Luxury training
The Telegraph has a long piece on what it calls Whitehall’s woke training regime.
Some of it is about what I would call anti-racism training and the rest is about gender bullshit.
Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.
Instead of clearing backlogs from the pandemic, staff are spending work time on attending lectures on LGBT+ issues or watching videos telling them biological men can use women-only facilities if they self-identify as female.
In one department, staff shared a “30 days of Pride” calendar, with daily videos and articles on topics including “transgender children” and “the history of the Stonewall riot”, that contained six hours of content.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s inherently bad to give people in civil service jobs training in the need to give everyone equal treatment before the law, which could include pointing out obstacles to doing that, which could include noting entrenched prejudices imbibed from the broader culture. Civil servants should not be treating some people as inferiors, and it could be the case that training helps eliminate that problem.
On the other hand I don’t think this should mean training in treating a small minority of people as magical saints with special magic genders.
Workers in government departments are also being bombarded with material about white privilege and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like that for instance. I don’t think it’s bad for UK civil servants to be told there is such a thing as white privilege in the UK. Remember India? The slave trade? Stuff like that?
But it doesn’t follow that telling civil servants India Willoughby and Emily Bridges are among The Most Marginalized people on earth is a good idea.
The MoJ’s Gender Equality Network, one of a myriad of groups within the Civil Service set up by staff to discuss subjects such as diversity, circulated a newsletter in July 2022 to its members that discussed gender identity, pronouns and non-binary people.
The newsletter said: “Depending on the culture, people who identify as other genders have been associated with sacred powers, spirituality and are thought to be blessings to the family and community they are born into.
“Many North American Indigenous tribes had no constructs of gender and embraced its fluidity before colonisation.
“In many societies, the gender binary is a product and tool of colonialism and white supremacy.”
That’s fatuous propaganda, but notice the Telegraph doesn’t say it’s part of the training. It’s from a newsletter. There are probably a lot of newsletters flying around the Civil Service with some kind of bullshit in them. What’s the betting most civil servants just drop them straight into the recycle bin?
So, the Telegraph thing is interesting, but read it with caution.
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Ironically, it sounds like this training is doing the exact opposite of what this sort of training is supposed to do. It is in fact entrenching prejudices imbibed from extremist, genderist ideologues, and interfering with equal treatment before the law. And the people it’s treating as inferior are women.
It’s notable how discussion of how things are (present sense) in the UK and similar Western countries tends to immediately hark back to how things were (past tense, slavery, long time ago now, and the empire).
I’m sure that British civil servants don’t need reminding of “the” slave trade, given how talked-about it has been recently. What is much less talked about is all the other slave trades, for example the fact that a million Europeans were taken by Barbary Pirates and sold in North African slave markets (I’ve never heard any suggestion of “reparations” for that, nor suggestions that, as a result, European teenagers shouldn’t be expected to pass maths exams), or the fact that more Africans were sold Eastward to Arab markets than Westward to the Americas (or the related fact that much of British colonisation of Africa had the explicit motive of stamping out slavery, preventing African overlords from selling their compatriots into slavery).
And while there still are some forms of white privilege, equally one can now talk about the many forms of black privilege (such as the fact that fault cannot be attributed to them; if an Asian-American does badly on a maths exam then he is at fault, if a black American does badly then the maths exam is at fault; and if a black American wants a large rock moved because it upsets them, then a college will readily spend $50,000 complying; and a black student can readily get low-paid white employees sacked for doing their job simply by making accusations of racism, even if the white person wasn’t on duty and not even on campus that day; that’s leaving aside that they can get into elite colleges with vastly lower grades, and the colleges will try everything to continue enabling that, despite it being illegal).
As for training that promotes BLM, they’ll tend to avoid mentioning the fact that BLM has cost the lives of 1000 black Americans (owing to police “pullback” and the resulting increase in homicides). Nor that whites killed by blacks in the US run at about 6 times the number of blacks killed by whites. Nor that blacks killed by US cops are barely a blip compared to blacks killed by black criminals (BLM should re-badge as “black lives matter, but only if killed by cops”, admittedly that’s less snappy). Nor that blacks are not killed disproportionately by cops once you factor in crime rates (as Roland Fryer found, to his cost), nor that the number of blacks killed by cops, if they don’t resist arrest and comply with police instructions, is pretty much zero. And while they’ll talk endlessly about George Floyd, they won’t mention the name of the white person who, a year earlier, died in near-identical circumstances, except that, since he was white, no issue was made of it (no cop is in jail owing to that).
All of this pertinent stuff will not feature in “training” to the Civil Service. Instead they’ll try to make out that Western countries like the US and UK are riddled with “systemic racism” (aka “racism that we can’t find any evidence for”), and that life is dire for black citizens — overlooking the fact that thousands and thousands of black Africans are continually risking everything to cross the Southern borders of Europe and the US to attain a better life. A better life, that is, built on the Western ideas and values that the “anti-racists” call “white supremacy”.
But what’s that got to do with British civil servants? I get it: Britain wasn’t alone in its involvement in slavery. But British civil servants are British civil servants, so Britain’s history is of more relevance than Barbary Pirate history. As a broad subject, I do think global slavery is hugely important and everyone should know more about it, for sure, but I also think it’s reasonable to narrow the focus for some purposes.
Surely there’s rather little in common between today’s civil servants and civil servants back in 1807 when Wilberforce pushed through his Bill abolishing the Transatlantic slave trade? That’s over 200 years.
I’m willing to accept that there are many old fuddy-duddies in the corridors of Whitehall, but I seriously doubt that any date back quite that far, appointed as nippers prior to 1807.
Ok, what I said was:
and
All as preface to saying I think the “training” in trans bullshit is bullshit. I don’t think it’s a huge or radical claim. Basically the claim is just “not all ‘equity’ training is necessarily terrible.”
On the other hand it’s possible that all the people who give equity training are terrible, so…