Around the time of the rule’s tenth birthday, its success in the US led to the idea being floated in British football. For some football bosses, it was considered a good way to quell the sport’s ugly history of overt racism, a way to heal the jagged wounds of monkey noises and bananas thrown at black players on the pitch in years past. Then Football Association chairman Greg Dyke gave the idea a nod, confirming to the BBC in 2014 that the FA’s inclusion advisory board were considering some version of the rule. In British football, as of 2015, the numbers on race were pitiful. Despite overall black and ethnic minority representation of 25 per cent in both leagues, there was only one black manager in the Premier League, and just six black managers in the Football League. There were no black managers in Scotland’s top four divisions, and just one black manager in Wales’ Elite League.20
Despite its utterly inoffensive nature, the idea of implementing the Rooney rule in British football sent the nation into a spin. Chairman of Blackpool FC Karl Oyston called it ‘tokenism’ and ‘an absolute insult’ to people in the sport.21 Carlisle United manager Keith Curle essentially called it a box-ticking exercise.22 Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, introduced plans to develop a pool of black coaches instead, and called the Rooney rule unnecessary.23 The way it was spoken about, you’d think that the FA’s plans weren’t suggesting having one person of colour on an interview shortlist, but instead were asking team heads to walk into their local supermarket and offer their most high-level jobs to the first random black person they saw in the vegetable aisle. In 2016, the English Football League opted to put forward proposals to implement the Rooney rule on a mandatory basis. The Premier League chose not to entertain the idea even on a voluntary basis.24
Around the same time as Britain’s Rooney rule conversation, a similar debate was taking place in the business sector. Then Business Secretary Vince Cable tabled plans to diversify business boards, announcing an aim of 20 per cent black and ethnic minority FTSE100 directors in just five years. Research in the same year found that over half of FTSE100 companies didn’t have a single person of colour at board level.25 With the conversation about boardrooms previously focusing solely on a very white version of gender, Cable’s intervention was refreshing. But, again, there was pushback against the idea, with the director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, telling the Telegraph: ‘Businesses seek to appoint board members on the basis of competence. They may not always make good decisions but there is little sign of systematic racial prejudice at the top of British business.’26
In 2015, a debate pondering the possibility of quotas to secure an increased number of women and people of colour judges prompted senior judge Lord Justice Leveson to announce to a lecture hall that the idea was entirely demeaning. ‘Creating a principle of appointment not because of merit but in order to achieve gender or ethnic balance’, he told his audience, ‘will inevitably lead to the inference that those appointments are most decidedly not based on merit alone.’27 Although it was established in 1875, the High Court only welcomed its first black judge, Dame Linda Dobbs, in 2004. She was born in Sierra Leone, received her legal education in Britain, and was called to the bar in 1981. In an interview with video archive First 100 Years, she detailed some of the discrimination she faced, saying, ‘It was difficult to complain about things in those days. There were no procedures. None of that was recorded, so to try and prove that, you know, you were discriminated against was very difficult indeed.’28 Dame Linda Dobbs retired from the High Court in 2013. In 2015, just 7 per cent of judges across courts and tribunals were black or from an ethnic minority background.
When it comes to women, lack of representation prompts calls for all-out quotas. A 2015 London School of Economics report called for gender quotas in all senior public and private positions. When a survey in the same year showed that less than 20 per cent of senior managers in the City of London were female, women in the financial sector began calling for quotas to tackle the over-representation of men.29 And when surveyed in 2013 over half the women working in construction – many of whom were working in companies where women were just 10 per cent of the workforce – supported the idea of quotas.30
But when it comes to race, the language used to raise awareness of similar issues is much less definitive. Instead of talk of quotas – where progress can be measured with numbers – the solutions posed are vague. The head of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills suggested positive discrimination in teaching recruitment in 2015, stressing that the ethnic mix of teachers should reflect the pupils they teach.31 When he was head of the Greater Manchester Police, Sir Peter Fahy called for a change in equality legislation so that police constabularies could use positive discrimination when hiring black police officers, but he was sure to let it be known that it wasn’t about ‘targets’.32 It seems that the root of the problem of both the under-representation of race and gender is essentially the same, but the solutions proposed for each are radically different. When there are no hard targets behind programmes of positive discrimination, initiatives are in danger of looking like they’re doing something without actually achieving much.
Positive discrimination initiatives are often vehemently opposed. Descriptions of the work addressing the over-representation of whiteness inevitably reduce it to tokenism, nothing more than an insult to the good hard-working people who get their high-ranking jobs on merit alone. Whenever I do the panel-event circuit, meritocracy and quotas tend to be an issue that rests heavily on audiences’ minds. The main questions asked are: is it fair? Do quotas mean that women and people of colour are receiving special treatment, getting leg-ups others can’t access? Surely we should be judging candidates on merit alone? The underlying assumption to all opposition to positive discrimination is that it just isn’t fair play.
The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.
Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because, if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men. Those who insist on fairness fail to recognise that the current state of play is far from fair. When pressed on lack of representation, some like to cite the racial demographics in Britain, saying that because the minority of the population isn’t white, that percentage and that percentage only should be represented in organisations. This mathematical approach is the true tokenism. It is an obsession with bodies in the room rather than recruiting the right people who will work in the interests of the marginalised. Representation doesn’t always mean that the representer will work in the favour of those who need representation.