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Should being ginger be a ‘protected characteristic’?

An MP wants to know if carrot tops and blue-haired cat ladies will get special treatment under the Equality Act.

Simon Evans

Simon Evans
Columnist

Topics Politics UK

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Anneliese Dodds, Labour MP for Oxford East and UK minister for women and equalities, was compelled to answer an eye-catching question from a backbench MP last week.

Chris Evans, the Labour MP for Caerphilly, submitted a written question earlier this month, asking Dodds ‘whether she plans to amend the list of protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 to include hair colour’. Ms Dodds was pleased to be able to confirm that the government has no such plans.

Well, that’s a relief, I suppose. But assuming that this question was tabled in good faith, and was not simply an old protocol to test the pneumatic pipes through which such things still pass from office to office in the Palace of Westminster, it somewhat beggars belief that it was asked at all.

These days, it’s hard to know whether this sort of thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. One sees so many news items lately that seem not so much like a glitch in the matrix as rejected storylines for season two of Did I Starmer?, already shaping up to be the least-popular reality TV show ever made. This question is particularly hard to digest. Surely, a satire? No, it appears not.

Columnists, like nature, abhor a vacuum. And so, into this absence of easily discerned rational explanation is sucked my speculation.

Was this devised as an easy win for Dodds? A question lobbed up for her to volley into the back of an open goal? One she could answer with brusque efficiency to demonstrate the seriousness of this government, its desiccated pragmatism, its absence of ideology and its contact with reality?

She may have had more difficulty answering questions such as, ‘Is it true that a Jamaican drug dealer has avoided deportation (despite being jailed five times in the UK and having beaten up his daughter’s mother in front of her), because that same daughter has unresolved issues with her gender that only he can talk to her about?’. Or: ‘Is the best you can do to prevent another Southport demanding an extra click in the purchase of kitchen knives? Really?’ Or: ‘Will you honestly not stop until you have driven the last ambitious Briton overseas?’ Tricky ones like that.

Was Chris Evans MP asking this because he fell victim to an elaborate practical joke at his expense, whereby his mates challenge one another to see what they can get him to ask questions about in parliament? Does he have to table a certain number of written questions to fulfil a quota, in order to get a grant of some sort? Or is it a local issue yet to achieve national traction? He is the MP for Caerphilly, after all, a Welsh constituency. Has he somehow discerned that the chief thing holding back the Welsh from achieving their potential is prejudice against their hair colour?

Perhaps it could be down to a personal grievance. Does Chris Evans the MP tire of being mistaken for his more famous and hunky namesake, the film star who embodied Captain America for a generation? In which case, he might feel the need to demonstrate priorities that put clear blue water between him and the mythical saviour of Liberty and the Free World.

Or was he perhaps in his constituency office, trying to prove to a class full of surly, bored sixth-formers on some sort of field trip that MPs are really quite powerful, actually? You can, for instance, just ask a government minister anything you want and they have to answer it. Maybe to prove it, he had asked the scowling teen nearest to him, ‘What is the most pointless question you can imagine asking?’.

The default hypothesis is that Evans would like to see hair colour treated as a protected characteristic. Just as plausible is that he is concerned that this government – one of his own party, note – is proving so clod-hoppingly inept at the practise and projection of power that it really might actually do such a thing.

I refuse to believe this is a real issue, even by the dubious standards of the infamous Equality Act. Hair colour, along with eye colour, has long been a self-evidently ridiculous thing to discriminate on the basis of. Even school children understand this. It is often used, however disingenuously, to demonstrate to them the absurdity of racism and the dangerous forces that segregation and hierarchy can unleash. It is hard to believe that anyone feels they are subject to this.

Having said that, it is not clear which colours Evans suspects are informing prejudice. Of the natural hair colours, it is the ‘ginger’ that has traditionally attracted ridicule up to and quite possibly past the point of causing real offence. No doubt some gingers suspect that their crowning glory could attract something in the order of a non-crime hate incident, but would it really lead to them being dismissed unfairly from a job?

The teasing of gingers was so recognisable a trope at one time that Tim Minchin wrote a very popular song about it, connecting the word ‘ginger’ with the single most taboo slur in the English language, with which it happens to share its letters.

Although that coppery hue is perhaps overrepresented in Evans’s region, one suspects that the colours to which he is referring are those now adopted deliberately, if ironically, to alienate and repel: blue, purple and pink.

Blue-haired women in particular, with or without cats, are presently seen as shorthand for the angrier, more implacable type of activist. The kind that scream inchoate agonised howls of rage when men they don’t like are elected president. ‘Bluehairs’ are even a synecdoche now, the equal and opposite of the more established ‘suits’.

It has been suggested that these synthetic colours – as well as signifying likely sexual orientation and political allegiance – operate similarly to aposematism in the animal kingdom. This is the fascinating mechanism by which certain species use bright, unnatural-looking colouring to advertise their toxicity or foul taste to prevent themselves becoming prey.

This presents Evans with another problem, beyond mere triviality and eye-rolling absurdity. If the ‘aposematic’ individuals then repel prospective employers, who might be seeking to put a friendly face behind a desk in a ‘customer-facing role’, that should surely mean that the dye is doing its job? Not that a bad dye job ever stopped Mrs Slocombe, of course, or her… cat.

In 1895, poet AE Housman wrote ‘Oh Who is that Young Sinner?’, a caustic satire on the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. It was not published until after Houseman’s death, presumably for fear that it would attract unwelcome inquiries into his own sinful state – which was even then, in 1936, some decades from being decriminalised.

‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.’

Houseman would, one hopes, feel some satisfaction to know that, 130 years later, men like Oscar and him need no longer fear incarceration for their God-given inclinations. He might also, were he to peruse Hansard for half an hour, wonder if we had lost our minds.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.

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