Bedfordshire girl puts race commissars on the spot

It has taken an eighteen-year-old Bedfordshire student, Abigail Howarth, to expose the sickness and confusion at the heart of the UK’s race relation’s legislation. She did so because of what she found out when she wanted to compete for a training scheme with the Environment Agency.

The strangely worded advertisement stated that applications for the four traineeships “are encouraged from people of the following descents: Asian, Indian, White other (e.g. Irish, Welsh, Scottish, European), African, Caribbean or of Mixed Race origins.

The traineeships purported to be provided under Section 37 of the Race Relations Act 1976 (Amendment 2000). This allows employers and their agents to provide training schemes to racial groups underrepresented in particular jobs compared to their numbers in the working population either locally or nationally. It had been restricted historically for commonsense reasons to non-white groups although civil liberties groups have long opposed the racial discrimination it perpetuates.

In this case PATH National Ltd, the major development agency acting in this business, in a bizarre and arguably illegal move, extended the qualifying groups to include everyone except white English people.

Civil liberties group Liberty and Law has successfully campaigned against misuses of the Race Relations Act including Section 37 in cooperation with the Commission for Racial Equality. It has asked the CRE to request PATH to freeze the recruitment scheme until it has determined its legality.

There appears be no co-ordination between PATH and the Environment Agency.

Extending the scheme to anyone who is white unless they are English cannot be justified by the statistics available from the Environment Agency. They explained to Liberty and Law that they “have no evidence that white Scottish, Irish or Welsh are underrepresented in the Anglian region of the Environment Agency.” More strongly they stated: “ Whilst PATH employ a broad criteria inviting applicants from people of these backgrounds, applicants would not be progressed further with us.”