My View: Madeleine McDonald

The water company recently telephoned me to conduct a customer survey. Since water is one of the few services I pay for without grumbling, I was happy to comply – until the inevitable question on ethnic origin. Talk about pointless box-ticking. If we didn’t have the privilege of clean water on tap, we’d all be dead within a week, whatever our origins.

When I find the question irrelevant, I answer “mixed”. This is no more than the truth. Researching my family tree revealed Scottish, Manx and Irish ancestors, making me a Celt. Go back in history to add in Viking marauders, Huguenot refugees from Catholic Europe, possibly even deserters from the Roman army, which recruited legionaries throughout Rome’s sprawling empire. Go back a hundred thousand years and modern humans walked out of Africa to colonise the world, making us all Africans.

Ethnic origin is a minefield. Some would argue that it is easy for me to mock well-intentioned political correctness since, having a white skin, I have never been ground down by low-level hostility and prejudice. I have never been spat at for my looks or refused a job for my name. So I see the point of such questions in surveys on housing or employment, and in medicine, and there I would never be tempted to provide a flippant answer.

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What annoys me is when bureaucrats seem eager to collect information on ethnic groups to no identifiable purpose. I say if you don’t plan to act on the information collated, don’t ask.

Moreover, in today’s world of patchwork heritages, who is what? One of my friends is part Jamaican, part Indian and part English. She veers between expressing irritation with people who categorise her as black, and declaring that she is mostly Jamaican on the grounds that she loves Jamaican food. Defining yourself by a love of ancestral food was a new one to me – although with ancestors who survived on porridge that is hardly surprising.

The last census endeavoured to resolve the confusion between national identity and ethnic group by asking one question offering a choice of five main national identities, followed by another listing 17 major ethnic groups. A statistical nightmare, but at least that enabled someone like the legendary Shirley Bassey, for example, to tick both Welsh and mixed. Like the rest of us, Dame Shirley has no choice but to travel on a British passport, but no-one doubts her heart is Welsh. Indeed, I have never met anyone – apart from vote-chasing politicians – who calls themselves British without adding some sort of qualification to that tag. And how many readers of this newspaper think of Yorkshire first and something else second? We are all a patchwork.

If officialdom persists in its quest to compile dubious statistics on ethnic origin, whatever the context, we’ll end up no better than South Africa under apartheid.

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