| Abstrakt: |
JUSTICE Secretary Jack Straw says he finds it 'worrying' that only 9 per cent of solicitors in private practice in Britain come from what he calls BME backgrounds (the letters turn out to stand for Black and Minority Ethnic). Why's that, Jack? According to the latest census, ethnic minority groups make up almost exactly 9 per cent of the country's population. So what on earth is worrying about the fact that the ethnic composition of the solicitors' profession precisely reflects that of the population at large? Indeed, I would have expected the proportion of BME solicitors to be considerably lower, since immigrants and their descendants so often have to work their way up from the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, conquering difficulties with language and acclimatisation to a new culture along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
