“This instruction applies to all staff of the Department and of all agencies and boards under its purview, both to civil servants and contacted staff. Any breach will be a serious disciplinary matter.”
A culture war has begun, to dig in and assert established positions in each Ministry before the new minister has sat down.
A Minister is responsible for everything which happens in his or her department: he or she is not just a figurehead to give a general steer, but executive commander of all the Department’s actions, with a duty to direct the minutiae.
Therefore when staff in the department start urging their colleagues to embrace dangerous pseudoscientific ideas like Critical Race Theory, it is as if the Minister himself has commanded it. That, it is reported, happened in the Ministry of Justice this week, pre-empting the arrival of the new Minister. It is happening all over. Though the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ are embedded everywhere, they can be dislodged. Each Secretary of State should issue a firm order to all staff, and I suggest:
This Department operates on the basis of equality in diversity. In public actions there must be no discrimination on the basis of irrelevant factors, not those in the Equality Act nor on the basis of political and social opinions, or personal priorities: we treat every British citizen as an individual, not as a passive representative of a nominal group.
Equal treatment also applies to internal staffing, with the proviso that an individual must be able properly to perform his or her tasks in accordance with instructions: their personal opinions must not interfere.
Bullying is a serious matter and should result in disciplinary action. This includes where anyone is ostracised before his or her colleagues or threatened with ostracism, disciplinary action or disadvantage by reason of their rejection of a colleague’s socio-political doctrines or priorities, in particular if it is a doctrine which the Department explicitly rejects. If the bully is in a senior position it is more serious still.
No one may be disciplined nor disadvantaged for expressing matters in modes of speech their colleagues dislike. An attempt to have a member of staff dismissed or disciplined for such petty reasons is itself a form of bullying and will be treated as such.
No person shall be disadvantaged in terms of promotion or placement by reason of their rejection of the doctrines the Department rejects.
The Department rejects racial theories and also ‘critical race theory’, ‘intersectionality’, ‘social conflict theory’ and all other doctrines which posit a social conflict between nominal groups or a privilege attaching to any racial, cultural or social group. Staff may individually hold and express these opinions privately, but must not express them as if from the Department or government, nor promote such doctrines as if from the Department or government.
Because every email from a Departmental email address and every internal memorandum may be considered by the recipient as one from the Department corporately, care must be taken with every email. No member of staff may send any email or memorandum suggesting acceptance of a social conflict doctrine unless it is explicitly expressed as being the sender’s personal opinion.
Diversity of approach is important for the Department’s work and so, beyond what is set out above, so we should try to ensure the staffing of groups with ‘neurological diversity’, with diversity of opinion and of priorities amongst staff, and to counter the natural tendency to staff our teams with those who think like us.
All training courses and material based on a rejected doctrine shall be cancelled forthwith and no others held, and no one may circulate from a Departmental email address an invitation to such a course or to view such material.
We will not subscribe to nor fund any external scheme which implies that the Department subscribes to any set of political, social or philosophical beliefs, whatever they are.
Any breach of these rules will be a serious disciplinary matter.
See also
- The Long March: conspiracy or accident
- A system failing in the middle
- Sir Humphrey’s logic
- To follow knowledge like a sinking star
- Liberals, conservatives and the Jordan Peterson thesis
- The Constitution: mice undermine the wall
- Why list astrology as a science?
Books
- By Jordan B Peterson:
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
- Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
- Political Correctness Gone Mad? with, Stephen Fry, Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg
- The Liberal Delusion by John Marsh
- The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
- The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham (former senior Lord of Appeal)
- Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics by Jonathan Sumption (former Justice of the Supreme Court)
- Constitutional & Administrative Law by Neil Parpworth
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
