Even critics of the HRification of everything — the influx of equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives — are liable to see it as just irritating flummery. They roll their eyes at new boxes to tick and training sessions to attend but don’t see it as much more than a silly fad.

This is a mistake. “Wokeness”, the American reporter Aaron Sibarium wrote at the weekend, “isn’t just stifling free speech or inventing dumb neologisms; it is determining policy that affects millions of people.” Sibarium had the evidence of his own reportage to back that up, raising cases where COVID treatments had been allocated according to race more than diabetes or obesity, and where experts had insisted that 9-year-olds could be put on puberty blockers if they were “trans”.

That is true of the US and it is true of Britain. I can feel as tired as anyone of yet another stupid argument about whether to call someone “he”, “she” or “they”, for example, but then I remember the kids being drugged to irreversibly change their developing bodies and a sense of seriousness returns. I can feel myself nodding off when someone rolls out words like “multiculturalism”, but then I recall that witnesses interviewed for the Casey report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham said the council took deficient measures because they were “terrified of the impact on community cohesion” and I wake up again.

At GB News, Charlie Peters, also of this parish, reports: 

A former Labour Party politician who was forced to resign his cabinet position at Rotherham Council in 2015 amid reports that he “suppressed” discussions on the grooming gangs now works as a senior diversity and inclusion manager in a major NHS body, GB News can reveal.

Mahroof Hussain was embroiled in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal in 2015 when Dame Louise Casey’s review into the council named him as it described the authority as “in denial” …

As Peters writes, the Casey report found that “staff felt … Jahangir Akhtar and Mahroof Hussain suppressed debate for fear of upsetting community relations”. “These members would push back,” one police officer said. “Neither believed the extent of the problem we were trying to communicate.” This man, whose unbalanced attitude towards “community relations” was a noteworthy aspect of large-scale institutional failure to combat child abuse, is working … in community relations. What about his record made his employers think “this sounds like the man for the job”? Unless, of course, this kind of job is not actually directed towards beneficial outcomes.

On a more eccentric note, Peters has uncovered an interview where Hussain says that “Jews control this and that” because of their “ability, financial resources and … capability”. Okay, I think he was trying to make a compliment — but it’s still richly ironic that a “senior diversity and inclusion manager” would indulge in broad stereotypes about Jewish “financial resources”. But why should we expect meritocratic hiring? Again — no one is seeking meritorious results.

The disasters of the EDI field are far too numerous to mention in a short opinion piece. There was, to briefly cross the pond again, the Google diversity head who had to be removed after he was revealed to have claimed that Jewish people have an “insatiable appetite for war”. There was the NHS racial equality boss, enjoying an £100,000 salary as an “associate director of transformation”, who had to be fired after telling a man that he was “everything she despised in a white manager”. Outright racial prejudice might seem to preclude aspirations towards working in the EDI sphere — unless of course that work has less to do with harmony and cooperation than one-sided outrage manufacturing.

This can be comic when it is not scandalous. It can devolve into petty handwringing, such as when a BBC diversity chief said that Idris Elba’s TV detective Luther was not “black enough” because, among other things, he was not shown consuming Caribbean food. It can wrap its leaders up in ideological knots, as different political causes compete with one another, such as when the University of Sheffield reportedly forced out a diversity officer for defending the feminist and alleged “transphobe” Kathleen Stock. (You might think that advocates of diversity and inclusion would support people defending the inclusion of diverse perspectives — but you would be wrong.)

As the case that Peters highlights demonstrates, the comic aspects of the problem are limited. As well as cultivating complaints, and digging a gigantic hole into which millions of pounds can be poured, the EDI phenomenon allows a failing state to engineer the illusion of improvement. Sure, it can’t do much about chronic societal and institutional dysfunction. But look how hard it’s working to be more equitable and diverse and inclusive. Well done. Do you want a cookie?