New analysis for The Guardian’s Cotton Capital project has revealed that not a single person in an executive position at Manchester’s main media, university or Premiere League football institutions, nor in its Chamber of Commerce and police force, is Black.
Cotton Capital is an ongoing project that seeks to explore how slavery and the cotton trade shaped the global economy, and in particular the economy and society of Manchester, aka Cottonopolis, and the Manchester Guardian – the forerunner of the paper we know today. It was initially sparked by an investigation into the Manchester Guardian founders’ own links to slavery.
The new research revealed that just 4.6% of people in all prominent public positions in Manchester – including local policing, the Chamber of Commerce, Premier League teams, arts bodies, university boards, NHS trusts and local political representation – are Black. The city’s Black population stands 14.8%.
The data does come with the caveat that the researchers analysed leading organisations in different fields as part of a sample that “would provide a snapshot of the state of ethnic representation within a city,” and as such is not exhaustive.
Looking at the wider BAME population, representation of people from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds was higher, at 18.7% – still some way off representative of the city’s 43.2% BAME population.
The analysis defined individuals as Black if they were a person of African descent, and included those of mixed heritage. In Manchester, Black people were best represented in executive positions in arts bodies and NHS trusts, with the figures there at 14.3% and 8.3% respectively.
In nearby Liverpool, the researchers found that 5% of leading public positions were held by Black people, a figure that roughly matches the city’s 5.2% Black population, although the Merseysiders fared little better when the figures were expanded to include all BAME citizens in prominent positions – 9.4% of the population compared to the city’s BAME population of 16%.
Speaking to the report’s authors Halima Begum, director of race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust, had clearly done her homework on how to hit Mancunians where it hurts: “The city’s leaders are entitled to claim that Manchester is England’s capital of the North,” she said. “But in equity terms, something is clearly broken and it must make many Mancunians deeply uncomfortable to know they’re being shown the way by London, Bristol and, of course, their old friends in Liverpool.”
