Civil Service employing at least 500 diversity officers
At least 500 civil servants are employed across Government to police and develop diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies, The Telegraph can reveal.
Some Whitehall departments have seen the numbers of staff whose jobs involve overseeing equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT or race policies double in the past year since Labour came to power.
The figures have only been extracted from Whitehall after a two-year battle by the MP Neil O’Brien, who used freedom of information (FOI) laws and parliamentary questions to counter attempts by officials and ministers to block the release of the figures. They are an underestimate as some departments have still refused to answer.
All young men yearn at times for some place where there will be no work to do, and it speaks volumes for the happy administration of this realm that every young man in his yearning fondly turns his eyes to the Civil Service.
Walter Besant - The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1888)
3 comments:
The Civil Service - perhaps the best way to think about it is a separate country with its own rules and folkways?
Any long living institution or bureaucracy will tend to have more and more careerists at the top who prioritize their own agendas. Perhaps we should make the top layers term appointments that may not be automatically renewed - that would discourage the out and out careerists from competing, and make their subsequent removal easier.
While I was commenting on the recent graffiti installation in Canterbury Cathedral, autocorrect stepped in to amend the medieval architects’ guiding principle to ‘ad maiorem DEI gloriam’, which seems to capture today’s public sector Zeitgeist and the fervour of its adherents rather well.
(In a similar vein, a light-hearted email apology to a work colleague became ‘mea maxima cuppa’, now adopted as our standard family request to put the kettle on.)
DJ - making the top layers into term appointments is certainly worth trying, although the appointment system would have to be effective too. There is an impression that bureaucratic inertia is a factor too, reaching deep into custom and practice which may effectively resist reform.
Macheath - ha ha, entertaining but it does raise questions about the stability of our language. We find that autocorrect makes numerous amusing errors and suggestions but doesn't seem to improve, even though it has been embedded in our digital world for some years now.
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