Forget Quantitative Easing, or indeed Quantitative Tightening. The latest trend-setting fashion from the Bank of England is Quantitative Targets, not in respect of inflation, employment levels or indeed monetary supply, but in respect of LGBT employees.
In the most astonishing story published today in the Times, the Old Lady has introduced a recruitment system that will include “broader gender definitions” and wants to create “quantitative targets” in respect of LGBT employees.
The Times story quotes from a copy of the 103-page submission, which was obtained by the journalist, and which the Bank sent to Stonewall for inclusion in its annual list of best employers – the Bank came 57th in last year’s list of employers.
These new LGBT targets are just one part of the Bank’s human resources policy which also states that people of any gender identity can become pregnant and, in its family leave policy, used the phrase “birthing parent” rather than mother.
The wording makes clear that the term is meant to be “the parent who is/was pregnant with the child but includes persons of any and all gender identities”.
These extraordinary revelations are included in the Bank’s 2022 submission to be included in the list of the 100 top employers published by Stonewall, the LGBT lobby group. It also states that all of the 4,000 Bank staff in the UK are expected to have a diversity and inclusion objective for each calendar year and all would be assessed on it. They are also encouraged to “include their pronouns in email signatures” and senior staff are to encourage others to be “allies” to the LGBT community by wearing a rainbow lanyard and displaying the same symbol at their workstation.
What’s more, in April 2021 the Bank’s LGBT group emailed all bank governors and other executive directors to encourage support of LGBT plus inclusion. Indeed, five governors and executive directors attended a meeting of the “LGBT+ and allies” steering group and eight signed up for reverse mentoring. In its application, the Bank also said that Stonewall could help support developing this area by creating special workshops.
As well as describing mothers as birthing parents. the Bank’s parental bereavement leave policy “talks about parents without specifying gender”.
The Bank also outlined in the submission that it was committed to gender-neutral lavatories, that it planned to update facilities, including a promise to ensure that the seventh floor of its headquarters in London offered only unisex lavatories.
Staff are also given private medical insurance which covers treatments for pelvic surgery “needed to treat gender dysphoria” or the mismatch a person feels between their biological sex and their gender identity. The Stonewall application also detailed that healthcare insurance – provided by Axa Health – could also cover phalloplasty, vaginoplasty and clitoroplasty.
So is dreaming up a new lavatory policy and helping draft this 103-page submission to Stonewall why Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, has been so busy of late that he’s taken the eye off the inflation ball? Is this why Bailey – and his executive directors – have totally messed up their primary responsibility which is to oversee monetary policy, missing all the red light signals in 2020 that inflation was beginning to set in?
Or does this extraordinary capture of the Bank’s human resource policy go back a little further to before Bailey? Maybe to the seven-year reign of Mark Carney, the Canadian former Bank of England governor who ran the Old Lady between 2013 and 2020? We know that Carney is a bit of a pinko, an extreme climate change campaigner, one who was even spotted watching the Extinction Rebellion lunatics protestors closing down Oxford Street a few years ago. We should be told.
There is a delicious irony to these latest revelations. One of the main criticisms of monetary policy over the last three years is that the Monetary Policy Committee – the influential group that sets interest rates – lacks diversity of thinking. Indeed, if only the Bank had focused on listening to a broader set of economists and had a more diverse range of rate-setters rather than so many Treasury group-thinkers, then we wouldn’t be in such an economic mess. But clearly the Bank has been more concerned about them all going to the same loo or having clitoroplasty rather than watching out for signs that the economy was heating up. Tant pis.
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