DEI - Division, Exclusion and Intolerance*




The last government’s Inclusion at Work panel, convened by Kemi Badenoch in 2023, unveiled its report into UK employers’ Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) practices in 2024. Composed of private and public-sector experts and advised by a Harvard professor, the panel noted that 10,000 DEI jobs in the public sector are estimated to cost the British taxpayer £557 million per year. According to the report, many DEI initiatives have little evidence behind them, are often ‘polarising’ and in some cases ‘unlawful.’ As Badenoch put it, concepts like ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white privilege’ regularly employed in diversity training, are ‘bunkum’. The report joins existing research on diversity training in finding that by calling attention to differences and casting whites as oppressors and blacks as oppressed, such initiatives often increase racial tension. And few will many be surprised to learn that many of these initiatives are often little more than virtue-signalling. According to the report, one in four bosses admit their diversity schemes were reactive to political fads, such as Black Lives Matter. Three in four admit to not having done any research on such practices before foisting them on employees.The report also takes on the thornier issue of diversity targets in hiring, which have often led to employers unlawfully discriminating against potential applicants. It points to the controversy in the RAF in which pressure to meet recruitment targets for women and ethnic minorities led to unlawful positive discrimination against white male applicants. It also cites the lesser known case where it was found in 2019 that Cheshire Police had discriminated against a white candidate through incorrectly applying the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010.                                                                                          

As always the College, in its desire to be seen as the coolest kid on the block, is clinging to the coat tails of the progressive movement with DEI. Like its embarassing, reputationally damaging 'allyship' with Stonewall here this too will be seen in time as just more, lame, virtue signalling. 

PS Council Members are still compelled to attend Unconscious Bias Training events like this.  

*I believe Californians now translate DEI as Didn't Extinguish the Inferno !  

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