A rare victory for proportion

A long-serving Metropolitan Police sergeant has failed in his attempt to sue the force for harassment after claiming that being called a “numpty” by a senior officer created a hostile work environment. Had the case succeeded, it would have set a troubling precedent, potentially lowering the threshold for what constitutes speech-related misconduct and further constraining the boundaries of acceptable expression in the workplace.

Sonny Kalar, who served in the Met for 30 years before retiring in 2023, lodged a series of claims against his employer, including race and disability discrimination, harassment, victimisation, and whistleblowing detriment. He alleged that senior officers had subjected him to a “collective witch-hunt”, orchestrating a sustained campaign against him.

However, Employment Judge Richard Nicolle, sitting at London Central Employment Tribunal, dismissed all his claims.

At the centre of Kalar’s case was an allegation against Chief Inspector Marlise Davies, a senior officer in the SO15 counter-terrorism command, who, he claimed, had discriminated against him by twice calling him a “numpty” during a phone conversation in July 2022.

The tribunal heard: “CI Davies accepts using the term, once not twice, but said that it was used as an affectionate term as in ‘don’t be so silly’, rather than in a disparaging manner. Nevertheless, she apologised to the Claimant.”

In its judgment, the tribunal states: “We accept CI Davies’ evidence that the comment was made during her call with the Claimant on 15 July 2022 in a light hearted manner.

“We do not consider that the term ‘numpty’ has any racial or disability connotations and in the context that it was used, in what we considered to be a light hearted manner, not one which was capable of constituting harassment when looked at objectively.”

The judgment continued: “We acknowledge the Claimant may subjectively have perceived the comment to be directed at him and to be disparaging but consider it relates to his heightened sensitivity rather than how the comments would be objectively viewed.”

The tribunal also rejected Kalar’s claim of discrimination arising from disability “given our findings above that the comment was not in any way related to the Claimant’s disabilities.”

Kalar also took issue with a remark by CI Davies about “living the dream”, which he perceived as a dismissive reference to his struggles with disabilities and health issues. Davies, however, stated that the comment referred to the poor state of the building at St Pancras International, where officers were working in a facility with water “running down the walls”. She also pointed out that at the time of the comment she didn’t know who the Claimant was, and was addressing a room full of officers. 

Her evidence was accepted, with the tribunal ruling that there was no basis to infer that the comment had been directed at Kalar personally, nor that it could constitute harassment on the grounds of race or disability. 

The tribunal also heard that in his final year prior to retirement Kalar expressed a wish to return to operational duties — prompting Davies to respond: “And I want to be a ballerina.”

As with her other remarks, the tribunal found that this was “informal, arguably self-deprecating and humorous language” and that “given the context in which these comments were made, they were not intended, nor could they reasonably be construed, as constituting harassment”.

In its coverage of the case, The Guardian noted linguistic research from King’s College London, suggesting that the origins of the word “numpty” can be traced back to the 18th century, when it was first recorded in a 1733 play as a “term of mocking endearment for a cuckolded husband”. Maybe so. But one doesn’t have to be Ludwig Wittgenstein to realise that, whatever its historical usage, a word’s meaning depends not on etymology alone, but on how it is used in real-life exchanges.

At its core, this tribunal ruling is a reaffirmation of something rather obvious but often forgotten in modern workplace disputes: words mean what they do not because of some fixed essence, but because of how they come to be used in any given setting.

Woke activists, usually so eager to emphasise the complexity of “lived experience” — multiplicity, fluidity, intersectionality — when it comes to the identities and personal narratives of The Oppressed, have for many years now been curiously reluctant to extend that logic to language itself. Yet as the ordinary language philosophers — Wittgenstein, but also Austin and Ryle — remind us, meaning emerges from use. If we strip words of their, ahem, “lived experience” — separating them from the activity, culture, and relational context that imbues them with meaning — we don’t just risk misreading them; we contort them into something they never were. 

By rejecting Kalar’s claims, the tribunal’s ruling serves as a tacit rebuke to the creeping textual fundamentalism that increasingly governs workplace disputes.

This same process, where intent and context are discarded in favor of rigid textualism, was at play in the recent case of Free Speech Union (FSU) member Carl Borg-Neal, the Lloyds Bank employee who asked a trainer, during a diversity training session, how as a line manager he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if spoken by a white person. When his question was met with a puzzled look, he clarified: “The most common example being use of the word n***** in the black community.”

Incredibly, the bank accused Borg-Neal of racism and launched a disciplinary process, which ended with his dismissal for gross misconduct. With the FSU’s support, Borg-Neal fought back, and the Employment Tribunal unanimously ruled in his favor, finding he had been unfairly dismissed.

One of the most striking aspects of the hearing was the extent to which Lloyds fixated on Borg-Neal’s use of the n-word in isolation, disregarding the wider context entirely. It was on the basis of this semantic fixation that the bank could concede that Mr Borg-Neal had not intended to cause any hurt, that he asked the question with no malice, and that the question itself was valid… but, er, still sack him anyway. 

Thanks to top-drawer representation from Doyle Clayton, we successfully steered the panel towards an appreciation of the wider context in which the n-word has been uttered: the incident took place during a race education session, and specifically during a discussion of “intent versus impact”; it was a well-intentioned relevant question regarding how to handle a situation of racially offensive language in the workplace; and there was no suggestion that he was taking an opportunity to say an abusive term under cover of a question. 

The Kalar ruling reflects the same stance, resisting the temptation to target words in isolation rather than assess them in and as part of the messy, unpredictable reality of human interaction.

Any given word or phrase may have an accepted dictionary definition. But when HR departments, activists, or ex-employees attempt to impose rigid, immutable meanings to ostensibly “unsettling” or “hurtful” words and phrases uttered in the workplace, they need to consider a host of other, contextually relevant factors – the “constellation of surrounding circumstances” as the U.S. Supreme Court once put it in Oncale v Sundowner Offshore Services — including the speaker’s intentions, tone, style of delivery, and the specifics of the setting.

And the TL;DR for censorial activist employees? Even words have a “lived experience”, you numpties.