Black and Minority Ethnic People: Workplace Issues

Lord Taylor of Warwick Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the Government for making time for this important debate today. This issue is not a minority one. It concerns who we all are today in modern Britain. Whatever one’s view on immigration or Europe might be, Britain has changed and will continue to do so. If this change is embraced and not just endured, Britain will be all the stronger. Of the UK’s population of 63 million, 14% are black and ethnic minority. Over half of the BME communities live in three main cities—London, Manchester and Birmingham. Leicester is seen as one of the most diverse cities in Europe, and what a magnificent example of diversity in the workplace is Leicester City Football Club. Its first team squad has 12 different nationalities and an Afro-Caribbean captain and last night became Premier League champions. Mind you, since I support Aston Villa, recently relegated from the Premier League, I wish to move swiftly on from that observation.

We are all products of our experiences and I was just reflecting on some of mine. Back in 1990 I was a special adviser to the Home Secretary, and the Cheltenham Conservative Association was advertising for a parliamentary candidate to fight the next general election: this was an application for a job to be an MP in the political workplace. I submitted my CV along with 300 others. In those days, you did not have to submit a photograph with your application. My surname is Taylor. Taylor is, in fact, the name of the Bristolian sugar trader who owned the slave plantation that my ancestors worked on, so the name does not sound foreign. When I was shortlisted a few weeks later, I travelled to Cheltenham for the interview.

I was greeted at the front door by one of the committee members. The elderly gentleman looked rather startled to see me. When I introduced myself, he said, “Oh, you’re John Taylor—I didn’t realise you were b-b-based in Birmingham. Welcome”. I must admit I rather admired the nifty way he side-stepped a potentially embarrassing situation. I was eventually chosen as the candidate and the association treated me well, but I have often wondered whether, in those days, had the fact that I am Afro-Caribbean been known to the committee at the application stage, or had I a foreign-sounding name, I would even have been interviewed.

It is not only good for minorities to achieve in the workplace, it is good for the nation as a whole. Historically, there has been a negative perception issue acting as a bar to the workplace becoming more diverse. Some years ago I was invited to be a speaker at the Institute of Directors on the subject of diversity. I walked into the entrance hall in Pall Mall and said to the concierge doorman, “Lord Taylor of Warwick”. He said, “Ah, yes, we are expecting Lord Taylor. You timed it well. You the driver, mate? You’ll be okay on a single yellow line. Anything after 6.30 pm is fine”. I replied, “No, I’m Lord Taylor”. There was a famous hit song called “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum. Maybe they had this gentleman in mind when they wrote it, because he turned from white to very, very pale. I would like to think that nowadays that misunderstanding would not occur.

Unemployment in the black and ethnic minority community is going down, I accept that, but there is still so much untapped potential there. I have a particular interest in the black majority churches. Take, for example, the Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God, based here in the UK. In the five years to 2013, it started 296 new churches in the UK. Last year, the Prime Minister addressed an event of black Christians from that church, which thousands attended. I was a guest speaker at the equivalent event in Lagos, Nigeria, where a quarter of a million people attended the national stadium. The event started in Lagos at 8 pm and finished at 6 am the next morning, so it is vivid in my memory. But these people, like many, are transnational in their activities and contacts, and there are similar groups, of course, among the Muslim and Chinese communities in Britain. The point I wish to make here is that surely our local enterprise partnerships need to develop stronger working links with such diaspora groups, their religious leaders and business concerns. We need to harness that potential, which I think is being wasted.

The media and creative industries are very influential sectors of society, perhaps even more so than politicians. It is a pity that black actors such as Idris Elba and David Harewood had to go to America to establish themselves in the industry. Frankly, that is a disgrace. While television is using more black and Asian presenters, Directors UK claims that the number of BME directors working in UK TV is “critically low”. A sample of 55,000 programmes found that only 1.29% were made by black, Asian and minority ethnic directors. In some areas such as period dramas, talk shows, panel shows and sketch shows, not a single episode had been made by a BME director. That, frankly, is a disgrace. In the mid-1990s, I was a television producer at BBC White City. It got to the stage when I asked whether it was called White City because everyone else above kitchen level was white.

I recall making a TV consumer affairs series for BBC Two called “The Street”. I had the pleasure of working with Kirsty Young, who went on to much fame and fortune. We went up to the highlands of Scotland to make one episode. I did not think that there were any black people at all there. But while we were doing some outside filming, a young white lady came out with a mixed race boy of about 10 holding her hand. She came straight over to me and said, “My son was watching you from inside. He wanted to come and see you. His dad is African, but he left before the boy was even born. My boy’s had a rough time at school because of his colour. He is shy, but it would mean a lot to him if you would just talk to him for a few minutes”. The boy proceeded to ask me if I was his father. I quickly assured him that although I was not his father, I would be proud to have a son like him. I explained that I was at the BBC and we were filming in his street. He then said, “But I thought you had to be white to work on the telly”. Although inaccurate, that was his perception, and it was a very sad comment that I will never forget.

As for newspapers, Amol Rajan is the only ethnic minority editor of a national newspaper, the Independent. I note recently that even that paper has now gone online. City University’s survey in March this year found that British journalism as a whole is 94% white. Is that acceptable?

Our corporate boards are making progress in terms of gender diversity, but there is a lack of racial diversity on company boards. In fact over the last two years, the growth of BMEs on boards of FTSE 100 companies has slowed and gone backwards, going from a 0.7% growth rate to a meagre 0.1% from 2015 to 2016.

For 10 years, I was vice-president and on the board of the British Board of Film Classification. Although it treated me very well, it was a very white organisation when I first joined. If I achieved anything there, at least I encouraged it to place job opportunities at the BBFC in not only the mainstream papers but also the ethnic minority newspapers such as the Voice and the New Nation.

The sporting world has great success stories such as Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis-Hill and a very diverse professional soccer league. However, let us not kid ourselves—in soccer the diversity is only on the pitch. Around 30% of players in the Football League are from BME backgrounds, mostly black, but there are hardly any people of colour in the football boardrooms. Of the 92 managers in the Premier and Football League divisions, just six are non-white. This is not acceptable. In America, there is the Rooney Rule. This was led by Dan Rooney, a football club owner, who helped create a rule in the US whereby at least one non-white candidate must be interviewed when a manager’s job is vacant. Maybe it is time to look at this here.

We are celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s life. A couple of years ago, I had the awesome privilege of playing the role of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, at London’s delightful Tudor Rose playhouse theatre. It was refreshing to me that no one questioned that such a role could be depicted by a black actor. When my parents came to Britain in the 1950s, there were signs in the windows, stating, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. We have clearly come a long way since then. But for BME minorities in the workplace, there are still many barriers to break. Will Britain ever achieve real racial equality in the workplace? To quote Hamlet,

“To be, or not to be: that is the question”.