Banking on a witch-hunt The “diversity equity and inclusion” agenda embodies precisely what it purports to combat Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/banking-on-a-witch-hunt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The most striking aspect of the shocking treatment of Nigel Farage, the godfather of Brexit whose account with the quintessentially establishment Coutts bank was closed because it said his views “do not align with our values,” was that it also said his views “were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”.
So in pursuit of inclusivity, the bank excluded Farage. Clearly, logic doesn’t figure as one of its values. Nor does the bank appear to grasp the meaning of language.
Coutts is owned by another bank, NatWest. That’s run by Dame Alison Rose. Last year she declared:
Our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families and businesses. And NatWest Group’s employee-led networks are playing a huge part in creating a truly inclusive culture at the bank.
In practice, this entailed behaving towards Farage like the Soviet secret police. This is now becoming the new normal in a culture where words such as “equality”, “inclusivity’ and “non-discrimination” have turned values hitherto considered the bedrock of a civilised society into the charge sheet for a witch-hunt.
A 40-page dossier released to Farage has revealed the true reason for his exclusion from the bank. It lists his comments about Brexit, his views on LGBT rights and his friendship with Donald Trump and the former Wimbledon player Novak Djokovic as being among many reasons why he was not “compatible with Coutts”.
The dossier contains no fewer than 39 mentions of Trump and 86 mentions of Brexit, along with a number of defamatory insults and contestable allegations. Farage writes in the Telegraph of this “Stasi-style” surveillance report:
I believe Coutts targeted me on personal and political grounds, for the dossier reads rather like a pre-trial brief drawn up by the prosecution in a case against a career criminal. Monthly press checks were made on me. My social media accounts were monitored. Anything considered “problematic” was recorded. I was being watched.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that Dame Alison signs up to the whole justice-denying, reason-repudiating, freedom-trashing agenda of “diversity, equity and inclusion”.
She has said that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her leadership, and earlier this year called on banks to finance the “net zero” carbon emissions agenda. On the day she said this, the bank ended new loans for oil and gas extraction. The Telegraph reports:
Her approach has been evident in the bank’s policies for employees, with staff allowed to identify as men and women on different days as part of a series of LGBT-friendly diversity measures.
Double-sided lanyards were offered to staff who identify as non-binary, so that they could alternate between different identities.
NatWest has also paid for transgender staff to get privately funded hormone treatment and has signed up to controversial schemes run by the charity Stonewall, appearing in its Equality Index last year.
Other institutions and companies across the board are now exhibiting similarly chilling behaviour in pursuit of the “diversity equity and inclusion” agenda of identity politics and victim culture. The key point about this agenda is that it embodies the very things it purports to combat.
Under the banner of “anti-racism”, racial libels and racially bigoted bullying and intimidation are being perpetrated against white people on the grounds that the colour of their skin makes them guilty of “white privilege” for which they must publicly abase themselves and do penance.
“Anti-discrimination” culture has ushered in discrimination against all who fall foul of prevailing orthodoxies. Middle-class university applicants, white people applying to become parliamentary candidates, men applying for anything at all, Christian registrars forbidden to exercise their religious conscience in gay adoption cases, orthodox Jews whose religious principles mean they never address the issue of sexuality at all in their schools but are being instructed to teach that homosexuality is one of a menu of acceptable sexual options — all these and more are being viciously discriminated against under the umbrella of anti-discrimination law.
In the US, a pushback has begun against the application of this legal concept. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in university admissions, under which a candidate’s ethnicity was a criterion for acceptance, was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts said:
Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.
In the Wall Street Journal this week, the former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal wrote:
Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ wilful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalisations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicised racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the US population.
Some logical conclusions of their race-based approach that liberals are loath to admit: immigration and medical school policies should be altered to reduce the number of Indian-American physicians, and selective colleges, which generally already require higher test scores for Asian-American applicants, should raise standards even higher so that Asian-American and Jewish students aren’t overrepresented on campus…
Privileging minority status in admissions and hiring decisions inevitably brings about a hierarchy of competing victimhoods. Liberals have moved beyond debating which minority groups deserve preferential treatment. They now create distinctions within groups. Activists complain that recent black immigrants, their children, and children of bi-racial couples are less deserving of preferential treatment than descendants of American slaves.
In Britain, we’re being told that equalities law is preventing the government from tackling the harm being done by the transgender cult that is being pushed by a disturbing number of schools. As I wrote here about these schools’ behaviour:
This involves validating as true a child’s declaration that they are “non-binary”, which is in fact a disorder of the mind or personality. Such validation is therefore a form of grooming — to subvert identity rooted in the reality of biological sex — in which the school actively colludes…
A Policy Exchange report by Lottie Moore says that four in ten secondary schools operate policies of gender self-identification; 69 per cent of secondary schools are requiring other children to affirm a “gender-distressed” child’s new identity; and only 28 per cent of secondary schools are reliably informing parents as soon as a child discloses feelings of gender distress…The report says: Schools are teaching beliefs about gender identity as though they are facts, often presenting the immutable and biological reality of sex as less important than a person’s ineffable feelings about themselves…
Within government there has been a row over what to do about this, including the issue of “social transitioning” in schools by which children adopt a name, pronouns or clothing that match their chosen “gender identity” as the opposite sex (or whatever they declare their identity to be).
The Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, wants to allow this in schools if the parents of the child consent. Both the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and the Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, reportedly want to issue harder guidance with a blanket ban on social transitioning in schools.
Yet the Attorney-General, Victoria Prentis, has warned that this would break equalities law. The Times (£) reports:
Prentis said that a blanket ban would be unlawful because the Equalities Act states that gender reassignment is a “protected characteristic”, regardless of age. She gave the same advice when ministers asked whether there could be a ban on social transitioning for primary school children…
A Whitehall source told The Times: “The government wants to go further but the problem is that this is guidance. It is coming up against the Equalities Act which is the law. If the government wants to go further, it has to change the law.”
The prevailing notions of “equality”, “anti-discrimination” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” are driving western culture off the rails and stamping out a classically liberal society through cultural totalitarianism. Just as happened in the Soviet Union, language has been hijacked to camouflage an onslaught on truth, freedom and the vulnerable, to recruit as enforcers of this evil untold numbers of gullible useful idiots, and to turn citizens into slaves of the system.
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