The One Simple Step the Government Should Take to Cut the Diversity Industry Off at the Root and Restore Meritocracy
The engine of identity politics and the DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) agenda in the U.K. is the Equality Act 2010. In particular, Part 11, which contains all the exceptions and extra clauses that turn a law against discrimination into one that drives ‘positive’ discrimination and a panoply of woke causes.
James McSweeney has taken a closer look at this problem in UnHerd. He’s unimpressed with the Government’s new policy paper, Inclusive Britain, which proposes beefing-up online censorship and ensuring NHS hospitals are “held to account” for insufficiently zealous diversity drives, while leaving the Equality Act untouched.
He has a proposal for what a Government that actually wants to cut identity politics and wokery off at the root would do – and it’s much simpler than you might think. It depends on realising that the lawfulness of the whole edifice rests on just a few clauses in the Equality Act.
Clauses like Section 149 which introduced a “public sector equality duty”. This obliged public bodies to “encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low”.
Subsequent regulations (introduced by Conservative ministers) toughened Section 149 – imposing on public bodies a requirement to publish measurable “equity objectives”, including concrete steps to strengthen diversity and extensive annual reports on progress. This effectively meant that every public body – from your local hospital trust to the Royal Navy – had to hire a diversity bureaucracy.
What followed was predictable. The number of Diversity & Inclusion roles surged 71% between 2015 and 2020. According to LinkedIn, the U.K. now has twice as many D&I workers per capita as any other country. How do these workers boost diversity?
While the Equality Act forbids explicit quotas, it provides two loopholes. Section 158 facilitates “enabling or encouraging” protected groups to “participate in an activity” where they are underrepresented. This covers targeted outreach schemes such Civil Service Summer Diversity Internship. And Section 159 does allow forms of preferential treatment for candidates from underrepresented groups. However, as university grades, A Levels, and psychometric tests consistently produce large group differences, the diversity and inclusion bureaucracy has been forced to get creative.
Some bodies, such as the civil service and police, have dumped numerical and verbal reasoning tests (the former has also dropped A Level requirements) – replacing them with situational judgement tests, which largely query candidates on how they would navigate professional relationships. These lack predictive validity but produce results without any clear group-correlated patterns.
Other bodies rely on more informal discrimination. NHS England’s pledge to reduce the ratio of ethnically European medical directors by 27% probably falls into this category – with candidates failing to fit the profile likely to be looked over. The Army has simply lowered standards.
These trends are unlikely to be reversed by repealing the Equality Act. When the Reagan administration scaled back U.S. affirmative action compliance requirements, companies failed to change their behaviour. I suspect we’d see the same in the UK – after years of on-message statements, no CEO or public sector leader will want to be seen as anti-diversity.
Instead of revoking the Equality Act, the Conservatives should amend it – removing Part 11 (which contains the above sections). With this adjustment, any private or public body pursuing diversity targets would become liable to near-bottomless lawsuits for violating the Equality Act’s prohibition on discrimination on grounds of race, sex, religion, gender identity or sexuality. Overnight, statements of intent to alter any group’s share of the workforce would become damning legal evidence. The entire diversity bureaucracy would be severely damaged.
The Government can do this quite easily, and it must. The alternative is to erode meritocracy and mandate growing discrimination against any group judged to be inappropriately successful.
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Clauses like Section 149 which introduced a “public sector equality duty”. This obliged public bodies to “encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low”.
A relevant protected characteristic? Would that be like being a child, or someone who is elderly and frail? Governments care so much about them that they authorise their injection with experimental drugs and force them into a nightmare of mask-wearing and isolation. They suddenly care about encouraging them to “participate in public life”?
This is nonsense. What they are concerned with is the idea of participation which they define as “disproportionately low”. So the relevant protected characteristic is being “different” in some way that is sanctioned. That difference had better not be unwillingness to accept an experimental injection. Such people are actively discouraged from participation in public life.
Let them be specific. Which persons warrant protection, and which do not? Which people cannot take care of themselves?
Fun times, when Australia tried applying random names to applications to reduce the number of men they were employing, they found a bias in favour of interviewing female-sounding applicants.
When they fully anonymised applications to remove all hints about gender or ethnicity, and interviews had to be offered solely on merit, they found…
Oh dear. Might need to rethink this one.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888
One of the most irritating things about all this is the refusal to even attempt to understand historical developments.
There was indeed a time when gender and ethnicity – in many places – were barriers to senior positions. But people talked about it; discussed it.
Minds changed: not because people were trying to be correct or virtuous, but because they were trying to be fair and reasonable.
Today’s gender and ethnic warriors are acting, far too often, as moral police – prepared to punish anyone, regardless of their background, who strays from their version of orthodoxy.
They have no respect for or understanding of the work done by previous generations, by people who persuaded, rather than bullied. They did this by seeking and finding common ground.
Bullies intimidate; and they will always find those inclined to appease them.
It’s like someone said when they hold the “whip hand”
Quite. Even now many refuse to see it. Even fewer will examine what he actually said.
Indeed! And then there’s the inability to accept that bullies come in all forms …
Yes. Softly spoken bullies are still bullies.
I’ll take issue with one of your comments. Morality is a foreign concept to diversity and inclusion advocates.
For example, allowing children to consider gender reassignment before they even reach puberty is morally repugnant, but its somehow been turned into a heated debating point rather than a simple case of right and wrong.
By all means, train teachers to recognise children who may be struggling with sexual identity, but the first port of call needs to be the parents/guardians, not the state.
Is it morally correct to have gender confused men competing in women’s sport? Of course it isn’t. Are they entitled to compete in sport? Of course they are, so, much like one wouldn’t expect the physically compromised to compete with able bodied athletes, give those wishing to identify as the opposite sex their own LGBQT classification and separate Olympic games if necessary.
That would be the ‘moral’ means to a solution, but of course that won’t be good enough.
When I said they “act as moral police”, I didn’t mean that they were a moral version of a police force. I meant it as people policing their version of morality.
Like you, I find that version of morality offensive and repugnant: particularly with regard to the outrageousness of inviting children to consider “gender reassignment”. That this is then, quite literally, operated upon is (or should be) criminal, imo.
I also agree completely re sports participation.
The State and their Controllers want to make paedophilia legal. Once you understand that, you understand why Government policies towards children are what they are
“a Government that actually wants to cut identity politics and wokery off at the root”
But we don’t have one and are very unlikely to get one in the foreseeable future.
Let’s not forget that the current Cabinet, by far the worst we’ve ever had, is at least 45% non-British.
And yet the most consistently solid on resisting identity politics is Kemi Badenoch.
Indeed; do the ethnic minorities that this legislation purports to benefit even want these woke policies? My anecdotal experience is for example that it’s young white and East Asian adults who have a problem with Jordan Peterson, while South Asians and blacks follow him and quote him approvingly; incidentally the personal development process he sells was shown to be particularly beneficial for ethnic minorities.
It is not about empowerment of minorities. Indeed, if it did empower them theyd ban it. They need the current victim group to at least feel victimised for their plans to work. Too many successes and that begins to fall apart. See the East Asians in the US for an example. No affirmative action for them.
The purpose is to damage the concept of the nation-state, which is built over long periods by people with a common heritage, culture and outlook. Few of our “new Britons” share anything with us. Many are resentful of whites, and many more can be persuaded they are hard done to.
People will learn the hard way it took us 1500 years to become a coherent nation. All thrown away in a few short decades.
The purpose is to destroy the concept of the individual, it is collectivism in action.
That too. But eroding a solid culture in which to grow helps with that. Especially since the endless cries of racism, sexism, homophobia encourage an instinct for self censorship, the underlying component of which is hiding your true self. That too contributes to the destruction of the individual.
That first and foremost. A nation state is composed of individuals.
I’m all for individualism. But they are condemning us collectively in case you haven’t noticed. We are condemned for our shared characteristics, not our individualism. We are castigated not just for being white but for our whiteness.
The condemnation is aimed at eliminating the individual, as such.
My ‘White Privilege’ really goes back about 8 generations, and is the result of my forebears coming in from the field to the towns and the cities, where they contributed to the industrial revolution with their very beings, living short, miserable lives, working long hours in dirty and dangerous jobs so that the next generation could have it better.
Their sacrifices, have enabled the world to develop and for things that we take for granted from food, clothes and houses, to medicine, to transport, to electricity and the rest of our modern lives to come into being. I will not give up my privilege. It was earned at great personal cost by my ancestors, and I refuse to give it up, just because other nations did not achieve what we achieved. We led the way.
Yet I listen to people who talk about the ‘shame’ of our colonial times and they must imagine everyone was dressed in finest silk and ermine, and carried about their business in sedan chairs. Dumbed down education meets lack of critical thinking.
White privilege is real, it is the reason Edgar Winter is supreme ruler of the universe….
I too have a similar ancestry. Mine were coal miners within living memory. Not an easy life. My own life chances were helped by their hard work.
We have provided an easy outlet for the resentment of other races. They are getting a free ride for the reasons you state. No real challenge to the narrative, as if ordinary working class people 250 years ago owned shares in sugar plantations. It is absurd.
But the real absurdity is our inability to tell immigrants who hate us, who complain of too many white people in positions of authority, to move to a country with no whites.
My favourite absurdity is black and brown people complaining too many of our historical figures and their corresponding statues are white. What else would they be in northern Europe?
Come on now Liberia is a shining example for freed salves from the USA of what can be achieved.
The fact is, the UK shared its progress across the world. If anyone’s living the life of privilege it’s those who benefit without their ancestors contributing.
Witness any protest on D&I or LGBTQ rights and the most prominent people there are white, middle class heterosexuals, often with their brats in tow.
By and large, in my experience, immigrants to the UK have few problem with their integration into our society other than self imposed problems. They often come from much worse.
Are negative racial attitudes endemic in British society? Absolutely not. A friend of mine in the 70’s was black, literally unknown in the wealthy north Glasgow suburb I grew up in, and he was universally popular. Second generation and at least as Scottish as I am, loved cars and bikes like the rest of us, and enjoyed a night on the lash with the rest of us.
One night he was picked on in the pub by a racist who was forced to drink up PDQ and was seen off the premises by pubfull of people who didn’t even know my mate. It was a ‘hold my beer’ moment. Everyone was looking for someone to hold their beer!
Its not racial minorities that hate white skins, it’s our own kith and kin.
I noticed when the Government switched to protected status for Muslims, the blacks kicked off again.. they need the victim card more than anyone!
‘Kemi Badenoch’ I hadn’t even heard of that one,is he/she Minster for teaspoons, or Is their role less significant?
Ignorance is a weird flex, but you do you.
The spicy Mrs Badenoch (married to a Scotchman, but let’s not hold that against her) is Minister of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and also Minister of State ( Minister for Equalities ), since neither of them is really a full time job.
I believe neither Ministry comes with much of a budget, and I doubt Kemi would spend it anyway. She appears to be one of those actual small government conservatives who believe in merit and work rather than identity and grifting, and isn’t afraid to say it.
We heard similar good stuff from Priti Useless, which hasn’t been matched by actions. However, I’d still like to see Badenoch given a chance to fail hard, if only because she’s prepared to actually tackle the grievance industry head on.
I have no idea what your obsession with Scotsmen is, exemplified by your compulsion to deliberately misspell the term.
Scotland was the source of the enlightenment for which we should all be grateful.
Also bearing in mind that the majority of Scots voted to remain part of the Union for which we have a long history of defending. Nor did the majority deem it necessary for devolution, but Blair did, so imposed it on the country.
The current political incumbent is thanks to the peculiarity of the voting system. The majority of voters didn’t want the SNP.
So why not tone down the baiting.
Always good to have a face to go with the name. Kemi Badenoch.
Original name: Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke.
Born in Wimbledon. As British as they come!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemi_Badenoch
Well, she’s a White Supremacist, so no wonder. (I gather you no longer have to be white to be a white supremacist. At 70 I can’t keep up…)
Kemi Badenoch is being racist to herself, I am told.
Is she sincere,or,like Johnson on Brexit, spotting an opportunity?
I don’t remember her complaining about the government policy of killing white oldies in order to make covid seem much more dangerous than it is.
And yet we are still branded as racists.
Sajid Javid is British! Born in Rochdale. A Lancastrian, by ‘eck!
I’m a Yorkie, but I’d never mortally insult those from the wrong side of the Pennines by claiming he was a Lancastrian.
Thank you. I was about to comment that in no way do I consider this turd a Lancastrian. Hearing it from someone from the wrong side of the Pennines is heartening.
I don’t think that Princess Nut Nut would allow it. Next?
In the name of diversity and equality shall we insist that many black professional footballers be sacked on the grounds that they are vastly over-represented compared to their share of the population?
Isn’t logic a sign of white superiority?
And add the wonderful multi kulti adverts where apparently ,despite being around 3% of the UK population all families are mixed race mostly with black males .
What total XXXlox
Indeed. It is almost as if they live in some fantasyland bubble where they telegraph their ambitions for our future.
Yes, imagine a film where the adverts were really all about the hidden messages in them!
They aren’t advertising what is, they are avertising what they want.
😉
“encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low”.
A ‘relevant protected characteristic‘ is individual freedom. Let’s go the full Monty on this. Instead of grouping people into nominal categories that, in itself, tends to the reinforcement of an -ism, we should encourage a person-by-person approach.
And at the top of the agenda must be Human Rights.
It would help if they knew the difference between a human right and an entitlement.
Natural rights versus “claim” rights. Scruton very good on this. Claim rights are such as the push for Transgender Rights – rights which destroy women’s rights. Such are not “rights”, rather weapons.
But where would we get our government ministers from if we didn’t have positive discrimination for morons?
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The US has solved their own moron shortage (they only found one for their top three officials) by waiting for their politicians to reach advanced senility or alcoholic degeneration in office.
The Conservative wing of the Uk’s globalist party are all in for the diversity/woke BS.
Just as they are all in on the global warming agenda, relentless mass immigration, everything trans and all the rest of it.
If the Tories thought they could get away with openly passing a law prohibiting being white, sexually normal and sane they would.
I honestly don’t know why so many brown people would come to this evil hell hole when they can enjoy the advanced society that is Wakanda.
Most ‘brown’ people of my experience who have emigrated here legally are usually grateful for the life they lead. I haven’t met one who is a SJW or black activist, most just get on with their lives and feel well integrated into our society.
By and large they are far better people than the white middle class crinklies parading their virtue at protests supporting the marxist BLM organisation.
I lived and worked in Leicester for over 20 years.
In my experience, Hindus are utterly untrustworthy. Sikhs and Christians are fine, Muslims far better than they’re made out to be.
Wipe out COMMON PURPOSE
it could be argued that these so called “diversity drives” and the current climate is actually putting off businesses from hiring people from minority backgrounds. I.e. say a business hired someone from a minority background and for whatever reason the applicant was not working out and they therefore decided to go through the procedure to legally dismiss them, that business may think that the woke mob and twitter warriors may go after their business as it could be seen as “racism” and therefore decide to covertly not hire the person in the first place. As has been seen in the states especially doing BLM in 2020 as looting and rioting targeted businesses.
It should always be the best person for the job, you don’t need quoters and drives and whatever is come up with.
Its also kind of ironic that the brexit campaign ran on tightening immigration laws as a central pillar yet all we have seen is the opposite.
My wife knew a woman who had been knee deep in public sector diversity crap jobs. She decided to look for a job in the private sector, then not woke at all. Amazed she could not get a job, interview after interview – my wife suggested to her that being involved in work that had no economic benefit, no targets, no metrics for success, etc. would put any private sector employer off. They need people who KNOW HOW TO WORK.
Equalities Act needs to go. Simple.
Look at those BLM protests in America. They had bricks delivered to rioting areas with the name ‘Acme Brick Company’ as a trademark, seemingly an unlimited resource. People need to be a bit more savvy about what is going on. If you stick at that level then you will discern nothing of the truth.
Just think, not many years ago we thought unity was our strength now its diversity. How stupid we were back then when we didn’t have the world and his wives telling us what to do.
I understand that in the Ukraine military aged men are not allowed to leave, only women and children. How sexist and ageist the Ukrainians are, where are the feminists demanding equality to fight along side the men.
Of course, no one is requiring women to leave Ukraine. They can stay and fight if they want to. Many have. They currently make up 15% of Ukraine’s armed forces.
But the men can’t leave, unless they are black.
Merit is an interesting idea but is surely rather limited in the sense that those who might be ahead of their time would be deemed utterly without merit in the moment but might be recognised at a later point. I am not a big fan of Aristotle but I think he had a sense of proportion in this regard, No man knows his merit even when he dies. Maybe his son will besmirch him or his more seedy affairs might come to light. Any merit that you have achieved within this malarkey is highly suspect. Because you failed to look at the whole of the moon.
Merit is missed in this context.
A better word would be competence.
Straightforward government meddling in things they have no right meddling in. The moment a regulation is applied to anything there are loopholes, and plugging those loopholes just creates more loopholes. We have an enviable political position in this country that doesn’t require a written constitution as in, for example, America. There are, of course, positives and negatives of both. Whilst the British concept of free speech is an immutable characteristic of our society the reason it’s under attack is because meddling politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers think it’s necessary to codify aspects of it. Enter the loophole. The American constitution, as robust as it seems to be is under attack by Executive Order from the President. The back door route is taken and whilst the first amendment says everyone has the right to free speech, it doesn’t exclude making speech freer for some than others. And whilst the second amendment states people are free to bear arms it doesn’t include the concept of magazines for semi automatics which weren’t invented when it was written. The loophole rears its ugly head again thanks to codification. So do lawyers. The upshot being that there is now an insistence on documenting everything we do.… Read more »
New bill proposes a content upload filter on the internet
https://reclaimthenet.org/smart-copyright-act-of-2022/
New copyright bill appears to push for internet upload filters
As if the DMCA isn’t bad enough.
By Didi Rankovic
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I watched The Witchfinder on BBC this evening. It is, presumably, set in the 17th century.
Half the cast appeared to be people of colour (I hope that’s the correct phrase this week).
There were only a few hundreds of people of colour in the country at the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_British_people).
How does such a push for diversity in modern programming help people understand historical fact?
Understanding facts is not part of the BBC’s remit. Virtue signaling is what they do
How do these workers boost diversity?
How? They are all black!!
Oh, and make sure blacks are over represented in every media – adverts, TV programmes, films (but don’t make them the criminal, always the good guy)
‘Gender identity’ is not a Protected Characteristic under the Equality Act. ‘Gender identity’ has no existence in law. The relevant characteristics are Sex and ‘Undergoing Gender Reassignment’. There is nothing in the Act that requires employers to allow men to use female lavatories and changing rooms.
Nevertheless, any mention in law of ‘gender’, which does not exist, is nonsense and should be removed and the Gender Recognition Act (which represents the end result of the ‘undergoing’ process) should also be repealed. People were prepared to tolerate the occasional transsexual as they did not threaten the status quo of two sexes but the ‘gender’ activists are now totally out of hand.
I would also remove the Religion Characteristic and include in employment law the provision that it has no relevance to the workplace and should neither be discriminated against nor allowed to intrude.
Great idea. They can repeal the Climate Change Act in the same afternoon
I cannot recommend highly enough Dr. James Lindsay – (New Discourses is his website).
He has many YouTube videos where he is interviewed by various channels to explain, in extreme detail, what is going on and the 200 year long intellectual development from Hegel through Marx, through the Frankfurt School, Gramsci & Marcuse etc. and into the post modern era and then the birth of Intersectionality in Crenshaws ‘Mapping the margins’ and so on and on.
He correctly calls Diversity officers ‘commissars’ because their only job is political which is to infect your enterprise or institution with the virus of their ideology and create more Critical Theory activists.
It is a pathogen that kills everything it infects because its intent is destruction.
The DIE industry is the tip of the spear of the marxian revolutionary intent to undermine the enlightenment and destroy Western Civilisation.
Nobody I’ve yet found comes close to articulating the situation as well as he does.
We are currently within the Wests version of Maos Cultural Revolution – we have the ‘red’ identities and ‘black’ identities equivalents by race, gender and sexual orientation.
We are in much deeper trouble than the vast majority of people realise.