RAF Head “Apologises Unreservedly” After Inquiry Finds Force Discriminated Against White Men
The Royal Air Force illegally discriminated against white male recruits to boost its diversity drive, an official inquiry has concluded, as Air Chief Sir Richard Knighton “apologised unreservedly” to all those affected. GB News has more.
A 72-page report ordered by former RAF head Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston revealed ex-recruitment chief Lizzy Nicholl, who quit over the furore, was right to raise concerns about the so-called positive action plan.
Group Captain Nicholl received legal advice in 2022 which suggested the RAF’s recruitment activities were in breach of the Equality Act 2010.
The report said: “We found that concerns were raised at the time by R&S [recruitment and selection] staff but that those who led the initiatives believed that they were ‘pushing the boundaries’ of positive action rather than acting unlawfully.”
It added: “We found that the chain of command’s reaction to the former Group Capt R&S was overly defensive and not properly considered whether she might have been justified in what she said regarding previous acts of positive discrimination or the legality of what she was asked to do; and that insufficient effort had been made to determine the facts.”
The report also criticised senior figures in the RAF for not utilising reliable forecasts when setting ambitious targets to increase the number of female and ethnic minority recruits.
The RAF had pushed to fast-track ethnic minority and female recruits into training slots in both 2020 and 2021.
More than 30 men have also been identified as having missed out on a a potential £5,000 “golden handshake” to start cyber roles in the RAF.
The report cleared the RAF of the bullying allegations but concluded that Group Captain Nicholl had been right to call out the illegal recruitment practices.
The impacted individuals are reportedly being compensated by the aerial branch of the British Armed Forces.
Responding to the report, Air Chief Sir Richard Knighton “apologised unreservedly” to all those affected.
He added: “We accept that some men were discriminated against.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A colonel has said he was forced to quit the Army after he was criticised for stating that “men cannot be women” on private social media.
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Apology not accepted. The top brass were and still are on board with the aims, and will have known the general drift if not the fine detail. Apology to the whistleblower not accepted either as their first instinct was to silence and punish. They got caught but will do it all again tomorrow more carefully.
My thoughts, exactly: They’re dishing out some money the government collected from the taxpayer and will henceforth cover their tracks more carefully. The mere fact that the air force has a diversity plan, IOW, that objective requirements are lower for the right kind of applicants, should be sufficient grounds to get rid of everyone involved with this starting with the top brass. Richard Knigthton is responsible for ensuring that something like this doesn’t happen, not for apologizing after his subordinates where caught breaking the law for the personal benefit of applicants to their liking while harming national security as a side effect.
Pushing the boundaries for positive action implies that they were well aware that they were acting illegally but hoped to get away with it in order to create a precedent for more law breaking with damaging side effects by other departments.
Ridiculous. People should be hired purely on their suitability for the role and nothing else. Speaking of diversity, more on the delusional fibber, Sadiq Khan and the state of the UK; ”Sadiq Khan’s claim that London was “built by migrants” is bizarre and without foundation, unless he means to refer to the Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes – who arrived in England two thousand years ago, and whose major legacy was linguistic: the Anglo-Saxon that developed into English. These tribes did not “build London.” Unlike the U.S., Great Britain is not a country of immigrants, and there was little immigration until the mid-20th century, when migrants started to arrive from the Caribbean in the 1950s, and then, in the 1960s, the migration of Pakistanis began. The Pakistani presence has been an unalloyed catastrophe. Many of them arrived – and continue to do so — as economic migrants, eager to take advantage of the full panoply benefits offered by the British welfare state, including free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits (even without having held jobs in the U.K.), family allowances, and more. Muslim migrants have had difficulty integrating into a society of Infidels,… Read more »
A tenuous link to the article being; just as you should face no discrimination in getting any job and nobody should be overlooked or turned down based on race etc, the same would naturally apply to criminals. The law should prosecute the person who commits the offence, irrespective of race etc. Not turn a blind eye and give a free pass to reoffend because police are performing some sort of tick box exercise, thereby basically enabling and encouraging the criminals to just keep at it. Have people not learnt anything from the whole Jimmy Saville fiasco?!
Should it be concluded that, for the purposes of justice, it was an advantage that Saville wasn’t a migrant?
That’s a generic lie. It’s mirrored by the German Greens claiming that Turkish immigrants were really responsible for rebuilding Germany and reacquiring general prosperty after the second world war when – in reality – the so-called Wirtschaftswunder happened in the 1950s while so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers) weren’t imported in numbers before the 1960s. Why did none of these supposed extraeuropean Übermenschen ever accomplish anything noteworthy in their native countries?
In the late 19th century, Chinatown in London consisted of just one street, Limehouse Causeway. At the time, the population of London was about 3 million. In the 1911 census, the number of people in England and Wales with the surname of Patel numbered just 11 people. In the late 1930s, a newspaper article called ‘The Foreign Bits of Britain’ related how a small country estate in Hertfordshire had been purchased by a German count in 1901 to be used as a ‘farm colony’ where German immigrants who had fallen on hard times could go to live and work at their trade to earn enough money to return home. The several hundred men who had lived there before the Great War had, by the 1930s, become a handful of old people. That was the extent of the ‘foreign bits of Britain’ that this newspaper could identify. Today, in Tooting, South London, there is a blue plaque on a building which ‘celebrates the migrants who built Tooting’. Photographs of this area from the 1950s show no obvious migrants. Admiral Lord Nelson referred to the estate of the Hamiltons, not far from Tooting, as ‘paradise Merton’. The area was built up in… Read more »
How do you square the circle of practising affirmative action whilst not discriminating against those you’re not affirming? Like everything nowadays, the policy appears incoherent.
You can’t and everyone knows that but they don’t say it.
So the result is that officials must prepare abject apologies both for not selecting minorities AND discriminating against majorities, and trot them out as occasion demands, without meaning either.
Likewise when an MP offends trans activists, they fill in a boilerplate apology form and mean nothing, because they would as readily apologise for insensitivity to de-transitioners. And in this way, basic morality soon disappears from a nation.
The primary cause of this is the Equalities Act 2010 brought in by Harriet Harman and immediately adopted by the following Tory government. Bin this and we could return to leading a normal life whereby we can call anybody names without fear of prosecution.
Just imagine for a minute that the discrimination had been against black men.
And then try and imagine that an apology would be all that was required.
Air Chief Sir Richard Knighton should resign or be sacked.