And on the heels of the Bailey decision the UK government’s senior law officer has ordered her department’s officials to scrap diversity training that had become a “new orthodoxy to settle old scores”.
As published in The Times, 4 August 2022
Suella Braverman QC described diversity training “zealots” as behaving “like the witchfinders of the Middle Ages”
The government’s senior law officer has ordered her department’s officials to scrap diversity training that had become a “new orthodoxy to settle old scores”.
Suella Braverman QC, the attorney-general, said she was “horrified” to discover that hundreds of government lawyers were sent on 2,000 hours of taxpayer-funded courses last year where they were lectured on “white privilege”.
The former Conservative Party leadership candidate, who was born in London to parents of Indian origin, said that the case of Maya Forstater spurred her to review diversity training in the Whitehall legal department.
Forstater, a tax expert, won a landmark claim earlier this year against a think tank after it sacked her for expressing the view that biological sex is immutable.
Writing for The Mail+, Braverman described Forstater’s case as having “ultimately ended in a triumph for common sense and freedom of speech”.
She said the review of diversity training in her department revealed that government lawyers attended lectures on “micro-incivilities, different lived experiences and how to be a straight ally”, provided by Stonewall, the LGBT campaign group.
“The experts on white privilege who shared their insights were cited as authoritative, but they all subscribed to the left-wing view on race, gender and sexuality which permeated their training materials,” the attorney-general wrote.
Braverman added that as part of the courses, “government lawyers are told that if a black person says that something is offensive, then it is offensive and they don’t have a right to question it”. She went on to ask: “How does that fit with the rule of law or due process?”
She described diversity training “zealots” as behaving “like the witchfinders of the Middle Ages, they don the outfit of the inquisitor and never tire of rooting out unbelievers”.
Stonewall has been accused of misrepresenting in its courses for businesses and other organisations how the provisions of equality legislation relate to transgender employees.
Several large organisations, including the BBC and the House of Lords, have quit Stonewall’s “diversity champions programme” — for which the charity charges about £2,500 — after the allegations came to light.
The charity has denied that it misrepresents the legislation.
However, Braverman confirmed that she had told her officials to scrap controversial diversity training schemes for government lawyers.
She encouraged government ministers to do the same and said she was pleased that Liz Truss, the favourite to win the Tory leadership battle, was “committed to scrapping diversity jobs across Whitehall”.