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Global Warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a global warning

Of course, the real reason for the Ethnicity Census is to be found in the letter. ‘There is no statutory obligation on doctors to supply ethnicity data,’ it says; but ‘The census will... help us to fulfil our other general statutory duties and responsibilities under the Race Relations Act, 1976 (as amended) and other legislation.’ In other words, they are required to ask but no one is required to reply.

There is something deeply sinister to be found on the GMC’s website, notwithstanding doctors’ legal right to withhold the information sought. Even if doctors do not reply to the GMC’s enquiry, there is no cause for the GMC to despair:

We will be contacting those doctors for whom we do not have access to current ethnicity data, requesting they provide us with this information. We have successfully partnered with the NHS in England to obtain ethnicity data for doctors in their employ, significantly reducing the numbers of doctors who need to take part in this exercise.

So much for confidentiality; and the prose reeks of bad conscience, as very well it might. I love in particular the phrase ‘current ethnicity data’, which conjures up the spectre of racial reclassification à la South Africa in the good old days.

But of course the GMC does have a complete excuse. It is only obeying orders.

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Nicholas Storey

July 17th, 2008 11:39pm

These sickening exercises proceed upon the basis that most people need to be policed by the state and professional bodies in such respects: quite rebarbative - and so typical of modern Britain.

JohnA

July 18th, 2008 12:29am

Ask them the number and date of the amendment to the 1976 Act that 'requires' the GMC to ask for and hold such information. It doesn't exist.
Btw this nonsense started under the Major government, not with Blair.
The information could indeed be perniciously dangerous in the wrong hands. We should all staunchly resist it.

Philoktetes

July 21st, 2008 6:39pm

I invite Anglo-Saxons, Cornishman, Welsh, and Scots to come to America and leave that nonsense behind

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