Every HR department needs a Jacob Rees-mogg

Like most employees, I’ve had to attend the odd training course. They usually come in the form of online tutorials in how not to defame people or end up in contempt of court. Quite a few public figures might have avoided legal trouble if they had also taken such e-modules.

But thankfully I have never been asked to attend an Alan Partridgesque “Knowing Me, Knowing You”, session or take a lesson in “Finding Your Mojo”. These are just some of the pointless courses that have been axed by Jacob Rees-mogg as he continues his valiant quest to make the Civil Service both better value for money and less divisive.

In a crackdown on Whitehall “indoctrination”, revealed by the Telegraph, the Cabinet Office minister has ordered that 250 “woke” tutorials be banned. One of them is a course delivered by the Government’s Behavioural Insights Team – also known as the Nudge Unit – entitled: “De-biasing Decision-making”.

An online description says the course “enables participants to use behavioural insights to counter cognitive biases in government and make better calibrated decisions and judgments, ultimately resulting in better project planning, delivery and policy outcomes”. Pardon?

There’s similar nonsense being promoted in private companies across the country. It starts with supposedly good-faith courses and ends with knee-jerk responses to the latest Twitter hashtag – following some questionable political movement or making regrettable statements. So the question has to be asked: when will the private sector take its cue from Jacob Rees-mogg and scrap this meaningless form of mind manipulation?

I’m all for courses teaching workers genuinely useful skills (we do have a productivity problem, after all) but not ones that pander to virtue-signalling nonsense. Perhaps there should be a course on reducing the number of courses in any given institution.