Are you an Irish polynesian?

Spectator, The, Jul 27, 2002 by Clark, Ross

Ross Clark exposes the government's obsession with ethnic categories, and urges us all to revolt

AMONG the thousands of questions my seven-year-old son has fired across cafe tables and crowded railway carriages, one has been conspicuous by its absence: `Daddy, why is that man black?' Admittedly, our neighbourhood is not the most renowned cultural melting pot, yet I do not remember a single occasion when race has ever been an issue for him. Whether it can be put down to the educational value of the obligatory black figures which now feature in every children's book, or is demonstrative of the natural acceptance shown by children when adults around them don't make an issue of race, I like to feel that we have made progress since my own childhood in the 1970s, when the young still had a tendency to stare at black people as if they had descended from outer space.

What, then, do you say to your children when they bring home in their satchels a questionnaire demanding to know whether they are white, black, Chinese or Gypsy? Over the past few weeks thousands of schoolchildren have received a similar form, asking them to assess their own `ethnic identity'. Any child above 11, say the guidance notes for parents, should make the judgment themselves. Children who until now have had no reason to think of themselves as anything other than a human being are being obliged to classify themselves, like a worm in a biology lesson, as belonging to one of 15 species and 65 sub-species, each given a four-letter code. You can, for example, be `White British' (WBRI), a `Traveller of Irish Heritage' (WIRT), a Gypsy Roma (WROM); you can be `Black Caribbean' (BCRB), 'Chinese' (CHNE) or - which, until I came across the government's ethnic classification system, I thought applied only to zebras - a `White and Black African' (MWBA). You cannot-- lest anyone should be fooled into thinking that bureaucrats who work in ethnic awareness had succeeded in purging their minds of all prejudice - be a British Chinese or a British Gypsy.

It would be cheap to equate the Department for Education's ethnic-awareness census with anything dreamed up in Nazi Germany, though the absence of the word 'Jew' anywhere on the form does indicate a certain awareness of, and sensitivity towards, historical parallel. The government's intentions are presumably benign, even though Cambridgeshire County Council and the Department for Education both failed to answer my question as to what they intended to do with the data. Yet I do not believe I am alone in feeling unease at the way government departments are suddenly developing an obsession with race.

If your child's state school doesn't appear to have much time for teaching any more, it may well be because the staff are bogged down in producing a written policy promoting race equality and in publishing annually the results of their `ethnic monitoring' survey, as they have been ordered to do by the government. The Commission for Racial Equality has sent out to every school a 38-page booklet on their duties, helpfully suggesting how they ought to go about formulating their policy: they should set up a group including the head teacher, a governor, several teachers and 'a representative from the pupils' council'. When they have finished their first draft, it should be sent to unions and local community groups for comment, and everyone invited to a series of meetings to discuss it. When it is finalised, the policy should be promoted via a poster campaign `in all main languages used in the community'. All, presumably, to come up with some mealy-mouthed variation on the words `this school does not discriminate against pupils on the grounds of their race'.

No doubt the egos of a few local busybodies will have been boosted, but no school will ever succeed in pleasing the shifting demands of the race-relations industry. Bosham primary school near Chichester has gone to great lengths to teach pupils about other cultures, with lessons on Hinduism and Islam; but when it was inspected by Ofsted last October it was criticised for failing to `prepare pupils for life in today's multi-ethnic Britain'. `Although the school has good links with the local community there are few examples of prominent people from a variety of culturally diverse backgrounds being used to celebrate personal achievement.' Since it lies in a rural area where few ethnic groups have settled, this presents Bosham primary school with an insurmountable problem. What it boils down to is that the school isn't scouring the local Yellow Pages and inviting enough proprietors of Indian takeaways to talk in assembly.

It is not just schools. As a result of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, all public bodies are obliged to monitor the ethnic identity of their users and, should the profile of their usage indicate the merest statistical bias against any ethnic group, is expected to devise policies in order to correct it. The Department of Health, for example, has discovered that black Caribbeans suffer more strokes (and fewer heart attacks) than the white population. Under the rules, health authorities are therefore obliged to devise policies to reduce the rate of strokes among black Caribbeans - although, since the Race Relations Act merely talks about reducing 'inequalities', they might equally well fulfil their legal obligations by persuading whites to suffer more strokes by eating more salt.