Well done Attorney General

[AndStand]

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Is the tide beginning to turn?

Attorney General Suella Braverman hits out at diversity training mol.im/a/11078419 via dailym.ai/android

It’s really important that people stop thinking of minorities when they think about the EA. Everyone has a sex, an age, an ethnicity, belief or lack of belief, a sexual orientation of lack of sexual orientation, is married or isn’t married, and anyone can be perceived to have any of the characteristics. All of those things are covered by the EA, because what should matter are skill sets, personalities, qualifications, needs etc.

@Torunette "Only the problem is that the EA spawned EDI and that became solely focused, as another poster has pointed out, on the concept of "the minority". So everything became about the "inclusion" of minority groups... ".

It was activists, some of whom are involved with lobby groups and who also work in HR, who have deliberately distorted the intent of the Equality Act, in my view. I think we can see this in the way that one particular aspect of the Equality Act has been positioned above all others.

"Only the problem is that the EA spawned EDI and that became solely focused, as another poster has pointed out, on the concept of "the minority". So everything became about the "inclusion" of minority groups... ".

Sort of, but EDI exists quite independently of the EA. EDI is chiefly a US import, from a place where they don't have proper legal protections, and actually can conflict with our proper equality law.

This case I saw today being a case in point - a woman who won at an employment tribunal over being told by an "inclusion advocate" in she must be oppressed because of her race.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11073493/Mixed-race-Sky-engineer-wins-14k-white-colleague-claimed-oppressed.html

However, she won the claim of race discrimination for Ms Cook's comments.

The panel ruled: 'The remark was one particularly concerning the colour of Mrs Bradbury's skin, which is not white.

'It was clear to the Tribunal that the remark was made because of that colour, such that it was a kind of discrimination.

'In short, the remark equated the colour of Mrs Bradbury's skin with her having been oppressed and that she would have felt that oppression, which had not been her view or experience.

'We should make it clear that we did not consider that Ms Cook deliberately used offensive language, nor did she deliberately seek to cause harm.

'It caused Mrs Bradbury understandable distress.'

In the US various Republican states are trying to crack down on "CRT/DEI" things in new laws (as did the Trump administration) - but it seems it may well be the case that our own existing EA does quite a lot to block them.

I know your question is a bit rhectorical, but I'm going to answer anyway.

I think having a wide range of different types of people leads to a wider range of viewpoints, skills and attitudes. It breeds discussion, avoids complacency and immobilising conservatism (by which I mean a tendency to do things the way you've always done them because that's what you've always done). It leads to a wider understanding of the people involved in your area of business. It facilitates innovation and original, creative thinking. It leads to an increase in the amount of critical thinking that goes on, leading people to evaluate things in ways they may not have previously thought of. And it leads to a more open minded assessment of people. You notice what more they have to offer in a way that can be hidden in a dreary uniformity. It's a good thing.

Inclusivity requires positive action in that it is frequently not immediately obvious what barriers are preventing people getting involved, and sometimes not even obvious to the people themselves. Again, going out of your way to include people who are not getting involved gives you both a better appreciation of their abilities, and of the internal barriers to getting things done that your organisation may suffer from.

This is all good. And the fact that marketed, evangelical EDI courses often do the exact opposite to this does not detract from it.

I don't have issues with less diverse organisatons either, in principle. But I've been in companies that have collapsed because they never thought of changing. No one challenged the status quo and they boiled frogged themselves into oblivion.

The problem is not equality, diversity and inclusion. The problem is this weird interpretation of "equity" in its Social Justice sense which has crept in. That's what's gumming up the works. The idea that EDI should only be only about giving certain specified minorities what they want (even if, as the posts above illustate, they don't even want it).

I think having a wide range of different types of people leads to a wider range of viewpoints, skills and attitudes.

Agreed. But the big failure, pretty much at the first hurdle, if you reread that sentence, is that to make DEI in its current form be an effective way of achieving that, you have to believe that people of different races are "different types of people".

Which is pretty fucking racist.

Being of different race can maybe be a quite weak proxy for "different types of people", but you'd do much, much better to search for different economic classes, different academic backgrounds, different political orientations and different nationalities. Those would really get you different "viewpoints, skills and attitudes", and identify more different types of people.

In practice, we seem to be getting ever reduced diversity in most of those.

(I think we are pretty much in agreement here, I just wanted to kick your quite good steel-man argument.)

(I think we are pretty much in agreement here, I just wanted to kick your quite good steel-man argument.)

Kick away. One way that people can vary is by race. There are other ways available!

I think we do agree.

In practice, we seem to be getting ever reduced diversity in most of those.

Of course. That's the paradox of evangelical EDI. It homogenises. It reminds me of Monty Python's "Happy Valley" sketch, where everyone was happy in the Kingdom, and anyone who wasn't was sentenced to be "hanged by the neck until you cheer up".

Absolutely. Equity, especially in the Ibram X. Kendi version, is all about disparities of outcome and not of opportunity. In my opinion it is the latter that we should be trying to achieve, but it's a long-term problem with no quick fixes.

Oops, sloppily worded - I want to achieve equality of opportunity, of course.

‘I think having a wide range of different types of people leads to a wider range of viewpoints, skills and attitudes.’

This is fascinating, just as a starting point, because does it? Haven’t we seen a far more obvious creep of ideological conformity, rather than a widening range of viewpoints and attitudes?

‘It breeds discussion...’

Again, does it? Where? What I‘m seeing is a contraction of the ability to discuss things openly.

I think this has partly been a result of efforts by the Conservative party to tackle their reputation as the 'nasty' party. A reputation added to by things like Section 28, lack of diversity of their MPs and so on.

So in that time we have seen the rapid increase of women and BAME Conservative MPs, particularly within the Cabinet itself - I read somewhere that when Cameron became PM in 2005 there were only 2 ethnic minority Conservative MPs, which seems astonishing now. Same sex marriage finally came in under Cameron too.

But less positively I think it led to a reluctance to oppose anything that could be reported as 'bigoted', a desire to avoid another Section 28 legacy. So ideological activists and lobbyists have been able to embed themselves deeply whilst ministers and MPs have been guided along policy routes they are told leads to the 'right side of history'.

Seeing how hopelessly captured the Opposition party is I think it would have been no different with a 12 year and counting Labour Government either.

This is fascinating, just as a starting point, because does it? Haven’t we seen a far more obvious creep of ideological conformity, rather than a widening range of viewpoints and attitudes?

We have, but then, we haven't really had an increased "range of different types of people", have we?

Places like journalism and politics are now stuffed to the gills with middle-class graduates from good universities who've done humanities degrees and like to talk about "diversity" a lot.

Forstater vs CGD was a good example of a company being hurt by lack of diversity. If they'd been more diverse by having more conservatives or feminists in their org, plus maybe been less US-centric, they wouldn't have made such a mess...

Yes, me too.

‘Places like journalism and politics are now stuffed to the gills with middle-class graduates from good universities who've done humanities degrees and like to talk about "diversity" a lot.’

And many of them are gay, from ethnic minorities, disabled, more are women than ever before. Progress in the areas identified as being pertinent by the EDI teams we are discussing. And the result isn’t great. That’s because it’s actually very little to do with real diversity. It’s to do with stacking the deck in favour of left-wing activists’ views.

The kind of diversity you're seeing is dalek diversity. You know with daleks, there are red, blue, white, black, yellow, green, gold ones. There are big daleks and little daleks. There are daleks that can climb stairs and daleks that can't. Daleks with plungers and daleks with other odd appendages. But they're all daleks.

But there is sense in EDI, and there are elements of sense even in the courses run by what has become a priestly caste. There is a diversity of diversities, and some of them are really good.

Take ‘manels’ as an example of what I think is ‘problematic’ here (in the old sense of the word). An EDI team might try to encourage colleagues not to participate in manels. Many feminists would agree with that. An EDI team might also want a panel to be balanced so that not everyone on it is white. Many people (white and from ethnic minorities) would agree with that.

So let’s say there’s a panel arrangement of five people under discussion, and the topic is something like paediatric neurosurgery. Let’s say - and I don’t think it’s that unrealistic - that the top five paediatric neurosurgeons happen to be men, and none of them are from ethnic minorities. One is gay, one is a Tory, one is French, one is disabled, one is under 40.

Is that panel diverse? I’d say it is. I think an EDI team would say it isn’t, and I think we’d end up with a panel without the needed voices on it.

And that might happen for any topic, any sector, or even every topic and every sector. I think that’s a disaster.

‘But they're all daleks.’

Dalek diversity. 😂

@achillestoes

Yes, but the solution to that is don't be stupid. Allow people to employ their judgement. Instances of idiotic execution don't mean that the principles are wrong.

It’s worse than anything like a nice chat about manels, though. I’m letting down my own arguments here because the EDI movement is actually quite a bit more extreme than this. There was an NHS document shared last year, a blog by the EDI lead for the Nursing and Midwifery Council. It began, ‘Dear white people...’ It went on to tell white people how they need to ‘be uncomfortable’, to tell them which divisive US books they need to read, to refuse them ‘permission’ not to be political.

It went on and on. And it’s just not okay. It’s bullying, and we’re paying for it. The taxpayer shouldn’t be funding people to make the NHS a political organisation, or to increase upset and conflict for employees EDI professionals happen to resent.

@JustSpeculation

I think the principles are very wrong. There is no legitimate hierarchy of who is the most oppressed. There is no set of rules about which ‘types’ of people are ‘diverse’ enough. The principles are bad. It’s time to throw them out and bring back real equality.

I think in corporate organisations there tends to be a jostling for a place at the cool kids table in the ranks of management, which produces a strong drive for conformity. Which is ironic and counterproductive when the doctrine du jour is diversity. Take diversity, and make sure that everyone is "on message" about it (again ironic), backed up with slogan everyone can repeat but most people don't bother about understanding, and you have the pseudo diversity we enjoy today.

But again, I say, EDI is inherently a good thing, however laughable some instances are.

I agree with you. But the principle that is wrong is that of equity.

@JustSpeculation

Yes, but that is the principle in play in these EDI teams, isn’t it? Inclusion and diversity are actually in tension with equality. Equality is when you give equal consideration to what someone can do (say, in a hiring decision) regardless of who they are or where they come from. The ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ imperatives drive the opposite outcome.

@achillestoes

So separate it out. It can be.