Ten years ago, I found myself accompanying the then Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office to the Locarno room in the department’s palatial HQ building. I was covering as one of Simon McDonald’s private secretaries for the week and he was on his way to address the ‘Summer Diversity Internship Programme’ cohort. I still recall looking at the assembled group of perhaps a 100 interns and barely being able to find a white face.
That is the context of Kemi Badenoch’s announcement yesterday that a future Tory government would finally ditch the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). For this the Conservative party leader should be commended. In so doing, the Tories have finally broken free of the ‘protected characteristics’ racket. And not a moment too soon.
This ‘duty’ has infiltrated every part of the public sector and undermined the very fairness it was meant to ensure. It enabled the civil service to limit eligibility to its ‘multi-award-winning’ graduate internship, from the early 2000s through to 2023, to only ethnic minorities, those with a disability and from a lower socio-economic background. There was no internship for middle-class whites. Those doing the internship, of course, ‘greatly increase their chances of being selected’ for a permanent government job.
