NICOLA Sturgeon announced this week that there is no evidence to suggest that BAME people in Scotland have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. But she has set up an inquiry anyway.
Now, there is evidence to suggest that black and ethnic minority folk south of the border are being affected disproportionately and an inquiry is, rightly, underway to find out why. It is a serious matter and needs investigating properly.
Surely the sensible thing to do would be to wait and see the results of that inquiry and see if it’s the same here and then act.
But politicians love an inquiry and will launch one every time a problem arises that they don’t know the answer to.
Then another inquiry is set up to find out why the first inquiry hasn’t come up with any results yet. A subsequent inquiry is then needed to find out why two separate inquiries were set up to predominantly investigate the same thing.
Before long, so many staff are employed doing inquiries that the only way to make it all stop is for a super-inquiry, preferably chaired by a High Court judge, to inquire into all the other inquiries and make a decision, followed by another inquiry into whether that decision was correct.
After all that, the appeals process can begin.
It has been quite a week for inquiries with a serious outbreak of them being set up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests last weekend. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has set up an inquiry to discover whether the city’s monuments and statues ‘reflect the city’s diversity’.
I can save him the bother. They don’t. How can they when the majority were erected in the 19th century when London was a vastly different place.
Other cities, including Glasgow, have also launched inquiries into monuments that honour the slave traders of the past.
Everyone accepts that slavery was bad and is a stain on our nation’s past but erasing it completely from history does a great disservice to the victims.
We must not hide history by simply lobbing it in the nearest harbour but instead use it to educate future generations and learn from our ancestors mistakes.
German schoolkids are still taught about the horrors of the Nazis, and that was much more recent than slavery. It is important and likewise our children should be taught the bad bits of our history so they too can prevent it ever happening again.
Otherwise we’ll just end up with an inquiry asking why it happened again.
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