The Editor,
The Times
7 August 2006

Sir

Today’s report on the proposal to enforce ethnic quotas upon companies bidding for public contracts is bad news for everyone. It further extends government controls on our lives, and even, it seems, on the way that we think, if we have the bad luck to be an employer.. It assumes, once again, that the problems of ethnic minorities arise mostly from the racism of the ordinary population and its institutions. No other interpretation, apparently, is acceptable.

Quotas are objectionable on all sorts of moral grounds. They are also likely to shake confidence that appointments have been on merit. They are based on simple-minded, often erroneous assumptions, which more or less guarantee injustice. Some ethnic groups do better than average in most walks of life. Are they also to be penalised by quotas along with the white majority? About half the minority populations in the UK are immigrants, inflows of which have greatly expanded in the last few years. Some are recruited for work, many arrive as dependants and new spouses or asylum seekers. No formal requirements are placed upon them to learn English or to learn how to live in the UK. Yet through quotas they must be treated, however brief or imperfect their acquaintance with English language, society and work habits, as suitable for employment as anyone else. Quotas also assume that all cultures share the same inclination for various kinds of work and education. This does not appear to be true; and if there are cultural handicaps, our multicultural policy will surely tend to perpetuate them. Because quotas make no allowance for the position of ethnic minorities in the social class structure, their effects are likely to bear particularly hard on the white working class.

This unwise policy is a further step in the racialisation of British society, where increasingly, membership of one or other ethnic or religious group must be claimed at every step in life to claim any entitlement. This further turn of the screw should make us re-consider the whole strategy of driving such wedges into the population. A different long-term solution is needed if we are all to live together in justice and harmony. One of many steps would be to require new immigrants to complete a programme of integration as a condition of entry to the UK and its job market. That would help us to treat all our citizens as equals. We might then eventually be able to put divisive ethnic categories behind us.

Yours faithfully,

David Coleman