The Times view on halting Whitehall wokery: End of the Rainbow

Politicians and civil servants wax routinely about protecting taxpayers’ money but only in rare cases do they believe it. Departmental budgets are there to be spent and the surest indication of the wanton disregard for prudence in Whitehall is the proliferation of positions in EDI. For those lucky enough not to know, EDI stands for equality, diversity and inclusion, an offspring of the somewhat more familiar initialism HR. There are some 10,000 EDI officers in the public sector and it can be asserted with reasonable confidence that very few of these wearers of rainbow-coloured lanyards have made much of an impression on the workplace.

Now, after 14 years, the Tories are threatening to do something about it. Esther McVey, the minister tasked with rolling back the tide of wokery in Whitehall, is banning the recruitment of EDI officers and making existing ones do other things. This cannot happen soon enough. EDI is not only given to absurdity, it can do real damage, as with the ruined ambitions of white males seeking to be RAF pilots. Of course, prejudice does exist and egregious examples should be dealt with. But they should be treated as the aberrations they are, not an endemic problem worthy of a discrete species of specialised and highly paid bureaucrat.

Ms McVey has succeeded in removing some government EDI vacancies (though there is a £68,000 head of “inclusion and diversity” job still going at the House of Lords). She has little time to dismantle an empire firmly rooted in Whitehall culture. Bureaucracies, once established, develop a cockroach-like capacity for survival. This is a shame. The vast majority of Britons do not require instruction in how to treat colleagues with different ethnic, religious and sexual identities, having long ago ceased caring. It is diversity officers, in the quest for relevance, who insist on highlighting differences. Most workers are too busy to notice.