Tavistock Trust backs down on ‘bombardment of wokery’

Children’s clinic accused of ‘causing division’ after urging staff to use Black Lives Matter logo on emails

ENGLAND’S only NHS child gender clinic has had to remove the Black Lives Matter logo from new staff email signatures after whistleblowers objected to a “bombardment” of wokery.

Clinicians at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust were last month urged to add the banner to their emails, displaying the group’s emblem of a fist set against the backdrop of a rainbow flag.

One of the trust’s “diversity champions” was said to have suggested to staff they should “step up and confirm the beliefs laid out in the logo” and that “those who oppose these type of views are simply wrong and should not be trusted, and were perhaps even closet racists or homophobes”.

But staff complained the logo was too political, prompting the BLM emblem to be replaced with a handshake icon with one black and one white hand.

BLM, which led protests over the murder of George Floyd in the US, has come under fire for calls to “dismantle capitalism” and defund the police.

The new banner also contains the message: “We are committed to being anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic, and putting Equality, Diversity & Inclusion at the heart of everything we do.”

A whistleblower said the row is symptomatic of a “bombardment” of woke initiatives within the trust, which has been at the centre of scandals, resignations and legal action over its approach to treating gender-dysphoric children.

In emails leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, the Tavistock’s staff are told they “will be encouraged to add [the banner] to their emails” to accompany the trust’s forthcoming race equality action plan.

In another email last month, doctors were told an “anonymous incident reporting tool” had been launched on the Tavistock intranet, “where any staff members can report an incident of racial abuse or microaggression”.

The microaggression portal will “capture the number and severity of incidents” and be reviewed by the trust’s new associate director of equality, diversity and inclusion, alongside a decolonisation drive in its library.

Trust chiefs have approved an annual budget of £2,500 for each “diversity champion” to spend on training, event speakers and learning tools, and £1,500 to hire a “trans associate champion”.

The whistleblower said that it “seems strange” that resources could be found amid a strategic review process “whereby we will be losing senior clinicians”, adding an external report had been commissioned with consultants to “see how racist our trust was”.

“Some [staff ] even used their electronic signatures to say that ‘Brexit will cause thousands of deaths for the NHS and this exit should be stopped as soon as possible and we should all vote to have a second vote’,” they claimed.

“The identity politics that is colonising our public services is only causing further division and distrust, which I cannot condone.”

Toby Young, of the Free Speech Union, which is supporting the whistleblower, said: “We’ve been contacted by numerous employees who’ve been sidelined or worse for not parroting woke

gobbledegook, but this is one of the most extreme cases.

A trust spokesperson said: “The Tavistock and Portman is committed to becoming an anti-racist [organisation] and stands by the steps it has taken to support black and minority ethnic staff and students, and to promote equality, diversity and inclusion more broadly.”