It’s not surprising that Esther McVey has nothing to do. She is, after all, the “minister for common sense” – a made up job with a made up mission to tackle a made up problem. What is surprising, however, is that she should have the temerity to tell others that their job is pointless, given the utter vacuity of her own.
McVey is like a particularly small fish circling an empty tank. Is the fish content? Does it know that everything it does is pointless? Is it aware of its own existential redundancy? Or, without any context of the world outside, does it imagine that each flick of its tail, each gaze out the glass, constitutes a moment of pivotal historic importance?
These were the sorts of questions one could rightfully ponder when McVey made her speech about diversity in the Civil Service to the Centre for Policy Studies this week. Certainly they were more meaningful questions than anything raised by her own contribution. Her proposals were, by turn, false, misleading, semi-comprehensible, and self-defeating.
Her most concrete plan was to ban civil servants wearing rainbow lanyards. Lanyards. That is the object of her concern. Amid all the things that are happening in the world, and indeed in our own country under the authorship of her own Government, this is what was occupying her thoughts. And after all, who would dare question it? It’s just common sense. “They should be a standard design reflecting that we are all members of the government delivering for the citizens of the UK,” she said, more of a fax machine than a human being, spewing out gibberish to baffled onlookers.
The proposal was absurd on its face and also in its introduction. It soon transpired that she did not actually plan to do this at all – she was apparently just freewheeling out there, making up policy on the spot. When the Government guidance on Civil Service impartiality was released overnight, there was no mention of lanyards to be found. Her great dream of regulated staffing paraphernalia had crumbled before it even really had a chance to be born.
Beyond the preposterousness, there is an ugliness. The rainbow lanyards simply represent equality. In so far as they demonstrate a political viewpoint it is one which the Government, all parties and the Civil Service is ostensibly committed to – non-discrimination, the rejection of homophobia and equal opportunities for all. Is McVey’s position that is now also “wokery”, or “political correctness”, or whichever other half-hearted generalised slur she now intends to deploy?
The new guidance states that the Civil Service should cease all external equalities and diversity spending unless a minister clears it. “People want the public servants to be getting on with the job of making their lives better, not engaging in endless internal discussions about ideology,” McVey said, “and I’m not prepared to see pointless job creation schemes for the politically correct.”
McVey, like many of her colleagues, seems to think that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is all people who self-identify as a unicorn, or whatever other ludicrous exaggeration is doing the rounds in The Daily Telegraph comment pages this week. What she apparently does not seem to understand, but should really put some effort into grasping, is that it protects any group which is marginalised or disadvantaged. Very often that includes white people – typically white working class boys, who are statistically more likely to underperform in school and thereby be underrepresented in professional sectors. One of the key data points in most industries deploying DEI is representation from those who received free school meals, which is as good a marker for class representation as we have in many contexts.
DEI isn’t perfect. There are some shoddy training initiatives, lots of fashionable jargon, and some overly sensitive language policing. But you would need a far more sophisticated thinker than McVey to untangle what is valuable from what is foolish. She’s a culture warrior, doing her culture warrior thing. And one of the problems with culture warriors is that they are unable to make cogent assessments of relative advantage. That would require a capacity to perceive the colour grey, rather than merely black and white.
McVey suggested that her intervention is driven not by ideology, but finances. She’s concerned about the size of the Civil Service. “At the heart of these changes are value for money for the taxpayer and better customer service for the public,” she said, lifelessly. There are, she insists, the equivalent of about 400 full-time employees working on DEI across the Civil Service.
Even if it’s true, which is frankly doubtful, it would dwarf in comparison to the manner in which the Government itself inflated the size of the Civil Service. Indeed, this was the only real form of levelling-up which they delivered through Brexit. The departure from the EU required the UK to hugely expand its domestic bureaucratic function. In some cases, new departments had to be created, like the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU). In others, they had to be enlarged to take on tasks which we previously left to Brussels, like the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
At this point, we started chucking very young civil servants – people in their early twenties – into extremely senior positions, all in a desperate bid to staff these places up. It resulted in a degradation of the promotional system through the hyper-inflation of grades. But of course, that has nothing to do with lanyards, or DEI, or political correctness, or any of the other nonsense fantasies McVey trades in. It is to do with the decisions which her own Government adopted.
Each week you think they can’t become any stupider than they already are, and then each week they surprise you. It’s like watching the air slowly escape from a balloon, leaving behind trace elements of nonsense and half-completed thoughts.
'President Musk' is flexing his muscles and revealing how weak Trump is