Braverman declares war on ‘witch trials’

Attorney General vows to tackle diversity training after her staff spent 1,900 hours in such schemes

Suella Braverman has disclosed that her Whitehall officials took part in almost 2,000 hours of diversity training, as she declared a war on woke “witch trials”. The Attorney General announced that she had scrapped the training schemes in her department and claimed they were “downright dangerous” after several high-profile court cases centred on transgender and equality issues. Ms Braverman also insisted there must be freedom of speech around the transgender debate.

THE Attorney General has revealed her officials took part in almost 2,000 hours of diversity training as she declared a war on woke “witch trials”.

Suella Braverman announced she had scrapped the training schemes in her department and claimed they were “downright dangerous” in the wake of a number of high-profile court cases centred on transgender and equality issues.

She was described as “absolutely furious” to find out that more than 1,000 of her employees, including 600 lawyers, had participated in some 1,900 hours of diversity courses.

During one lecture, civil servants at the Government Legal Department were told: “Not being racist isn’t enough, we must be anti-racist.”

The same session told participants it was “not up to you as a white person” to tell black people whether or not a phrase was offensive, and they should instead “educate yourself as to why the phrase is offensive and stop using it”.

A further session, which focused on how to be an ally to LGBT people, urged civil servants to “recognise your privilege, and transfer the benefits of it to others who lack it”.

In an attack on diversity training consultants – many of whom were paid for their external presentations – Ms Braverman told Mailplus: “Like the witch-finders of the Middle Ages, they don the outfit of the inquisitor and never tire of rooting out unbelievers.”

“This does nothing to create solidarity and support but rather keeps emphasising difference, creating a sense of ‘other’ and pitting different groups against each other.”

Ms Braverman, who came sixth when she ran to become Conservative leader last month, had pledged during her campaign to stand up to “woke rubbish” and confront a radical progressive agenda in Whitehall.

And she called on Britons to “get serious about taking on this divisive mindset”, saying “woke” politics represented “a new religion with a new priestly caste”.

“While some ‘zealots’ believe in it and ‘don the outfit of the inquisitor and never tire of rooting out unbelievers’, others simply ‘wear the priestly clothes to ward off their rivals’ or ‘nod along and recite the creed because they are too scared to dissent’. None of these approaches is acceptable in modern Britain.”

Ms Braverman went on to urge her Cabinet colleagues to follow her lead and clamp down on so-called “wokery” in their own departments.

Last month, Jacob Rees-mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, revealed he would ban all “absurd” wellness and diversity training in Whitehall, replacing it with “intelligent, sensible courses”.

Ms Braverman insisted there must be freedom of speech around the transgender debate in the wake of a number of high-profile court cases.

Maya Forstater, a tax expert, was sacked in 2019 over a series of tweets questioning government proposals to allow people to self-identify as the opposite sex.

She had faced complaints from her colleagues who said the statements were “transphobic”, which led to her visiting fellowship not being renewed and she was offered no more consultancy work.

The initial decision was subsequently overturned earlier this year by the Employment Appeals Tribunal, which ruled Ms Forstater’s “gender critical” belief a person cannot change their sex “must be tolerated in a pluralist society”.

Asked about the court case, Ms Braverman said: “How did we get to the place where stating the facts of biology can get you sacked?”

It comes as Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak pledged to take a tougher stance on transgender issues.

Last week, Ms Truss praised a hustings audience “who know what a woman is”, while Mr Sunak called for the terms “woman” and “mother” to be protected as the use of gender-neutral language grows.

Many black people will attest that it isn’t unusual to fall prey to “well-meaning” assumptions about our supposed victimhood. There are those, usually on the Left, who think that we ethnic minorities are always suffering and that we therefore require their support and counsel, whether we know it or not.

That is what seems to have happened at the broadcaster Sky, where a diversity officer told a colleague of Latina heritage that she must have been “oppressed”. The colleague rightly objected and she later won a claim of race discrimination at an employment tribunal over the comments.

Whatever the merits of that particular case – and I, unlike too many woke activists, am willing to give those involved the benefit of the doubt – it speaks to a much bigger problem. A new ideology is being imposed on corporate Britain, promoted by over-mighty HR managers. What were once straightforward personnel departments have been taken over by highly organised activists who are successfully exploiting moral confusion on questions of race with dispiriting consequences.

Despite claiming to be “anti-racist”, their world-view perversely rehabilitates racial thinking – arguing that seeing race and judging by race is not unjust but a virtue so long as it is done by the right sort of person. They have attempted to delegitimise colour-blindness, which argues for equality under the law. And they spout all the usual fashionable lingo – including hierarchies of oppression, “white fragility”, and “white privilege”. The result has been the opposite of inclusive: it has stoked divisions between groups and encouraged patronising attitudes towards ethnic minority employees who just want to be judged on their ability to do their jobs.

We can hardly expect the corporate HR activists – the foot soldiers of the Diversity Industrial Complex – to wake up to the fact that they are inadvertently normalising a form of racism in the workplace.

Even the savviest of corporate executives have been blind to this. Out of a combination of fear and PR opportunism, they have fallen over themselves to jump on the bandwagon, forking out millions of pounds on diversity “tsars”, “fellows” and “officers”.

In boardrooms, only the bravest souls have been willing to state the obvious: that stereotyping should be rejected no matter who it comes from; that making negative assumptions about people because of their race is racism; and that ethnic minorities are not all the same, but indeed have a wide range of experiences and political views.

These truths are the antidote to the Diversity Industrial Complex, which, incidentally, has a financial interest in rejecting evidence that Britain is in fact a good place to get on if you are from a minority background.

So the onus now is on corporate leaders to take up this fight. They should distance themselves from this industry and replace their ideological “working groups” and implicit bias training with robust complaints systems to deal with individual accusations of racism. Not only would this free employees from the burdens of politics, it would surely save a great deal of money too.

In this age of staggering inflation and rising interest rates, they would be fools, and bad businesspeople, not to take that up.

FOLLOW Inaya Folarin Iman on Twitter @Inayafolarin; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion