Make no mistake, we are living under a diversity dictatorship
hen a Cambridge don of Indian heritage announced last week that she would no longer teach for a certain college in protest at “racist profiling and aggression” by the college porters, some onlookers – including yours truly – recoiled.
Among other things, the don was enraged and felt racially insulted that the porters had insisted on calling her “Madam”, as they do all women, rather than “Doctor”, as she’d demanded.
To certain friends and I, however, it seemed highly likely that the porters’ surliness was less racism and more a natural response to an obnoxious, arrogant and imperious member of the intellectual elite telling them what to do.
But these days, that sort of argument counts for nothing – it could even get you sacked, exiled, barred, no-platformed, bullied or worse. Those who cry repression and oppression – racism, sexism, transphobism – have become judge, jury and executioner.
We’ve seen countless times in the past year or so how anyone accused of an outrage against identity will
Wimmediately pay the price, from classicist Mary Beard, accused of racism and mauled on Twitter as a result, to Germaine Greer, ceaselessly attacked for her unorthodox views on transsexual women and #MeToo.
If the obsession with identity politics had remained a matter for vitriol and silliness only on Twitter, or in Left-wing newspapers and journals, things wouldn’t be so bad. But they’ve seeped, with chilling consequences, into absolutely all aspects of life, with our institutions now as obsessed as their American counterparts with dictums for promoting “diversity and inclusion” at the cost of just about everything else.
This means, with catastrophic consequences guaranteed, that the once highly prized notions of merit, creativity, and freedom of thought and speech are being systematically tossed on the bonfire of all things Potentially Un-PC.
And what a week it was for the country’s diversity warriors. The BBC announced last week that it had banned all-white shortlists for top jobs, with staff to be put through “cultural awareness training” to root out “unconscious bias”. The rules state that at least one black or ethnic minority candidate must be included in all shortlists for middle and senior-ranking jobs at the corporation.
Job discrimination, whether based on sex or race, is wrong and illegal. It is crucial that employers aren’t allowed to refuse promotions on these grounds. But the idea that “diversity” comes down to tabulating the number of skin colours in any given management tier, room or discussion, is idiotic, pretty racist itself, and (should be) insulting to everyone’s intelligence.
Then there’s the sheer ridiculousness of putting any workforce, especially that of one of Britain’s most iconic bastions of the Left, through the tedium of Sovietsounding “cultural awareness training” in order to hit ethnic quotas for top jobs imposed by top managers. Mind-boggling.
The noxious effects of what I can’t help but call the ever-strengthening “diversity dictatorship” is particularly dispiriting in once-irreverent domains like comedy. Shane Allen, the former head of comedy at the BBC, said last week that Monty Python wouldn’t “stand a chance” of being broadcast on the Beeb these days. Nor would Hugh Laurie or Stephen Fry, because they are “Oxbridge white blokes”. They may be the funniest people ever to walk the earth but – sorry! – they don’t tick the right demographic boxes.
Lionel Shriver, the novelist, recently discussed the hideous effects of the diversity dictatorship on creativity after seeing an email sent by Penguin Random House to literary agents, alerting them to a new “companywide goal”. This was not to produce the finest writing possible or to make more money. It was, rather, that “both our new hires and the authors we acquire [must] reflect UK society by 2025… taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”.
Rather than being applauded, Shriver’s contempt for such priorities in a book publisher garnered her a tsunami of abuse and accusations of, you guessed it, racism.
Nassim Taleb, the LebaneseAmerican scholar and statistician, put beautifully on Twitter last week the sinister nature of all this diversitymongering. “The more you institutionalise rules of ethical behaviour that should be voluntary (say, anti-racism, anti-sexism),” he tweeted, “the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions.”
Unethical, absolutely – and plain lunatic, too.
Last week, an Oxford philosophy tutor caused a furore when she told a young man with Down’s syndrome that he was sexist for tweeting his pleasure in going clothes shopping as a “man” rather than as a child.
So keen was she to call out an “ism” that she ended up chastising him in public for an innocent comment about a trip to the shops with his sister.
Nothing could be clearer. In a world obsessed with “isms”, decency is easily eclipsed by identity politics.
Meanwhile, amid all the “inclusive” quotas and pledges and sackings, the bias trainings, the shamings and the relentless jargon, our society is losing its creativity, humour and intellectual freedom. Without these, everything turns a ghastly shade of monochrome, and no amount of box-ticking will change that.
And yet this is just what the Government is trying to persuade us is great fun, spinning a really quite desperate line on fruit-picking, in a bid to make it a more appealing summer job for Brits. The vast majority of seasonal fruit-pickers in the UK are non-British, and farmers are desperately short-handed this season. “Farm work is always portrayed as very low paid and back-breaking,” said Nick Marston, the chairman of British Summer Fruits. “But it is not the
Anyone accused of an outrage against identity immediately pays the price
arduous work it was 15 or 20 years ago.” Hmm. It’s still picking fruit for hours on end, starting at 6am; it’s still seasonal, low-paid and probably requires bunking in a farmhouse somewhere in the middle of nowhere, probably sharing a room with countless others, some of whom will undoubtedly snore.
I can see why this attempt is being made (someone has to pick the nation’s berries!), but dressing it up like it’s a great fun alternative to more conventional work does seem to be stretching it a bit.