The Voice is Britain’s best established black newspaper.  It has much to commend it, no doubt.  For example, there’s a culture page and a fascinating page of international news:-

TUPAC’S CULT KILLER - Member of Tupac cult “chops off daughter’s head and tosses decapitated body into local river”.
HIV ACTIVIST SLAMS COPS - A HIV/Aids activist in Swaziland has called on the police to stop arresting prostitutes.
COURTS CALL FOR GOVT BAN ON DEATH PENALTY - THE Ugandan courts have ordered the government to amend laws that impose the death penalty for certain serious crimes.

All good stuff ... or stuff anyway.  But it was really the careers page that caught my interest.  I thought I might check out what kind of businesses are hungrily searching out ambitious, young, go-getting readers of The Voice.  After all, one has grown mightily suspicious of all those super-smart black men and women that wander nightly across our TV screens - you know, the ones with the indispensable leadership qualities, cutting-edge techie skills and smooth moves no white member of the opposite sex can resist.  Time to find out whether we are being unfair, even prejudiced and just plain ignorant in writing off such “positive images” as all bloody lies, frankly, and social engineering so blatent the liberal media should be seconded en masse for 10 years to Congo TV.

Careers advertised in The Voice are arrayed across twelve impressive sounding sections.  Now, we all know that the public sector will employ absolutely anybody.  A mop ‘n bucket job in a hospital trust or filing in a council equality department doesn’t meet the specification I am looking for.  No smooth-moving, ranking black go-getter would be interested in anything so uncool and thin on respeck.  So we will eschew serious study of the thirteen state pay-roll jobs advertised in the Education section.  Even the one limited company listed there, Keeping It Simple Training Ltd, is a confection of the state.  Love the name, by the way.

So, what about the next section ... the promisingly titled Engineering & Technical?  Surely, the big cheque-book is being waved by somebody terribly corporate and anxious to net one of those brilliant, black, back-room techies you see in every cop show.  But the cupboard is bare: “There are currently no jobs in this section” says The Voice.  Must be a bad week for businesses needing slightly off-the-wall but astonishingly gifted black hackers.

OK, then ... on to General Appointments.  And whoa, here we go!  A private company.  Tesco, whose new store is ready to open.  Ah, Tesco.  Shelf-fillers.  Check-out girls.  Not the sort of work Denzel Washington would die for (if only the bad guys would shoot straight).  And anyway the damned store is in Clapham.  Down-market Sarf London, for pete’s sake - where black faces are more numerous than Labour MP’s after another Tory election disaster.  All the rest of the General Appointments are public sector - bar one.  But that’s the Voice - Britain’s best established black newspaper.  Not quite what I had in mind.

OK, then ... on to Hair, Health & Beauty.  But there are currently no jobs in this section.  Legal & Financial?  There are currently no jobs in this section.  Professional & Executive?  Seven jobs listed, all public sector.  Likewise Public & Community.  Regional Appointments stacks up a single entry for a public sector non-job (Equality Development Officer in rural Somerset - wierd but that’s culture war).  Sales, Marketing & Media ... there are currently no jobs in this section.  Secretarial & Administration ... there are currently no jobs in this section.  Social, Health Housing and Teaching Appointments take us back again into the state sector.

And that’s it.  Zippo for Denzel.  Anyone would think those brilliant black TV people don’t exist in real life ... or that egalitarian spending programmes are pure waste, and racial equality is undeliverable, impossible ... that nothing will ever change.  Or, alternatively, that a half-decent Thatcherite burn-out of the public sector would disemploy black Britain in toto and leave us asking what on earth it is for.