UK Minister Scraps Civil Service Diversity Training ‘Riddled With Left-Wing Views’

UK Attorney General Suella Braverman said she has scrapped the diversity training programme in her department, as it is “riddled with left-wing views.”

Writing in the Daily Mail, Braverman compared the “diversity, equality, and inclusion” (DEI) sector to the “witch-finders of the Middle Ages.”

She said she was “horrified” to discover that hundreds of government lawyers spent nearly 2,000 hours of their taxpayer-funded time last year attending lectures given by LGBT charity Stonewall on “micro-incivilities,” different “lived experiences,” and “how to be a straight ally.”

‘Downright Dangerous’

During the training sessions, Braverman said, “government lawyers are told that if a black person says something is offensive, then it is offensive, and they don’t have a right to question it.”

“How does that fit with the rule of law, or due process?” she asked.

She added: “This kind of thinking is harmful in other departments, but in legal cases it’s downright dangerous. It does nothing to create solidarity and encourage support but rather keeps emphasising difference, creates a sense of ‘otherness’ and pits different groups against each other.”

‘Woke Commissars’

Braverman said she has told her officials to scrap the training programme, adding, “We really must get serious about taking on this divisive mindset and call it out for what it is: a new religion with a new priestly caste.”

She compared “zealots” who believe in this “new religion” to “witch-finders of the Middle Ages” who “never tire of rooting out unbelievers.”

She also criticised those who “nod along and recite the creed because they are too scared to dissent,” adding, “None of these approaches are acceptable in modern Britain.”

“Britain needs a lot of things but it certainly doesn’t need woke commissars policing our thoughts,” she said.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss arrives to attend a Tory Leadership hustings event in London on July 21, 2022. (Getty Images/Dan Kitwood)

Braverman, who joined the Conservative Party leadership race last month but has since been knocked out, backed Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is one of the final two contenders, to continue her work to fight “pernicious identity politics.”

The attorney general said she is “especially glad” that Truss is committed to scrapping diversity jobs across the UK government.

Truss’s campaign said there are at least 326 of these roles in government departments, and scrapping them will save taxpayers around £12 million ($14.5 million) a year.

‘Waste of Money’

Braverman told Sky News that the training materials used are “riddled with left-wing views on race and gender, things like white privilege.”

She said the “thousands of hours” of training within government departments come at “a huge cost to the taxpayer.”

“It’s been divisive, not inclusive,” she said. “It’s been patronising, not empowering.

“It’s based on an assumption that me as an ethnic Asian woman from working class roots must be a victim, necessarily oppressed. That’s a misassumption. And I think it creates division. It’s tearing up society, breaking down the fabric of our country.”

She called it a “waste of money,” as she said she does not think “ultimately that’s what taxpayers want their civil servants or their government lawyers to be spending their time on.”