Charles MOORE
Many in our bureaucratic elite are desperate to abase themselves before a creed that despises them
The Civil Service Code says the “core values” of the Civil Service are “integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality”. It explains the word “impartiality”: you must not “allow your personal political views to determine any advice you give or your actions”. You must not “act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests”.
The Code also justifies whistleblowing: if you “believe that you are being required to act in a way that conflicts with this code, your department or agency must consider your concern, and make sure that you are not penalised for raising it”.
But what happens if your department’s leaders are themselves breaching the Code and actively encouraging their staff to do the same? Who will then be brave enough to trust the Code’s claim that you will not be penalised for blowing the whistle?
Last week in this space, I gave examples of how some permanent secretaries (the top post in each government department), in tweets and internal messages, approvingly used the hashtag Black Lives Matter (BLM) following the killing of George Floyd in early summer. Sir Stephen Lovegrove at the Ministry of Defence was one. Jonathan Slater at the Department for Education was another. Mr Slater advocated “tackling the whiteness of senior Whitehall”. These messages clearly expressed personal political views. They appeared to discriminate against white people. Imagine the justified outcry if Mr Slater had attacked “blackness” in Whitehall.
This week, the new Cabinet Secretary, the man in charge of all Whitehall departments, has been announced. He is Simon Case, aged only 41, and endowed with an enormous brain. He will need to apply it fast: his service’s impartiality is seriously in question. As with the BBC, this phenomenon is already well known in relation to Brexit, but today – also as with the BBC – it is even stronger in relation to race.
The mandarins’ endorsement of BLM was not an idiosyncratic “oneoff ”. It is – to use race-relations jargon – “systemic”. Behind it lie organisations and ideologies within the Civil Service which advance under friendly words like “inclusion” and “diversity”, but leave simple fairness far behind.
Take the Civil Service Race Forum (CSRF). Although 100 per cent of its members come under the Civil Service Code, it sees itself as a group within government entitled to lobby for particular policies and interests. Thus it tells the Department of Health to follow its recommendations in relation to Covid-19 disparities between white people and ethnic minorities.
On June 5, the CSRF declared: “We unequivocally support the global Black Lives Matter movement.” Unless civil servants “recognise their own biases” their conduct “risks complicity in upholding racial inequities”, it warned. A second Civil Service organisation, Project Race, born out of the CSRF, was instigated in 2015 by the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Richard Heaton, another senior praise-singer for BLM. It promotes “Critical Race Theory”, based on five “tenets”. These include the idea that “colour-blindness” and “meritocracy” are tools of maintaining white power; opposition to the notion that it is a good thing when the interests of white people and nonwhite people converge; and the claim that “mainstream” school curriculums are white, middle-class conspiracies against ethnic minorities.
Out of Project Race come a stream of “race ambassadors” within the Civil Service – 50 in the Ministry of Justice alone – who commit to spending two days a month (at taxpayers’ expense) on their task. The ambassadors bustle round the Civil Service disseminating their woke tenets and collecting “intelligence on the ground” about departments and individuals who are not pulling their weight. Project Race makes sure that senior civil servants are taught about “unconscious bias”, “white supremacy” and “microaggressions”, etc.
When he was foreign secretary in 2018, Jeremy Hunt launched a “reverse mentoring” scheme to crown the glories of Black History Month. Senior British diplomats are taught by young ethnic-minority officials how to think properly (“help challenge ingrained views”). Reading lists circulate, recommending books like Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, by Reni Eddolodge. The temptation to take Ms Eddo-lodge gratefully at her word and not read her book must be irresistible.
And so it goes on. Somewhere inside all this, the worthwhile idea that people from different backgrounds can enrich this country and give differing perspectives which will be useful to serving the public has vanished.
The test case is Black Lives Matter itself. What is it? (A question, by the way, that no official has ever sought to answer, even in favourable terms, in their streams of communicated support this summer.)
If you look at the UK Black Lives Matter fundraising website, you will see both its general aims and its specific policies. The former include the desire to “dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain”. In the eyes of BLM, that must include dismantling the Civil Service which pays the wages of all the people being incited by their bosses and race ambassadors to support it. After all, “the oppressive structures we live under” must go.
As for the specifics, these include “defunding” the police, an end to all border controls and the “decriminalisation of black students in the classroom” (without explaining how they are criminalised at present).
I expect all these policies are seen by the majority of the population as wrong and dangerous. More relevantly, from the point of view of Civil Service propriety and therefore of public trust, they are clearly personal political views rather than the policy of the Government which civil servants are duty-bound (as their name implies) to serve. So they blatantly fall foul of the Civil Service Code. Yet no one in the system dares object.
One unmistakable aspect of these doctrines is that they are explicitly anti-white. They identify all the problems of black people as deriving from white people, all the goodwill of white people as bogus or useless, and all the evils from which black people suffer as inherent in white people simply because they are white.
That sounds quite like racism to me; and not just to me, but probably to any white person – not to mention nonactivist black people – in a work environment where these doctrines are preached. BLM followers complain of “micro-aggressions”. This talk is a macro-aggression.
There are times when the subject of race drives people mad. I fear we are living in one such. In apartheid South Africa, the desire to maintain white Afrikaner power drove the ruling party into a crazy quest to define everyone as white, black or “coloured” and crush the last two categories. Now it is a similar madness the other way round.
This week, Jessica Krug, a black professor of African-american history at George Washington University and an activist (nom de guerre, Jessica La Bombalera), admitted that her romantic tales of descent from Angola and Brazil were utter fiction. She is actually a white, bourgeois Jewish woman from the suburbs of Kansas City. “I have built my life on a violent anti-black lie,” she said. She added that she suffered from “unaddressed mental health demons”.
Perhaps Prof Krug has unique personal problems, but there are signs of collective madness in the desire of many in our bureaucratic elite to abase themselves before a creed which despises them. They should not be allowed to do so on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.