https://thecritic.co.uk/chasing-rainbows/
Last week Britain’s “Minister for Common Sense” proudly announced banning civil servants from wearing rainbow lanyards. Esther McVey’s latest offensive in her party’s war on Whitehall wokery was dead within 24 hours. The day following McVey’s Colonel Blimp speech, the Cabinet Office refused to issue specific guidance on lanyards, and distanced itself from McVey’s announcement in briefings to newspapers.
The episode perfectly encompasses the Conservative Party’s reaction to the total capture of the administrative state by their ideological enemies. First, McVey’s target was ridiculous. LGBT lanyards are political; one conservative-minded civil servant I know wore a non-binary lanyard because he believed it would help his promotion prospects to show off how “diverse” he is to his colleagues. Most civil servants who wear these symbols do so as a virtue signal for their cause; it is a wink to their fellow LGBT activists that they are “allies”. However, these pieces of fabric are hardly the most pressing of issues when it comes to Whitehall’s politicisation.
McVey’s immediate defeat by the Cabinet Office is not surprising. Her role was invented purely as a PR exercise by Downing Street when Suella Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary. On the other side of the Whitehall gender wars are a series of pro-trans networks (there are six in the Ministry of Justice alone) which run training, events and produce guidance on pronouns and gender-neutral language..............................................................
@HebrideanHecate God, it’s embarrassing.
Two Whitehall henchmen hauled the poor emoji offender into a room and presented their case: not only had the civil servant liked this news link, they said, but they had also commented on another blog post some months ago raising questions about Black Lives Matter. The civil servant was issued an official warning for inappropriate behaviour, and was told — unless they reined in their behaviour — more severe action would follow.
The civil servant is not alone in being punished for committing a thought crime. In January I reported on the case of a Department of Work and Pensions official who had the temerity to say there are two sides to the trans debate. A subsequent departmental investigation cited the comment as evidence of harassment, and the civil servant was given an official warning.
@Flick It's outrageous and as far as I am concerned criminal harassment.
Talk about Yes, Minister.
As an example, my brother is a guy has a masters in English literature and is working as a local newspaper reporter for peanuts -- that's fine, but the fact is our society is creating way too many masters in English literature and there aren't enough positions for them all.
This is one reason why we've got the strange culture we have right now, because there's a lot of jostling for position, people playing musical chairs hoping to get into a seat before the music stops. Arbitrary, contradictory, ever-changing and draconian rules and such start to show up because with so many people there needs to be ways to exclude many of them.
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