Tim Worstall

There’s Discrimination and Then There’s…

This looks like it got decided the right way:

A literary prize for writers from ethnic minorities has been forced to
include entrants of all colours after complaints that it discriminated
against white writers.

Arts Council England and Penguin UK had to
rewrite the rules a year after introducing the Decibel Penguin Prize, a
short-story competition for British writers of Asian, African or
Caribbean origin.

The
Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) decided that the prize could
breach Section 29 of the Race Relations Act. Had the rules not been
changed, the watchdog could have begun legal proceedings against the
organisers.

If you’re not allowed to discriminate against then doing so in favour of one group is doing so against another, isn’t it, and thus also verboeten.

Which might mean that this new anti-discrimination against gays legislation will have some interesting effects. There’s a significant sector set up to chase the pink pound (Ivan Massow made his money providing insurance, didn’t he?) and if any of those businesses are now found to be refusing to serve heterosexuals, or discriminating against them, then that, surely, will also be illegal?

In

2 responses

  1. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    IIRC, Massow would happily have taken the business of any straight people who came his way (missus); he was a life assurance salesman who built a massive IFA practice out of chasing round to find the one or two fairly obscure life assurers who didn’t react to the AIDS scares of the 1980s by putting a massive loading on all gay men.

    Reply
  2. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    It’s “verboten” actually.
    This sort of crap is enormously good fun – how far back to you go? According to one theory, all humans are descended from Africans anyway. And does “African origin” include white South Africans? What about Cliff Richard (born in India, I believe)? And where does Asia start? Probably not the Ukraine, but what about Khazakstan?
    And the other caveat is “British”. What does that mean? A recent immigrant from India may well be of “Asian origin” but is he or she British yet? What about his or her children? What about mixed-race children?
    And what about people who descend from e.g. native North or South Americans, Aborigines or Maoris? They seem to be ruled out entirely.

    Reply

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