The issue of racism has had a significantly increased profile following the murder of George Floyd, the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the exposure to Covid-19 for a disproportionate number of BAME workers due to them being over-represented in certain jobs across the country, and the subsequent number of deaths in the BAME community.
These events have created an opportunity for a greater national effort to end racism, yet the Commission’s report into racial and ethnic disparities in the UK, if unchallenged, risks taking the efforts to end racism backwards, not forwards. The PDA repudiates the report.
The pharmacy profession has a significant BAME population. Many PDA members and their communities have seen or experienced, the consequences of racism. The PDA opposes racism in every form, including in their casework support for individuals who have been discriminated against at work, in their campaigning, and in the creation and ongoing support of the PDA BAME Pharmacists’ Network, which was launched in early 2020.
Institutional and structural racism exists in the UK, in the labour market and in the wider society. However, the published report suggests that the Commission failed to recognise its existence or at least the scale and consequences of that racism. The report simply does not reflect the experiences that many PDA members face in their lives.
There must be no complacency about racism, it should be called out and addressed. As part of civic society, the PDA wants the UK to be an anti-racist society and supports efforts to move towards that goal in, and beyond, the workplace.
Elsy Campos Gomez, President of the BAME Pharmacists’ Network, said:
“Racial discrimination is a public health issue and the report seems to ignore the overwhelming evidence that speaks volumes about its consequences and how it manifests in organisations and society. For that reason, now more than ever, we need to be more vocal and more courageous about denouncing acts of racial discrimination and the social injustice that is attached to it. We need to make the evidence count by speaking up, actively being anti-racists and by being better allies of those facing racial discrimination.“
Instead of commissioning and promoting this report, the PDA calls on the Westminster government to implement in full the recommendations of previous reports which addressed race inequality, including McGregor-Smith (employment), Lammy (criminal justice), Williams (Windrush), Angiolini (deaths in custody), Parker (FTSE100 boards), and Marmot (health inequalities). The government should also implement the requirement for ethnicity pay gap reporting which has not been progressed since a consultation in early 2019.