Free Speech Union Wins Six-Figure Settlement For Sacked Civil Servant
by Toby Young, Daily Sceptic:
In its biggest victory to date, the Free Speech Union has helped a civil servant secure a £100,000 settlement after she was forced out of her department for raising the alarm about its embrace of Critical Race Theory and gender identity ideology. The SundayTelegraph has the story.
A civil servant was sacked after blowing the whistle on the infiltration of political activism in Whitehall, including the exclusion of white men from a jobseekers’ event.
Anna Thomas, 32, has spoken for the first time about how her career was ruined after she warned colleagues that the Civil Service’s duty to maintain political impartiality was breached by the dissemination of critical race theory in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Ms. Thomas has received a £100,000 settlement from the Government after a three-year ordeal. During that time, she repeatedly tried to raise the alarm about how political activists have infiltrated the Civil Service, including with resources asking employees to “assume” they are racist and the promotion of a jobseekers’ event for the Metropolitan Police that excluded white men.
The payout comes amid growing concerns about widespread political activism in the Civil Service after Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the head of the equalities watchdog, faced an attempted coup by trans-activist civil servants.
Ms Thomas, a softly spoken mother-of-one, first wrote down her concerns towards the end of the summer in 2020, when she was employed by the DWP as a work coach at a Jobcentre in Portsmouth.
DWP employees were directed to an “anti-racism hub” on the Department’s intranet, which she says encouraged civil servants to treat racism like Covid-19 and to “assume that you have it” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the Black Lives Matter protests. The hub was prefaced with a statement by Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary, telling staff they were “responsible for being actively anti-racist” and asking them to “make DWP an anti-racist organisation”, she says.
Learning resources shared on the intranet advising staff “how to become race confident” included a diagram from the American activist Ibram X. Kendi asking staff to “admit that you deny racism is a problem” and to “promote and advocate for policies and leaders that are anti-racist”, she says.
Staff were also directed to the work of Robin DiAngelo, a critical race theorist who claims that white people, including children, are “inherently racist”.
“It listed a lot of resources that were very politically partial,” says Ms Thomas. “I did raise my concerns [that] we are only promoting one-sided very political stuff and not giving a broader overview from perhaps different authors.”
She says she believed that posts supporting Black Lives Matter and Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, were expressions of those group’s political or social aims, such as defunding the police or enabling people to self-identify as a gender.
After posting her concerns on the intranet, she faced a backlash from some colleagues.
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