BBC still "hideously white" (sort of)

At ATW, JammieWearingFool links to a Daily Mail report on the ethnic make-up of BBC staff, entitled "BBC more 'hideously white' than ever as number of black executives drops to all time low". Now, leaving aside the question of whether the present figures are actually an "all time low" (and I imagine that there were probably rather fewer black executives at the BBC when it was founded, or, indeed, thirty years ago, than there are now), the main point made in the article appears to be the following:

Latest figures show not only has the BBC failed to hit targets, it has actually gone backwards, in the number of non-white senior staff.

In 2004 only 4.4 per cent of management were from minority backgrounds.

The BBC had set itself a target of 7 per cent by 2008. But latest figures show this has actually dropped to 4.3 per cent.

This equates to around just 40 ethnic executives out of almost 1,000 senior BBC posts, according to trade magazine Broadcast.

Greg Dyke, then director general, put in place the targets after branding the corporation as "hideously white" when spotting just one black face among 80 guests at the management Christmas party.

Dyke had planned for a voluntary programme to have 12.5 per cent of all staff and 7 per cent of senior management from BME groups by the start of 2008.

By the end of last year only 10.9 per cent of the corporation's total workforce came from ethnic minorities, only marginally up from 10 per cent at the end of 2003.

Now, according to the 2001 census, whites make up 92.2% of the total population, non-whites 7.8%. So, whites were already slightly under-represented when compared with the general population when Dyke first made his remarks, and since then the over-representation of non-whites has increased still further. And yet the complaint is that the number of non-whites is still too few!

To be fair, they are still under-represented among the BBC's senior management. But we can all rest assured that the BBC is taking action to change this. To be precise, the are setting up a "fast track" scheme, designed to, as a BBC spokesman put it, "give a leg-up" to non-whites. This spring, thirty staff will be chosen for the fast track programme. Of these thirty places, fifteen will be reserved for non-whites, with a further five being held for the disabled. The white, able-bodied majority will have to fight it out for the remaining ten. It all makes you proud to be a licence fee-payer, doesn't it? Still, while the BBC's discriminatory approach is unfair, I can't work up much sympathy for its disadvantaged white staff: they're just finding themselves suffering as a result of the same left-liberalism that they have themselves championed time and again.

But the ethnic make-up of its staff is hardly the main problem, one way or the other, with the BBC. Rather, it is the lack of political diversity that means that the BBC, or at least its news service, is unfit for purpose. As I wrote in a comment at ATW:

What the BBC really needs is not more (or, necessarily, fewer) non-whites, but more non-liberals. After all, regardless of the ethnic make-up of their senior staff, they still take a robustly anti-white, pro-everyone else line, whenever they report (or, in some cases, don't report) on any "racial issue".