Over at the new Operation Black Vote (OBV) blog, two Lib Dems – Nick Clegg and Merlene Emerson – have published articles, excerpts below…

Believing in our children, not criminalising them (Nick Clegg)

Nick argues that dealing with crime needs a completely new approach to the counter-productive policies of New Labour:

In these difficult times, the prospect of rising youth offending is a serious one. But fear mustn’t now give credence to the New Labour way, which is to bang up our children the moment they divert from the straight and narrow. Britain now has 3,000 children in prison – more than anywhere else in Europe. This Government spends eleven times as much on incarcerating young people than on projects to stop them getting involved in crime in the first place. …

… for all Labour’s tough talk our streets aren’t safe. All they’ve done is demonise young people, feeding stereotypes of hooded gangs terrorizing their neighbourhoods. The idea that inner city Britain is full of feral youths is especially damaging for perceptions of BME communities, as it’s in those areas ethnic minorities often have a big presence.

What’s in a name? (Merlene Emerson)

Merlene weighs up the pros and cons of not having a typically English name:

… a recent report [said] that the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has taken a keen interest in the subject of names. In a curious social experiment, DWP sent out bogus CVs in response to a thousand job vacancies. In each case they sent out one with a British White sounding name and another with identical qualifications but bearing a more ethnic sounding name. As one might have guessed, the imaginary white applicants had significantly greater success than their imaginary non-white counterparts and were offered interviews where the latter hadn’t.

The analysis of this research is still on-going but we have certainly been given a sense that race discrimination is alive and well despite the Race Relations Act and that it starts even before the job has been offered. Just as job applicants are now not required to state their age and marital status, would the solution be to require applicants not have to state something as basic as their names? Yet one’s name is something that goes to one’s sense of identity and belonging and it may seem ludicrous to legislate on names.