The Runnymede Trust is agitating for the Rugby Football Union to make more intensive studies of how many BAEM folk there are playing the game. And coaching it, watching it and so on. Presumably on the grounds that no one realises that lots of Pacific Islanders like it and partake and few Somalis. The world is a poorer place for us not knowing this by the numbers rather than just common sense.

RFU more focused on burying its problem with monitoring ethnicity rather than addressing it, says leading race equality think tank

The complaint then becomes that:

Dr Zubaida Haque, the interim director at the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank, said: “It’s astonishing that the Rugby Football Union are not collecting and monitoring data of players, coaches, board members and other participants by ethnicity, given that data is the first step in identifying whether there are issues with participation, recruitment, retention and progression of black and ethnic minority people in the game.

“This is the entire reason that Theresa May set up the Government’s Race Disparity Unit in 2017 which collects and monitors data by ethnicity across all public sector areas.
“The complete lack of action on even collecting data by ethnicity makes you wonder whether the RFU is more focused on burying the problem rather than addressing it.”

As we’ve noted before we worry about people who do that most unEnglish thing and use a PhD as a reason for the Dr. title in a non-academic setting. But, you know, there we are, personal pronouns are all the thing these days.

We’d also note our agreement with the Sir John Cowperthwaite view of such matters. He refused to allow anyone in Hong Kong to collect GDP statistics on the basis that if they existed some damn fool would only insist upon doing something with them.

But why is it that Ms. Haque is so concerned here? In the accounts of her won organisation, The Runnymede Trust, there is a line about “Basketball”. Which we assume is monitoring of the racial balance among basketball players, no doubt to ensure that enough white people get to play the game.

That is, the concern over the RFU is that they’re not employing the Runnymede Trust and the way to get her to shut up is to do so. We admit, we could be wrong, it might not be so sophisticated, could be just “Gissa Job”.