The BBC Doesn’t Want to Hear About Anti-White Discrimination
Should the Equality Act 2010 be scrapped? Last week, Reform UK set the cat among the pigeons in the Leftie Blob by pledging to do just that. Suella Braverman, Reform’s new Shadow Education and Skills Secretary, said Britain is being “ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion” and promised to “build a country defined by meritocracy not tokenism”. Readers will not be surprised to hear that I heartily agree, and I set out some reasons why in the Spectator:
For one thing, it has encouraged untold vexatious complaints in the workplace. A recent report by Don’t Divide Us found a seven-fold increase in employment discrimination claims around race between 2016-17 to 2023-24, despite just 5% of claims being successful over the whole period. The Act’s focus on personal identity and victimhood encouraged a grievance culture, it found, which far from easing racial tensions was only exacerbating them further.
In particular, it is the Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty and “positive action” wheezes which have made it a vehicle for systematic discrimination against less politically favoured groups – whites and men. While the Act outlaws ‘positive discrimination’, where minorities are explicitly hired preferentially, it doesn’t outlaw “positive action”, where minority groups get special outreach programmes, which we’re supposed to think is fair and unobjectionable. But as those would-be airmen know, this is really a distinction without a difference. If you’re giving a leg-up to some groups to increase ‘diversity’, you’re not giving them to others. “Institutions should be held accountable for treating people fairly rather than hitting artificial demographic targets’” says James Orr, Reform’s new head of policy.
I added:
While critics will no doubt try to paint Equality Act reform as extreme, the policy hits a healthy middle ground. Orr explains: “The Equality Act consolidated pre-existing legislation on disability, sex and race discrimination. Reform UK supports the predecessor legislation and unequivocally opposes discrimination based on protected characteristics.”
Much as I predicted, Keir Starmer himself furiously waded into this debate with nasal sound and fury, denouncing Reform’s plan as “shocking” and against “basic values”, and even suggesting that wanting to repeal it was un-British.
Typical Starmerite intellectual dreck. This damaging, unpopular law, rushed through Parliament at the fag end of the Brown premiership, is hardly Magna Carta.
Still, the comment gave the debate extra legs, and so it was that I found myself invited onto BBC One’s Sunday Morning Live, a “faith and ethics debate show” which airs after Laura Kuenssberg’s politics programme.
I would be debating Nels Abbey, who once wrote a book called Think Like a White Man, and Sharan Dhaliwal, a journalist. On my side would be Alka Seghal Cuthbert, director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us. This was nice, as I had sourced a quote from Alka in my Spectator piece, while readers will recall her appearance on the Sceptic last year on DDU’s report on the Equality Act and the problems with it.
I was the only guest joining down the line. In my first answer this may have helped, as I was able to explain at some length and without interruption that contrary to Starmer’s suggestion that Reform wanted to rip up protections going back “decades”, the “Public Sector Equality Duty” and “positive action” mean the Equality Act is a whole new ball game.
It took a little while for the discussion to return to me – I had no real opportunity to butt in over Zoom – so I had to bide my time for my next (and final) comment. Alka had mentioned that diversity targets cut against meritocracy, which Abbey objected to.
But this is true, and so in my second comment I explained that public sector diversity drives had undermined recruitment processes in many public sector institutions. This is a very serious problem, undermining operational competence and more in the very institutions that have power over us and are expected to serve and protect us. Perhaps the most glaring example is in the Metropolitan Police, which has been carrying out obsessive diversity drives in recent years.
As former Met officer Paul Birch explained in Daily Sceptic last year:
Police forces nationwide shout from the rooftops about the proportion of BAME recruits being successfully enrolled. Numbers and percentages are declared like Soviet tractor production figures. But they’re much more reticent to publish the disciplinary and misconduct statistics which result from this lack of diligence in the vetting procedures.
I pointed to three examples: last month, it emerged that the Met had hired through a diversity scheme a suspected child rapist who had failed vetting.
As the Telegraph explained:
More than 100 applicants who initially failed vetting procedures were later allowed to join after their cases were referred to a special panel set up to scrutinise rejected applications from ethnic minority candidates, and help the force meet diversity targets.
They included PC Cliff Mitchell, who was recruited despite having being accused of raping a child. His application was initially rejected, but this decision was overturned. He was later convicted of 13 counts of rape, including six against a child.
In 2023, no less an authority than the police inspectorate found that having lowered standards as part of a diversity drive, the Met had serving officers who were “functionally illiterate”. And like many forces, the Met has significantly lowered its fitness requirement, principally to allow more women into the force (of course, this also allows in more unfit men).
Unfortunately, though I had been allowed to set out my stall in my first answer well enough while I remained in the technical details of the act, I wasn’t to be allowed to get away with noting something so outrageous to BBC sensibilities, albeit so demonstrably true. Thus presenter Shaun Fletcher, far from chiding Abbey not to interrupt me, followed his lead by demanding to know what “evidence” I had. I told him I had just produced some (the point about vetting), and then went on to list the other two examples. But Fletcher jumped in again and threw it over to Abbey, the bulk of whose response was a rather bizarre disquisition about the Financial Crisis being the fault of white men. What this had to do with the Met’s hiring standards was not altogether clear.
All in all, I was pleased to be invited on and to be able to strike a note of dissent that I daresay is rare at the national broadcaster. For her part, Alka sensibly noted how divisive the notion of “protected characteristics” is and how the legislation had caused employment grievance complaints to spiral. But the quality of the respondents felt rather low. As my mother, excited to see me on the BBC, nevertheless remarked: “It felt as though you and your colleague [Alka] were on Newsnight and the other two were on the One Show.”
Stop Press: For a deep look into Reform’s Equality Act proposals, readers may enjoy my discussion with the Prosperity Institute’s Fred de Fossard for the Sceptic, out Friday.
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Here is a sign that being white is a handicap:
Any person with the slightest drop of black blood immediately categorises themselves as black. Not white. Black.
Mixed race people don’t want to be called white, they want to be called black.
If being black were such a terrible thing, why are they so determined to be categorised in that way.
OR…. could it be that they being black these days is actually an advantage?
You make an interesting point
There is probably an element of that
I think it may also be due to other factors such as peer pressure from the non white side of your family/community and the programming that casts white as bad.
Except pop stars like Beyonce who get blonde hair and cream themselves up a bit
It doesn’t bother me if they so chose but are we sure that everyone who is not demonstrably white wants to be categorised as “black”. According the the national census a small minority categorised themselves as black when invited to chose. There are many more south asians here than black people.
While we do not want every advertisement and interview to be dominantly non-white (as advertising agencies and the media seem to think is right), nevertheless, I note that black people are over represented and asians under represented.
Yes that is curious
There is this absurd “BAME” term that is widely used, the rest get lump together into “minority ethnic” as an afterthought.
“Asians” don’t exist. You must mean Ethnic Indian Subcontinentals, not Ethnic Orientals, including the Oriental types of the vast Russian steppe.
Yes, just look at that photo above… just more Relentless, Nauseating Communist Propaganda “nudging” everyone toward MISCEGENATION: blonde Ethnic European women with Ethnic African men.
Under our two tier system, yes being black is definitely an advantage. You get far more chance to appear in TV adverts and of course be allowed to roam free even if you are a drugged out pyschotic risk to society, particularly in Nottingham.
Obama?
Oh to hell with this race nonsense, I fancy a bit of toast this morning. ——chuckle
The “increase in employment discrimination claims” will conceal what went on behind the scenes. Businesses and tax payer funded organisations will have paid tend of thousands to avoid the legal costs, management time and potential organisation reputation damage from defending their position in court.
The position as stated by Braverman was understated.
So in other words, the financial and productivity hit taken on by employing people who may be of lesser merit (employing them to hit diversity targets), is less than the hit which may be experienced as a result of defending claims of discrimination and all that goes along with it.
The problem with removing the equality of intersectional groups act is that you have to replace it with a true individual equality and basic rights act, which will be able to hold an overbearing executive properly in check for the poor man in the street. Such an act should underline how and to what extent parliament gets it’s sovereignty from the people. Without such higher ground reform will lose the argument.
The replacement bill of basic rights should make most of the government COVID response impossible. I e stopping being going about their living etc , forcing a vaccine for certain groups.
Equality Act is a contradiction as it legislates to treat selected, identified sectors of society differently, giving some advantage over others.
This abrogates the Rule of Law – equality and equity before the Law – and is contrary to the principle of Common Law that an individual’s Rights do not take precedence over the Rights of another.
It also is contrary to property Rights in that it uses legislation to dictate how somebody – a company owner – may use their property.
Property right is an artificial construct invented at the time when the medieval state got transformed into the modern administrative state.
Tripe.
Right to property is both a Natural and Common Law Right – Stone Age Man understood the concept.
Alfred the Great codified property Rights, and Magna Carta deals with them.
The ‘natural’ right is that everybody can take anything from you he wants unless you manage to fight him off and it used to work in this way until the end of the so-called middle ages when the state started to enforce abstract laws instead of leaving it to warriors to fight it out among themselves. That’s what Thomas Hobbes called the social contract in Leviathan.
I think this has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. The equality act supposedly makes it illegal to discriminate against people because of their age, yet, Sometimes, you don’t want to hire people with too much experience (that’s a quote) and it supposedly also outlaws an explicit No foreigners! hiring policy. It’s not particularly complicated to enounter it nevertheless and it’s usually not in the best interest of people colliding with either of both to do something other than Move on and try it elsewhere about it because if people want to do that, they’ll always find a way to do it.
In my opinion, this act is more of a theoretically unpleasant paper decree than a real world phenomenon.
“ On my side would be Alka Seghal Cuthbert, director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us.” Ethnic Indian Alka Seghal Cuthbert, former member of the REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY (remember there are more Marxists in the Indian Subcontinent than westerners can ever imagine) is not only the director, but also the founder and sole employee of the so-called “grassroots” group Don’t Divide Us, whose partners include two other former REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY members: Claire Fox (now in the House of Lords) and Stuart Waiton (Chairman of the Scottish Education Union). From her own website, it seems that she only criticizes the Equality Act because she wants to completely remove all ideas of the Indigenous British People, and force the West to be “colour-blind” = “white people don’t exist”: “My family came here and found a country still on a journey to redefining its new postwar relationship with the Commonwealth. For the most part it has done this successfully and it’s a tragic mistake to allow all that we’ve achieved to be side-lined in a chaotic rush to import ideas from elsewhere THAT DON’T REFLECT OUR JOINT INHERITANCE IN THE UK.” In other words, allowing Third World countries like her native India… Read more »
In over 2000 years, the indigenous black people on the continent of Africa never built or launched a single seaworthy boat to allow them to escape Africa. There was not a single two storey building built, just basic huts made with wood straw or stones. Not a single statue was erected to an influential black person. It was only when the dreaded white man arrived did that change. They don’t act or think or create as white people do. That statement was made by a black priest.
The, sorry, our BBC always like to ask those opposing their entrenched views to provide “evidence ” while providing none of their own.