‘Positive action’ in recruitment and promotion allows an employer to treat one candidate “more favourably” than another based on his or her race or another “protected characteristic”, if both candidates are “as qualified” for the role. That’s the law, as set down in sections 158 and 159 of the Equality Act 2010.
The U.K. Government’s Equalities Office guidance states (italics mine):
Positive action in recruitment and promotion can be used where an employer reasonably thinks that people with a protected characteristic are under-represented in the workforce, or suffer a disadvantage connected to that protected characteristic.
In practice it allows an employer faced with making a choice between two or more candidates who are of equal merit to take into consideration whether one is from a group that is disproportionately under-represented or otherwise disadvantaged within the workforce.
In reality, ‘as qualified’, in so-called tie-breaker situations, is not at all clear cut. In Blackstone’s Guide to the Equality Act 2010, Rachel Crasnow QC discusses the scope for ‘positive action’ in ‘tie-breakers’ (pp. 227-228, bold mine):
The consequence of this is that there must be an objective selection process that assesses specific skills, qualifications, and abilities, but does this mean that candidates have to be qualified or suitable in exactly the same way before a choice based on under- representation is legitimate? The present view is probably not.
The Act uses the phrase ‘as qualified as’ and it was suggested by the Government in 2009 that whilst this does not authorise in any way the use of quotas, it will cover situations where candidates meet the minimum qualifications or the particular requirements for the post, in contrast to a scenario where the applications in question are identical in their qualifications, skills, and abilities.
Thus even if a candidate from a protected group had some weaknesses in areas where his/her competitor was strong, if those related to desirable rather than essential aspects of the job specification, s/he may be considered as qualified for the post. Not all recruitment exercises divide the desired characteristics of the post into necessary and preferred. So the answer to this question may require a more specific examination as to how important the skills in question are for the job
Put plainly, ‘positive action’ is discrimination (less or more favourable treatment) based on crude assumptions about ‘groups’. It is not the provision of reasonable support based on individual characteristics and needs.
And so, perhaps it’s unsurprising that though ‘positive action’ came into force in April 2011, employers have been reluctant to use it. Concerns have been raised about the risk of legal challenge, as well as other important issues, such as its potential to undermine employees’ credibility and lead to segregation and stigmatisation within the workforce.
But with a rapidly growing ‘Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion’ (EDI) industry, and fresh impetus to change recruitment practices to meet targets, ‘positive action’ based on race is becoming a reality in Britain. For example, I recently posted about universities advertising student opportunities with racial eligibility criteria. And last month it was revealed that London’s Royal Free Hospital is now requiring “interview panels to justify themselves whenever a shortlisted ethnic minority candidate is not appointed to a role”.
Some of the many legal and practical implications will no doubt become clearer as more employers begin implementing race-based policies and practices.
One issue that must be addressed is a candidate’s right not to disclose his or her racial background – and the ability to opt out from more favourable treatment based on race.
Currently, candidates have the right not to disclose their race when applying for a job. And there are many reasons why they may ‘prefer not to say’. They may not want to risk disclosing racial information that could lead to them being discriminated against in the recruitment process. In fact, some will want to feel confident that race has no role in the recruitment process – that treatment is equal regardless of race. That is my stance.
But in the drive to meet ‘diversity’ targets, I fear that overzealous HR committees and interview panels may not want to miss an opportunity for race-based ‘positive action’ – even when a candidate has chosen not to disclose his or her racial background. There might be a temptation to infer a candidate’s race and ethnicity based on physical appearance and name, and then to impose this (mis)classification for the purpose of discrimination in the selection process.
Race can be complex, and people often get it wrong when trying to guess the race and ethnicity of others (for example, mixed-race people are often seen as black – and how they identify can change over time). But that’s just a side issue. If a candidate chooses not to disclose his or her race on the ‘equal opportunities monitoring form’, then that decision should be respected and not undermined. No matter how obvious his or her race and ethnicity may seem.
Surely it is the employer’s responsibility to explain the rationale and possible benefits of disclosing personal information on ‘protected characteristics’ – including race. Then those making the appointment can be confident that candidates are making an informed choice about whether to disclose this information and potentially be considered for ‘positive action’. But even once the possible benefits are explained, some candidates will opt for non-disclosure so that race does not inform the recruitment process.
In my opinion, for as long as Sections 158 and 159 of the Act remain in force, employers must be transparent about their policies and practices that involve discrimination based on race.
And importantly, there must be an opt-out provision for candidates who wish to be treated equally and not more favourably based on their racial background. This can be through non-disclosure or a simple opt in or out statement. In the case of the former, it should be made clear that racial identification will not be inferred by proxy and used for ‘positive action’ targeting the candidate.
Candidates must have the right to equal treatment in recruitment and promotion regardless of race and ethnic background.
This article first appeared on Amber Muhinyi’s Substack. Subscribe here.
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They’re just doing the withdrawal slowly because haste would be an admission. Sheds a light on the insane world of modrn finance and investment though. Huge protests in Japan because they have developed facilities for the production of this Satanic product. I suppose if you’ve got some money it is a good time to bet against this given the factories that are springing up all over the world. You can get your turbo cancer and then get an mRNA shot to treat it. Isn’t that just neat and tidy. We have so little undestanding of anything we don’t even know the extent of the unknown. There are strong warnings in our teachings about tinkering with things at this level. You can’t tamper with the code especially when you don’t understand it at all.
And where were all these doctors back in 2021? Actually, scratch that. They should have noticed something was off in 2020. Because then they would have known in advance that in no realm could these rushed out, novelty jabs have possibly been deemed a) safe, b) effective or c) necessary. What happened to all that medical knowledge and clinical expertise? Why were special tests suddenly necessary when nothing of this sort had previously been required to diagnose a respiratory virus?
”Premeditated Ignorance is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness. It is when people do not know because they do not want to know. For, if they did know, they would have to take responsibility for the knowledge; and, they would thereby be required to renegotiate their identity and relinquish the status, privilege and authority that are derived from the false order of knowledge. At the very least, they would be compelled to leave their comfort zone.”
Now imagine how many lives might have been saved if medical professionals had only engaged those big brains, remembered why they became doctors in the first place and challenged the government’s policies and propaganda campaign.
https://x.com/JacquiDeevoy1/status/1809202046182007057
“Where were all these doctors back in 2021?”
To be fair, many were probably signing the Great Barrington Declaration and various petitions and so on at the time, were blogging on the vaccines, or were being threatened in their employment, or by the new laws, or had been suspended.
The censorship machine was, and is, pretty efficient.
I haven’t signed the Accord, but posted my first 1700 word blog giving reasons not to take it on 02/12/2020. But I’d already been expressing doubts for a few months before that, and kept at it throughout 2021. According to the stats, a few thousand people across the world read it.
Yes indeed, some brave professionals did stand up and speak out, risking persecution or worse; an ‘Andrew Wakefield experience’, but it boils down to critical mass at the end of the day. Not enough did. It’s always easier to censor or threaten into silence the odd lone voice or the minority, but harder to ignore a sizeable collective.
While the public dutifully banged their pots and pans in appreciation of the hard working and heroic doctors and nurses, while they ignored their own signs of ill health and stayed home ”to protect the NHS” with bovine-like obedience ( because trusted public figures and ”experts” in a position of authority told them on the BBC news it was necessary ), those same doctors and nurses were prescribing and administering inappropriate and contraindicated treatments to vulnerable and trusting sick patients or withholding simple medications such as antibiotics, all with deadly consequences, while simultaneously preventing relatives from entering the hospitals to be with their dying loved ones, but also to stop the public from witnessing the deserted hospital departments, because they then might catch a glimpse of what staff were really doing when they weren’t ‘busy’ not treating patients, but rehearsing those all important and elaborate dance routines, because they needed to be just right before uploading them to TikTok, after all.
The rest is history but this scam based on lies went on for more than three years and the buck stopped with the frontline staff and their negligence and mistreatment. Their unwillingness to call upon their own not insignificant knowledge of evidence-based practice/medicine. Sure, not all are guilty as hell, but the vast majority certainly are. Cowardice, complicity and conformity are probably what most demonstrated, but the effects to the general public were exactly the same as if pure malice were behind it all. People who went into hospital to get better still died needlessly. The medical establishment, more than any other profession, let down the public badly and with disastrous consequences but we’re meant to accept they were ”just following orders”? They were holding people’s lives in their hands. And the worrying thing is, would they do it all again? Because the risks of them speaking up remain exactly the same should there ever be a ‘next time’.
You can’t blame people for feeling aggrieved or losing trust, especially if they’ve lost loved ones. And the internet is full of receipts;
https://x.com/OlooneyJohn/status/1808911244184752216
Thankyou for pointing out the Medazolam democide through NG163 End Of Life Pathways. If their life wasn’t over they seemed to have hastened their demise with those drugs but also through dehydration from many testimonials. Some say too big to be a conspiracy but Stanley Milgram shows how obedience to authority can be kill.
Yes, Milgram called it early on. Frightening what people are capable of when absolved of personal responsibility. It does creep me out to think how many literal psychopaths we’re rubbing shoulders with in our day to day lives, and how many of those are working in the medical/nursing professions. Best not to go there.. There’s some notable people been doing impressive detective work around the whole Midazolam scandal for a while now. Johnathan Engler being just one. More here if you’re interested;
”Some people were onto the midazolam / euthanasia story from very early on.
Although I was aware of the noise around Jacqui Deevoy’s one-hour 2021 documentary “A Good Death”1 as well as the data showing increased midazolam orders, it is to my chagrin that I didn’t pay enough attention to this story early enough, choosing to believe a variation of one of these singly or in combination:
However, I don’t believe either of those propositions anymore, largely because of the weight of evidence I have now seen, which amounts to strongly suggesting the following:
In summary, I believe the weight of the evidence suggests that the lives of large numbers of people worldwide were ended prematurely as a result of the administration of certain medication.
The way in which those directives came about is, at this time, unclear.
Was this an emergent event which was the result of some sort of societal mass delusional psychosis, one which involved the entirety of the healthcare profession buying into the story of the imminent arrival of a novel deadly virus, such that the application of these protocols was regarded as saving people doomed to die from a terrible death by “easing them on their way”?
Or was it part of a co-ordinated process by which a pandemic event was essentially staged?”
https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/did-testing-and-euthanasia-protocols
.
Brilliant Mogs. Thanks
I was,and was threatened with dismissal for refusing the booster after I had a seizure after my 2nd AZ vaccination. I have kept the letter. The threat was only lifted 2 weeks before I was to lose my job. Never shirked face to face consultations either.
Listen to Neil Oliver and his call not to demonise people who, albeit belatedly, have woken up.
People on our side are always asking, how could this happen, were they ignorant or complicit etc. The shoddy truth is that very few people think about anything. They might be quite accomplished within their discipline but this tells you nothing about their actual capacity to comprehend. This tendency to take the line of least resistance, the cowardly way out has I think been engendered by a culture of indulgence that took off in the 1950s but was a concommitant of industialisation from the beginning. Carl Sagan said of Johannes Kepler, that he preferred the harshest of realities to the dearest of illusions. Can you say that about many of the people that you encounter these days? Surely they are more defined by risk aversion.
The attack on the chemical and electromagnetic fields is becoming impossinle to ignore. You will feel it in your joints or your breathing or energy levels. The intensity is increasing. The trains weren’t running by me the other day because so many people had called in sick. This malaiase isn’t some mild summer cold. It represents amongst other things a new nasty attack of the spike protein, they call it FLERTS, just look it up. The point is that the malaise will become nastier and the gaps between infection will become shorter. This represents major debilitation. If you are of a martial aspect you might feel that you have been deliberately weakened, There is no way out of this situation. That is what they have done to you.
It is no joke it results in confusion and brain fog. I have never had these symtoms before. It is interesting to watch yourself as a clumsy and less competent human being. The nervous system is somehow distanced. I admire it from the perspective of a warrior in the tenor of our times. The symptoms become more vague and you are up against the tendency to just carry on as normal. Trust me if it weakens your brain you won’t be carrying on as normal.
If you do feel weak I would advise transferring all of your strnegth to your lower body and then just move from the hip until you are revitalised. It is a much more powerful way of moving anyway if you can get the hang of it and the lower body is less vulnerable to tinkering, This time that we are moving into will be one of inexplicable debilitation. Be forewarned about it. Imagiine them as some aliens shooting the maximum intensity beam in order to win. We have to show them that humankind is made of stronger stuff.
You keep posting stuff Stiff.
The truth will out.
There is great strength in the movement of the Europeans towards upper body strength but you need to know the limits.
True…You must also squat, so long as you can do so safely.
Can you imagine being in a sub-optimal state and having to fight a fierce and determined enemy. That should be your major concern.
Something sexual came to mind but I know you are being serious and it is a serious subject.
A massive round of applause to UK Column for a a shout out for the DS article:
“The Devastating Charge Sheet Against Pfizer”. Dr Carl Heneghan.
Whoops.
https://youtu.be/6JJFlf43WRE?si=a_1FwHMiVZgTgd4A
Well done to all the signatories.
As for bringing back trust, as far as I’m concerned that ship sailed a long time ago. I’ve always looked after my own health and that policy has now been significantly strengthened. I doubt I will ever use the NHS again.
Re. The YT link at the bottom of the article, spot the NHS advert for the product on offer! From a personal perspective, I’m glad I declined it when it was offered back in 2021; pretty unlikely to change my mind now.