March of the DIVERSITY COMMISSARS

No one voted for them, but our society is being reshaped by an army of finger-wagging council officials pushing an ideology that only serves to divide us

IN the run-up to last week’s Budget, municipal moaning reached a new level of intensity. Town hall leaders wailed that ‘Tory cuts’ had taken their councils to the brink of bankruptcy, despite Government expenditure soaring to £1.2 trillion this year.

The fact is that in local government, as elsewhere across the vast state machine, huge amounts of cash are being poured into town hall coffers, only to be squandered through bureaucracy, mismanagement, low productivity and misguided priorities.

Birmingham, Slough, Croydon, Thurrock and Nottingham — to name just a few — are in financial meltdown. And not because of the evil Conservatives — but because of their own reckless decisions. (Four dodgy investments by Essex’s Thurrock council, for example, resulted in losses of an eye-watering £275 million in 2022.)

But there is another crucial factor that has precipitated this crisis: the fashionable obsession with ‘diversity’. This has not only distorted the priorities of local authorities, but has also meant that they are consumed by a bizarre sense of political mission to transform the fabric of our society.

Complaints

Only yesterday, the Mail revealed on its front page that British councils have almost doubled their spending on ‘woke’ jobs in the past three years, frittering away almost £52 million on ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ (EDI) roles.

Since 2020, nearly 200 councils have blown your cash on these jobs, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, from Birmingham City Council hiring an ‘Assistant Director Community Services and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ (on an average salary of £103,165) to Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire hiring a ‘Staying Well Team Manager’.

Only a couple of decades ago, it would have been unimaginable for town hall executives to indoctrinate their staff through exercises such as ‘unconscious bias training’ (the notion that racism lies deep in our minds) and instruction in U.S.-imported ‘ critical race theory’ ( the belief that white people are inherent ‘ oppressors’ and black people inherent victims). But that is now the sinister new normal, even in Tory-run authorities.

In the face of a barrage of complaints about cash shortages, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove recently pointed out that councils would have more money to spend on the front line if they dropped some of their ideological fixations. He urged them to reconsider spending vast sums on what he called ‘discredited equality, diversity and inclusion programmes’. Yet the profligacy continues.

Inevitably, the BBC sought to demolish Mr Gove’s argument. Maintaining that councils in England are spending only £75,000 each, on average, on ‘EDI initiatives’, the Corporation asserted that at Birmingham City Council, just over £450,000 would be saved by axing its 11 diversity officers, a figure that pales beside the overall budget of more than £2 billion.

Although a more diverse workforce is a fine aim, the truth is that pouring money into this highly controversial, politicised area is a misuse of public money.

A recent study by the Conservative Way Forward thinktank found, on the basis of Freedom of Information requests, that Britain’s local authorities employ between them 794 equality and diversity commissars at an annual cost of more than £27 million, with an average of two officers for each council.

At East Lothian Council, there are 45. At Leicestershire County Council, 40 such staffers are on the payroll, at a cost of £1.25 million a year.

At Wigan, where one in five children is living in poverty, £345,000 a year is spent on eight full- time diversity evangelists, while at Bradford, the 13th-most deprived area in Britain, the equivalent of 12.5 full-time officers costs £665,000.

And, despite criticism from the Tory cabinet, the recruitment continues.

Politicised

Sefton Council in the North-West recently advertised for an ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer’ on up to £38,223, with responsibility ‘for the delivery, monitoring and evaluation of the current Sefton Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy’, while South Derbyshire District Council feels it cannot manage without an ‘ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer’ on up to £34,373.

Michael Gove’s own council of Surrey is currently seeking four new ‘Inclusion Development Advisers’ for its Early Years Team, on £38,746; and Calderdale, not content with its ‘Staying Well Team Manager’, also wants an ‘Assistant Director of Education and Inclusion’ on £97,810.

Nor is age and inexperience any barrier to entry into this world. Coventry is currently filling a vacancy for a ‘Workforce Diversity and Inclusion Apprentice’ as part of a team that delivers ‘cultural change through a range of organisational interventions’.

Apart from recruitment, money is frittered away on lucrative contracts which benefit consultants far more than the public who pay for them. Warwickshire County Council spent £677,000 on an ‘ equalities, diversity and inclusion training package’, while also providing staff with instruction in African drumming. And then there was the contract worth up to £420,000 signed by Calderdale Council in 2022 to provide ‘support for young people who identify as LGBTQ+’.

Such sums could be far better spent on areas that most people care more about, like repairing potholes. Indeed, a recent study by The Mail on Sunday found that Labour councils in England had used up £ 1.54 million of public money on EDI training, an amount that could have repaired no fewer than 30,000 potholes: let alone the £52million spent on jobs in this controversial field.

Inflammatory

What is so disturbing about the advance of the EDI creed is how it has happened without any mandate from the public. No politician or party ever stood on a platform to introduce such ideology to our institutions, yet these unelected bureaucrats think they have the right to reshape our entire society.

And they do so peddling a blinkered, sectarian doctrine that trades in racially charged, inflammatory theories like ‘white supremacy’ and bogus science such as children can choose their gender.

The absurdity of all this posturing is that it is failing to build a harmonious society or workplace. On the contrary, the endless focus on differences ends up promoting division and resentment.

In the same vein, the eagerness to manufacture new forms of oppression — like so called micro-aggressions — actually breeds a culture of grievance, which helps to explain why the public sector has so many strikes and is so prone to excessive levels of sick leave.

The zealots for the woke agenda like to think their doctrine leads to more ‘compassion’, but what it really creates is disillusion and distrust. An organisation does not need a phalanx of fingerwagging, report- writing, box-ticking, jargon-peddling officials to show its commitment to real equality.