The Commission for Racial Equality has responded to the Advertising
Standards Authority’s decision to uphold complaints against its
controversial poster ads by taking a full-page ad in the Times.
In the ad, which ran on Monday and was created by Euro RSCG Wnek Gosper
- the agency behind the original CRE campaign - the organisation says it
is sorry some people found its recent poster campaign personally
offensive and that the ASA felt obliged to condemn it.
But under the headline, ’The Campaign for Racial Equality is Sorry’, it
goes on to list a stark series of statistics concerning racial
discrimination - about which the CRE says it is also sorry.
’Sorry that for every attack on a white person there are eight on
Afro-Caribbeans and 16 on Pakistanis,’ one entry reads. ’Sorry that,
according to some reports, ethnic minorities receive prison sentences up
to nine months longer than white people for the same crime.’ The ad ends
with the statement, ’Sorry that in a so-called progressive society on
the verge of a new millennium, a Commission for Racial Equality needs to
exist at all.’
Sir Herman Ousley, chairman of the CRE, said: ’When we launched the
campaign we were dealing with complacency. Our aim was to get a response
and we got one. We aimed to get people talking about this subject again
- and they are.’
Mark Wnek, the creative director of Euro RSCG, who wrote the ad, said
the next phase of the CRE campaign would be a celebration of ethnic
diversity.
