‘Diversity, equity and inclusion’ is corroding the civil service
by Ian Acheson, spiked:
The Cabinet Office should be focussed on serving the people – not stoking identitarian grievances.
Shortly after arriving at the UK’s beleaguered Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2015 (I served as its first chief operating officer), I established a delivery board to sharpen up the productivity of the organisation. Even then, the ECHR was eternally distracted by factional activism and internal mutinies. The new board didn’t go down well with people unused to being called to account. I was reminded, sarcastically, by a colleague that ‘delivery’ should only apply to babies and pizzas.
I was reminded of that time by a letter sent last week by Mark Serwotka – boss of the main civil-service union, the PCS – to Cabinet Office permanent secretary Alex Chisholm. In it, he accused Chisholm of presiding over ‘racist institutional bias’. Based on figures uncovered by the PCS, Serwotka claims that white staff are twice as likely to be promoted as their non-white colleagues. ‘If the differences in promotion rates are not driven by racism, what is the explanation?’, he asked.
Serwotka, a Corbyn disciple previously expelled from Labour, never reaches for moderation when hyperbole will do. But it is worth dwelling on the seriousness of his claim for a moment. Serwotka wrote in his letter to Chisholm that the Cabinet Office’s recruitment system is ‘wholly broken’ and that ‘racism remains a major issue’. If this were true, the Cabinet Office, which is supposed to be the beating heart of government delivery for us all, would be failing on issues of basic fairness.
This is a curious situation to say the least. After all, officials at the Cabinet Office have been practically marinated in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives for years, many expensively delivered by an industry of external consultants and NGOs. The Cabinet Office was responsible for designing and delivering the ‘Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy’. It recently launched a programme to increase the number of ethnic minorities at the top of Whitehall through intensive coaching. You could fall over the number of race and ‘LGBTQI+’ allyship trainers and internal support groups. Why has all this anti-prejudice effort apparently been so spectacularly unsuccessful? Why is the Cabinet Office, which should be solely focussed on delivering the objectives of the democratically elected government, instead a seeming poster child for discrimination?
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