THEODORE DALRYMPLE
These things are sent to try us: I’m speaking now of circular letters from the General Medical Council. I recently received a second such letter about the Council’s Ethnicity Census from the president of the Council:
Toward the end of 2007, I wrote asking for your help with an important project designed to help us to understand better the diversity of doctors registered with the GMC. We were hugely encouraged by the response we received and now have ethnicity data for over 60% of all registered doctors in the UK. To complete the picture we still need your support and I would be grateful if you would provide the information we seek.
What is the purpose of the GMC’s racialist project?
We are committed to ensuring that our processes and procedures are fair, objective, transparent and free from unlawful discrimination... That is why we need data for as high a proportion of registered doctors as possible.
There is no explanation as to how such a census will ensure that the deliberations of the Council on individual cases will be rendered fairer by the possession of the data, and to try to find such an explanation on the Council’s website is to enter a world of Kafka-esque euphemism, equivocation and evasion:
We will use the data to analyse diversity issues. This analysis will, among other things, help us understand why proportionately more international medical graduates appear before our Fitness to Practise Panels.
Both in the letter and on the website, doctors are assured that the information gathered will be kept entirely confidential. The GMC seems as blithely unaware of the recent scandals of supposedly confidential and highly sensitive information gathered by the government and left wholesale on trains, as it is unaware of at least two comparatively recent genocidal episodes that were made easier, or even possible, by ethnicity data on 100 per cent of the population. Furthermore, doctors did not cover themselves in ethical glory during either of those episodes, which suggests that prudence might be the better part of impudent busy-bodying. Of course, the real reason for the Ethnicity Census is to be found in the letter. ‘There is no statutory obligation on doctors to supply ethnicity data,’ it says; but ‘The census will... help us to fulfil our other general statutory duties and responsibilities under the Race Relations Act, 1976 (as amended) and other legislation.’ In other words, they are required to ask but no one is required to reply.
There is something deeply sinister to be found on the GMC’s website, notwithstanding doctors’ legal right to withhold the information sought. Even if doctors do not reply to the GMC’s enquiry, there is no cause for the GMC to despair:
We will be contacting those doctors for whom we do not have access to current ethnicity data, requesting they provide us with this information. We have successfully partnered with the NHS in England to obtain ethnicity data for doctors in their employ, significantly reducing the numbers of doctors who need to take part in this exercise.
So much for confidentiality; and the prose reeks of bad conscience, as very well it might. I love in particular the phrase ‘current ethnicity data’, which conjures up the spectre of racial reclassification à la South Africa in the good old days.
But of course the GMC does have a complete excuse. It is only obeying orders.
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