Obstructive activists and malcontents have been enabled by equalities legislation
One happy consequence of Reform UK’s success in May’s local elections is that we have apparently entered a golden age of journalists scrutinising local government. If measured by the quantity of output, at least. Every time one opens a new tab on Google Mobile, instead of the old listicles or teasers about which movie star has dementia, we instead find half a dozen fresh BBC news articles breathlessly relaying the minutiae and the drama of county council politics.
Whatever one might think of the agenda behind this reporting, Reform’s dramatic arrival on the scene has meant that local government in England is now something people might genuinely be interested to read about — especially in those councils where Reform UK have won overall control, with a mandate to shake things up.
What often made local politics so dull was that elected councillors were content to let officials run the authority on autopilot. These staff are not colourful or controversial characters, and have a tendency to talk in the kind of patronising jargon that sends reporters, let alone their readers, off to sleep. And unlike politicians who are considered fair game, these are essentially just people doing their jobs, impartially of course, and as such local media were a lot more deferential. The combination is a powerful one in terms of avoiding scrutiny.
The BBC are also mindful of their obligation to impartiality, and their reporting reflects that. Happily, their staff at local level have found a way around it, which is by running articles that simply report whenever anybody else attacks the new Reform councillors, or Reform-run councils.
One such piece was published on Monday, in which a letter from the chair of Warwickshire County Council’s “LBTQ+ staff network” — presumably addressed to the Chief Executive of the Council — was quoted as stating that staff were left “deeply unsettled” by decision of the new Reform UK leadership of the the council to cease flying the Rainbow “Pride” flag from council headquarters.
The story had previously caused controversy when the council’s chief executive Monica Fogarty had refused a request from councillors to take the “Progress Pride Flag” down before the end of the Holy Month of Pride (formerly known as July). This was also reported by the BBC, with Fogarty striking a heroic pose as a defender of the marginalised and oppressed. Reform councillors subsequently voted to strip the chief executive of her authority over flags flown from council headquarters, and to hand the power to the council chairman.
The image of Reform’s new leader of Warwickshire Council, George Finch, a likely lad of nineteen, sat triumphantly next to a crestfallen and pouting Fogarty, may end up being one of the most symbolic icons of Reform’s ascendency. The timely eclipse of disapproving, public-sector lanyard women by young men with skinfades and democratic mandates, heralding the overthrow of Britain’s stakeholder protectorate.
The article published on Monday is relatively unusual in that it contains direct criticism of policy, set by elected councillors, by council staff. I will not name the chair of the “LGBTQ+ staff network” in whose name the letter was sent, as this is an opinion piece intended to muse on broader questions, but her name is set out in the BBC article. I would assume she works at a council-run agency rather than as a policy official in county headquarters, however the “LGBTQ+ network” will include such officials, probably in numbers disproportionate to their share of the general population of Warwickshire. It is not clear whether the chair herself felt it appropriate to share the letter with the BBC, but the reporter certainly doesn’t seem to see anything sufficiently controversial about a group of council staff criticising a decision by the elected leadership to be worthy of comment in itself.
As with so many of the delights of 21st century life, the concept originated in the United States
This is a result of the odd role played by “staff networks” in the British public sector — they are semi-official organisations, effectively mandated by legislation, and which often include very senior staff. In practice, though, they are bottom-up in their structure, and enjoy genuine independence in terms of what they do and say within the organisation. They supposedly represent the interests of staff with particular characteristics within the workplace, but they are certainly not trade unions with a corporate personality distinct from the organisations that employ their members, or an automatically antagonistic stance toward management.
As with so many of the delights of 21st century life, the concept originated in the United States — primarily in large private sector employers that aspired to be seen as forward looking. During the Civil Rights Era, informal groupings of African-American staff began to form in those workplaces that allowed it, which during the 1970s began to be formalised as Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Xerox apparently was the first company to do this. ERGs proliferated over the subsequent decade, and later in the 1980s the concept was adapted for sexuality-based affinity networks, which back in those dark ages were still limited to staff identifying as gay or lesbian.
Where ERGs started out as advocacy groups challenging unequal terms of employment, by the 1990s they were championing leadership development of members of their respective minority groups. Britain was about a decade behind America in terms of the development of such networks, and other than in US-run corporations who mirrored the practices of the parent company, their growth was initially concentrated in the public sector. Regional networks for black members of staff in the NHS began proliferating in the aftermath of the 1981 riots. Central departments of the civil service, including the Foreign Office, also set up groups to examine lack of representation for racial minorities at around the same time.
The backlash against Section 28 in the late 1980s and early 90s was a catalyst for the proliferation of gay and lesbian groups in public sector workplaces, especially in those areas of local government under opposition control. The 1990s also saw the formalisation of networks for staff with disabilities across the British public sector, as well as “women’s networks” which, though they only ever attracted the interest of a small percentage of the often majority female workforces in local government, were popular among the most ambitious women looking to (literally) network with their peers.
The 2000s saw affinity groups enter the mainstream of the British private sector, as theories about the power of diversity and equality to enhance the profitability and performance of businesses gained increasing credence. As corporations became keen to burnish their inclusive credentials, so leaders in the public sector felt able to copy them under the guise of borrowing best practice from the private sector. This took place during a time in which HR departments grew inexorably, and in which eccentricity and individuality in the workplace became more of a career liability.
The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) created by the Equality Act 2010 required public sector employers to eliminate inequality, and the staff networks were recognised within this legal framework as “stakeholders” in this process. The PSED initiated the first Civil Service Diversity strategy in 2011, which mandated government departments to support and fund staff networks for each protected characteristic under the Equality Act. As had been intended, this quickly rippled out across the rest of the public sector.
In 2015, the Civil Service Talent Action Plan gave staff networks authority in recruitment and “talent management” (i.e. who got promoted), and a say in shaping policy. Coupled with the commitment under the PSED to consider the impact of all new legislation on equality, this meant that staff networks within government departments began to enjoy serious authority over government policy under the quasi-constitutional power of the Equality Act 2010.
The formal role of the staff networks was further strengthened under the Civil Service Diversity & Inclusion Strategy 2018. It was at around this time that members of the Senior Civil Service began to be required to participate in one of the networks as “allies” as part of their formal corporate objectives, if they weren’t already a part of a network due to their belonging to a protected group themselves. They would be assessed against this as part of their annual review process, which plays a key part in eligibility for promotion.
The concept of “allyship” is a vague and nebulous one. Supposedly, it is meant to involve those of “non-marginalised” or “privileged” groups (heterosexuals, men, white people etc) “amplifying the voices” of and “advocating” for their “marginalised” colleagues. In practice, it usually meant intelligent if slightly spineless middle-aged Senior Civil Servants being fed intersectional social justice dogma by an HEO fresh out of university, and being judged on how completely they digested it and accepted its premises. Anybody who had any exposure to the British public sector during this period will have had the connotations of the word “ally” completely changed in their minds, and will now no longer be able to watch a documentary about the Second World War without imagining a balding 54 year old DEFRA Director wearing a rainbow lanyard storming ashore at Anzio, or launching a dogged attack through the bocage around Saint-Lô.
If this experience was miserable enough for everyone else, it was especially humiliating for those who did not feel “marginalised” or defined by their own “protected characteristics” — those for whom being gay, or being Asian or whatever was not a professional identity. Particularly those who were slightly older, and who felt their own career progress thus far was down to their own efforts or merits, rather than a result of their being “advocated” for by “allies”. When these groups were first formed, an individual could simply choose whether to participate or not, but by the late 2010s that was ceasing to be an option one could get away with quietly, especially for those at more senior grades.
It’s worth taking a brief moment to dwell on the especially noxious role of the so-called “mental health” networks, which were often populated mainly by individuals with the kind of personality disorders that made them especially unpleasant or professionally dangerous to be around. These networks could be the most vocal within any government department, mainly because they believed that they had lessons to teach everyone else about their own “mental health”. As such, they tended to elevate the most malign and narcissistic individuals into moral authorities within their workplaces.
It will be difficult to prove the precise level of influence that LGBTQ+ networks had over senior officials in government, and over clinicians within the NHS, during the controversy over “gender affirming care” (hormone blockers and the removal of health body parts) during the decade while that debate was in contention in the UK. But throughout that time, scepticism toward gender ideology was framed by these groups as if it were a threat to the safety of staff. It’s known that the LGBTQ+ network within the BMA attempted to attack the methodology of the Cass Review, and that officials attempted to block Kemi Badenoch while she was Secretary of State for Women and Equality from meeting with gender critical campaigners. It is important to remember that every single decision made, and each piece of policy advice issued by officials, was done in an atmosphere in which groups like this wielded real influence over people’s careers.
Gender recognition is a particularly stark case, but there are other areas in which staff networks have influenced policy under the terms of the PSED. These usually involve attempts to ameliorate obvious examples of policy failure, such as with issues around integration of predominantly Muslim ethnic minority immigrant groups on which the Civil Service Minority Network and its predecessors have “fed in” to decisions on Home Affairs. As was the case with gender ideology, advocacy for robust border policies and reduced immigration is framed by such groups, especially within the Home Office, as being a threat to minority ethnic personnel, making them feel “unsafe”. This is unlikely to influence policy officials who are already inclined to oppose such policy or rhetoric, but it provides them with additional justification for their positions.
All of this has been enabled by the spread of quasi-constitutional legislation
The proliferation of staff networks around the public sector has provided infrastructure for the well-organised to influence policy around the democratic, parliamentary structures by which policy and decision-making is supposed to be held accountable. As in the case of the BBC article about Warwickshire’s flag policy this week, it has created platforms for what are political activities that should not properly exist. If officials have specific grievances about the way they are treated in the course of their employment, they have the right to raise that via their trade union or their lawyers to take it up under the law. But beyond that, they should not enjoy any greater right to influence policy than any other voter. Staff networks muddy this by creating what appear to be constituencies on whose behalf campaigners can speak, and which by their numbers feel that they have the authority to participate in politics on an institutional level.
As ever, all of this has been enabled by the spread of quasi-constitutional legislation — most perniciously the 2010 Equality Act, under the previous Labour government, which the Tories not only failed to cut down but actively built upon during their wasted years in power. We have arrived at this point not because duplicitous civil servants have subverted the systems of government, but because it would have been illegal for them not to have done so. It will all need to be broken up by a future government if it has any chance of implementing a programme of national restoration and constitutional house cleaning.
