The Pharmacists’ Defence Association’s Black and Minority Ethnic co-opted Committee member Nav Bhogal has been criticised by the Free Speech Union after he urged pharmacy bodies and wider NHS stakeholders to address “racial undertones” in the language used in those sectors. 

Reacting to a blog that appeared on the PDA website in October last year, in which Bhogal suggested alternatives to terms he believed had “racial undertones” such as blacklist/whitelist, master/slave, black market, blackmail and blackout, the Free Speech Union’s founder Toby Young said removing such words would amount to “just performative virtue signalling.”

Bhogal called on pharmacy bodies, NHS representatives and educational institutions to review and update “language in pharmacy and healthcare resources” and provide training for pharmacy professionals “to raise awareness about the importance of inclusive language and the impact of outdated terminology.”

However, Young, the associate editor of The Spectator, was quoted in MailOnline as saying: “Penalising old white men for using racially insensitive language doesn't improve the lives of poor black people one iota. It's just performative virtue signalling.”

Also, in a blog on the Free Speech Union website, published on December 30, its director of digital communications Frederick Attenborough was also critical of Bhogal’s comments.

Attenborough said: “While the stated goal of (Bhogal’s) recommendations is inclusivity, such interventions are part of a growing trend for workplace speech codes that stray beyond the requirements of equalities law.

“In turn, this has raised concerns about whether such policies are, in fact, a deliberate attempt to control expression and impose ideological conformity.”

Lola Dabiri, president of the PDA's BAME Network, told Independent Community Pharmacist: “The perception of and/or real impact of words used in communicating could be positive or negative. As is widely known, unconscious bias is real and can easily creep into language.

"It is therefore a worthy approach to raise awareness of such and the appreciation of the need to 'mind our language' in the fight against racism in the pharmacy world and in all levels of society."