way to describe all who are not white, but this kind of generalization leads to a lack of specificity.
“By zooming in and looking at all ethnic minority communities together, the experiences of particular groups, such as the African-Caribbean or the Roma, Roma and nomadic communities, are lost.
The commission was created nine months ago, following protests following the death of George Floyd in the United States.
In an unrelated report on Monday, the British Future thinktank published a poll showing that 47% of ethnic minority Britons were confident about the meaning of BAME as a term, and 29% said they weren’t familiar with it at all.
According to other sources, another idea the commission is considering is ordering larger companies to disclose any wage gaps between white employees and their ethnic minority colleagues.
Ministers have previously pledged to make annual ethnic pay reports mandatory for companies employing more than 250 people, reflecting requirements for pay by gender. But more than two years after he published a query on his plans, no further developments have materialized, and more than 130,000 people signed a petition last year asking the government to make reporting of payment by ethnicity mandatory.
Activists have expressed broader concerns about the commission’s possible recommendations, predicting that they are likely to reflect the views of Munira Mirza, director of Johnson’s policy unit. Previously, he had criticized the concept of structural racism and was tasked with organizing the panel.
Tony Sewell, his choice to chair the commission, has also previously questioned the effects of institutional racism. After his appointment in July last year, Sewell apologized for the “incorrect and offensive” comments he made in a newspaper column after former soccer player Justin Fashanu revealed that he was gay in 1990.
