Suella Braverman’s war on diversity jobs fails to see the big picture

In declaring war on the diversity industry, Attorney General Suella Braverman adds weight to a campaign that has characterised the Tory leadership race.

Her rhetoric — branding diversity consultants the “witch-finders” of today — may go further than the more measured words of Kemi Badenoch, who set out her stall at the beginning of the contest on an anti-woke platform.

Liz Truss, Braverman reminds us, is also committed to scrapping diversity jobs across Whitehall — as Braverman has now done in her own department — and fighting “pernicious identity politics”.

Once these women are ensconced in their inevitable cabinet posts in September, we can look forward to a new era of straight-talking common sense, where meritocracy rules and people’s thoughts are no longer policed by self-appointed cultural arbiters.

For that, much of the electorate will be relieved. It is true, as Braverman says, that the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda has become the new orthodoxy, presided over by left-wing zealots.

She singles out transgender issues as a particular cause for concern, citing the case of Maya Forstater, who lost her job for stating the scientific fact that transgender women cannot change their biological sex.

And she hits out at the charity Stonewall, which seems to have a stranglehold on the public sector, preaching highly controversial dogma about “micro incivilities”, “implicit biases” and “how to be a straight ally” to cowed staff, terrified of speaking out of turn and causing offence.

Braverman has ordered her officials to put an end to such creeds, which she says wasted 2,000 hours of her lawyers’ taxpayer-funded time last year: “We really must get serious about taking on this divisive mindset and call it out for what it is: a new religion with a new priestly caste,” she wrote in The Daily Mail this week.

Most voters would surely agree that government needs to worry less about civil servants checking their privilege, and more about energy prices, fighting crime, and GP appointments.

Suella Braverman is tipped, by The Sun, to be the next Home Secretary in a Truss cabinet which, if the projections are accurate, would be properly representative of Britain.

Others apparently in line for cabinet roles include Badenoch, Kwasi Kwarteng, Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Sajid Javeed and Penny Mordaunt — whose own progressive (for a Tory) views saw her hounded out of the competition just as she became a credible threat to the party’s right.

Under this new guard, perhaps the diversity industry will collapse, or at least become obsolete, as our leaders visibly demonstrate that opportunities abound for everyone, without the help of affirmative action.

But before we get completely carried away with Braverman’s brave new world, we should take stock of where we are in terms of diverse workplaces.

The diversity business grew out of a demand for greater parity — a by-product of Blairism, according to Braverman and the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act.

But while we can do without some of its sillier sidelines — among them, “Japanese gay grandfather empathy” courses for civil servants — and ditch its hectoring extremists, we still need an apparatus to address the genuine inequalities that exist in this country.

Gender imbalances — despite the likely make-up of a Truss government — pervade British boardrooms; even in the fairly enlightened civil service, men outnumber women in the top positions.

A report by diversity company Green Park two years ago found that while people from ethnic minority backgrounds make up 13 per cent of the UK population, only 4.7 per cent of the most powerful leadership roles (51 out of 1,097) are held by them.

Diversity awareness that tackles class disparities and encourages social mobility should also have a place in any forward-thinking establishment.

As with many movements that go too far, the backlash can end up being counter-productive, and the danger is that a Braverman-style route of diversity training will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I know a few young graduates who have been recruited into diversity consultancies and whose jobs include educating often middle-class white male board members on how to adopt more inclusive employment policies.

These professionals, trained to listen as well as advise, are as much a part of the diversity industry as the Stonewall heavies. Can we not keep them while axing the no-debate belligerents who have given diversity such a bad name?

I would rather work in an institution which took advice from, say, an ethics expert versed in the challenges facing women in the labour market than from a Tory grandee such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, who dismisses diversity as a job creation scheme and whose unreconstructed views, generally, hark back to a less tolerant age.

An employment tribunal ruled this week that an “inclusion advocate” at Sky was guilty of racism after she told a colleague she must have been “oppressed” because she was mixed race. Such mindless stereotyping does nothing to promote welcoming working environments.

But not all diversity jobs are “part of the problem”, as Suella Braverman insists. In her mission to stamp them out, which disadvantaged minority will bear the brunt?