BAME? We call it ‘global majority’ now, says council

THE term Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) has been abolished by a London council that has decided those it covers should now be called ‘global majority’.

It means white people under Labour-run Westminster Council have in effect been declared a minority.

The council said after its Bame staff network’s annual meeting that it had committed to take ‘serious action’ to be ‘more diverse and inclusive’.

A statement added that the council had made three ‘key commitments – to be an antiracist organisation; to continue sustained action to remove pay gaps within the organisation by 2025; and to adopt the term “global majority” instead of BAME and to change the staff network name to reflect that’.

The decision was mocked by barrister Colin Wynter KC, who tweeted: ‘I am no longer a BAME in Westminster. I am a “GM”. Neither a car, nor a weird fruit or vegetable, but a member of the “global majority”.

‘My “journey” so far – negro, coloured, Afro-[insert], Black, BAME, POC [person of colour] and now GM. Can’t wait to see what comes next.’ Sir John Hayes, of the Common Sense Group of Tory 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’s Serena Simon said: ‘Our recent commitments ensure an ongoing and serious focus to embed diversity and inclusion including anti-racism in all that we do.’

Academic Rosemary Campbell-Stephens MBE, 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, have been racialised as “ethnic minorities”. Globally these groups currently represent approximately 80 per cent of the world’s population, making them the global majority.’

‘Distortion of language’