Last year, I joined a charity. I won’t say which one, because - on balance - I’d rather they didn’t eject me as a right-wing rabble-rouser and anti-woke troublemaker.
So, in the interest of domestic peace, let me talk in generalities. The charity I joined is old and venerable. Its ancient foundations go back 600 years, and it has a plush HQ in London.
Last week, the charity sent members an email. It was riddled with the usual pieties we have come to expect from an organisation that has succumbed to ideological capture.
It moped and mithered about how the charity’s members were too male and pale. But it had a problem. It couldn’t put a number on the scale of this demographic awfulness.
Which surprised me. The charity has a website listing its members and, disgracefully, most of them, judging by their pictures, look like me. Not as handsome, obviously. But a high-incidence of blokey, whitey types, nonetheless.
It’s worth noting that these members aren’t part of the charity because of an accident of birth, or as some sort of inherited perk. They pay to be members. And they pay a lot. Voluntarily.
But I digress. Even though the charity has a pretty good idea of who its financial backers are, it is blindsided by the really important stuff. And what might that be? Is it whether a potential member can pay their dues, and bring some deep, specialist knowledge to bear on the charity’s work?
Nope, it seems that the really important stuff is what members like to do in the bedroom. I know this because attached to the email to me from the charity was a survey. One question I wanted to know whether I was heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, intersex or asexual.
Another asked whether I was male, female, transgender or - a fourth option - which allowed respondents to “identify in another way”. What, like a ‘furry’? A cat, perhaps?
It is a measure of how inured many of us are to this guff that when I came to questions about religious and racial identity, I almost felt a sense of relief. Familiar territory!
They only want to know which God I worship in the privacy of my own head, or whether my great-grandmother mated with someone who possessed a hint of the tar-brush.
We must push back against organisations seeking to define us in ways many of us find repulsive - Colin Brazier | Getty Images
But, seriously, what would the men (and they were all men) who founded this charity - and sustained it over centuries - make of such posturing cant?
I posted a version of this question on Twitter. Amid the scores of replies was a huge sense of angry resignation about the insertion of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) into areas of public life that do not warrant such intrusion.
A deep frustration about the effrontery of organisations in the state and private sector, who feel they can expect to ask individuals deeply personal questions, while normalising behaviours which many of us still find aberrant or transgressive.
But one reply in particular caught my eye. For its sheer truthful simplicity. Alexander D’Albini wrote: “They never ask about the most important identities. Father/Mother. Uncle/Aunt. Child/Estranged Child. Employed/Unemployed.”
And isn’t that the truth? By shoe-horning people into a frame of reference the DEI industry chooses, the way many of us prefer to see ourselves is undermined. If a public body like a charity sees us first and foremost through the prism of sex or disability or race, where does that leave the way many of us choose to self-define?
I hate the idea of being boxed into a corner of definitions. People are more complicated than that. But if I were forced to choose my own words, they would include nouns like “father”, “widower”, “brother”, “son”, “conservative” and “friend”.
But the DEI industry doesn’t want us to do this. I know this from experience. At Sky TV, where I worked for 25 years, the corporate bosses released an ‘Inclusive Language Guide’ in 2017. It encouraged staff to avoid words like “man” or “woman”, “father” or “daughter” - because such words were based on familial assumptions some might find objectionable.
It was a textbook example of a cadre of executives telling subordinates how to think. It was also deeply undemocratic. If those executives ever put that ludicrous ‘Inclusive Language Guide’ to all of their employees - not just the senior creatives and HR gurus, but the Filipina cleaners and Nigerian security guards - it would have been run out of town.
But that’s not how the DEI industry works, is it? Far from being an expression of the wisdom of the crowd, or the settled wishes of the silent majority, it is a stitch-up by a Brahmin caste of self-appointed moral policemen.
But, for all I disdain what they do - find ridiculous what they do - that is not the same thing as pretending it is irrelevant.
These language guides and needless surveys about sexuality do have a real-world impact. They have a chilling effect on dissidence and dissent.
They provide legal grounds to fire those who won’t toe the line. They are one of the foundational tenets of cancel culture.
Worst of all, DEI creates jobs for those who don’t deserve them. This doesn’t matter so much when there are plenty of jobs to go around. But we are entering a time when that is no longer the case. Artificial Intelligence is creating a shake-down in the employment market. There is an oversupply of graduates. Wage compression is happening.
Time was when a young white man in his early 20s could afford to be relaxed about DEI recruitment policies. Not anymore.
It’s not just galling to see someone less able get a job you wanted by dint of their skin colour, rather than the content of their character and CV - it is now also a source of real-world suffering.
It will leave a cohort of young white men and women not just disadvantaged, but embittered. And who knows where that ends.
All of this is especially true in the public sector, where the most vigorous DEI recruitment policies are pursued. Should a young person be lucky enough to get a job working for the State, they will enjoy levels of job security and pension entitlement only dreamt of in the private sector.
Most of us resent paying taxes. But imagine the resentment of a young graduate, facing a mountain of tuition-fee debt, paying taxes that provide a lifestyle enjoyed by successful DEI employees, which they struggle to access. Not because they haven’t worked hard enough. But because they can’t tick the box marked: ‘Black British’ or ‘neurodiverse’.
There was another reply to my post which also caught my eye. It was from a former Number Ten staffer, Rory Geoghegan. He’d noted how many people think these surveys are nothing to worry about.
They aren’t obligatory. You can always tick: ‘prefer not to say’. But Rory, presumably speaking from a position of knowledge, says such a noncommittal reply is increasingly frowned upon.
He wrote: “Some police forces have already set targets for themselves to reduce the proportion of their workforces ticking the "prefer not to say" option. Prefer not to say is the sign of a "bad" culture, apparently.
I have no idea whether this is true, but it certainly has the whiff of it. So much of the diversity culture begins with a gentle request to comply, but - pace Orwell - ends up with a metaphorical fist in the face. The goal-posts keep moving. And never towards common sense.
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