Are you an Irish polynesian?

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

In order to partake in this massive statistical parlour game, it is, of course, necessary for hospitals to classify all their patients according to their ethnic origins. Hence, anyone being wheeled through accident and emergency must now be asked not just for their name but for their ethnic identity. If you are wondering why desperately ill people are still being forced to wait on trolleys in spite of the millions Gordon Brown is pouring into the NHS, the bureaucracy involved with admitting patients certainly doesn't help. A bizarre, 34-page document distributed to NHS employees lays down the correct procedure for extracting from bewildered patients whether they are Mirpuri Pakistani or Sri Lankan Tamil. One helpful tip reads, `The temporarily confused or traumatised (including the unconscious): There will be instances when it is more appropriate to collect some data later in the admission.'

From now on, even historic houses must ensure that they are getting a sufficient number of Polynesians through the door. The Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has just put out a hefty report, People and Places: Social Inclusion for the Built and Historic Environment, which hectors custodians of museums on their new obligations to encourage access to ethnic minorities. `The diversity of society as a whole needs to be considered when promoting heritage sites,' spouts Jowell, without explaining how you advertise Dover Castle specifically to Turkish Cypriots. If anyone is in any doubt about her department's intention to stamp out institutional racism in the nation's folk museums, she adds, `Staff attitudes and routine practices and procedures can be a major barrier to change, and may be excluding or marginalising groups unintentionally.'

Anyone applying for a lottery grant in recent months will already have smelt the whiff of change. Two years ago Andy Lowings successfully applied for a grant of L4,750 towards the Northborough Harp Festival, held near Peterborough. This year he applied again and was rejected, seemingly because he was unable to satisfy `Awards for All', one of the distributors of lottery funds, with his answers to their `Cultural Diversity Monitoring Form'. The form appeared to assume that he spent last year's festival counting black faces among his 1,000-strong audience; it asked him which ethnic groups attended his festival, listing `Asian or British Asian', `Black or British Black', 'Chinese', 'Irish' or 'Other'. There was nowhere for him to mention, however, the Paraguayan harpists who he flew over for the last festival: South Americans don't appear to exist, according to the government's ethnic classification system.

While cultural events in country towns are given the cold shoulder for being too white, different standards inevitably end up being applied to organisations whose membership is limited to particular ethnic minorities. Few would begrudge the L1,859 recently awarded to the Organisation of Blind African Caribbeans, who perform folk songs and dance in south London, though it ought to be pointed out that the blatant ethnic exclusivity of its name ought, under Ms Jowell's edicts, to make it ineligible for lottery money. One cannot help thinking that lottery distributors are becoming so obsessed with doing the right thing with regard to ethnic policy that they are on occasions becoming blind to more fundamental questions such as `Are the intentions of this project good or bad?'