Westminster Council has decided to drop the term minority when referring to black, Asian and minority ethnic people. From now on, they will be referred to using the phrase “global majority.”
The Labour-run local authority said it is making the change to be more diverse and inclusive.
According to The Times:
It said the change was one of three “key commitments” it was making to the cause, along with being an anti-racist organisation and continuing to remove pay gaps within the organisation by 2025.
However, Sir John Hayes, of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, said: “Minorities and majorities are about the context — you can’t use the term ‘majority’ out of context and assume it affords some sort of accurate description.
“The distortion of language is at the heart of the liberal left agenda. The malevolent minority that control too much of Britain wish to control and limit language as a precursor to limit what people think. It is deeply sinister and must be resisted at every turn.”
Westminster council made the change after questions were asked about how minorities should best be described, stemming from the death in 2020 of George Floyd in the US and the rise of the Black Lives Matters movement.
The council is also introducing anti-racism training for staff.
The government’s style guide, which was updated in December last year, recommended dropping the term Bame after receiving a report on how Covid-19 had affected various communities.
Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Education at University College London who coined the term ‘global majority’, wrote in 2020 that it “encourages those so-called to think of themselves as belonging to the majority on Planet Earth”.
She added: “It refers to people who are black, African, Asian, brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or [who] have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’.
“Globally these groups represent approximately 80 per cent of the world’s population, making them the global majority.”
Serena Simon, the council’s director of communities, , whose salary is said to be between £106,518 and £147,114, said: “Our recent commitments ensure an ongoing and serious focus to embed diversity and inclusion, including anti-racism, in all that we do.”
