Hopefully all readers will fondly remember Cressida Dick. Dame Cressida Rose Dick DBE QPM is a British retired senior police officer who served as Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police from 2017 to 2022. She was the first female officer to lead the Metropolitan Police Service, or the Met, in London. Dick joined the Met in1983.
When appointed, new Met chief Cressida Dick reportedly said “diversity is at the heart of her role“. In 2018, Dick launched a campaign to increase the proportion of female officers in the Met. At the time, 27% of Met officers were women; Dick aimed to increase that figure to 50% over time, although she did not set a target date. Later she was quoted as saying: “We’re growing, we’re bigger, more capable, more diverse, more scrutinised and better equipped than ever before. The streets are safer and I’m proud of that.”
Despite Ms. Dick claiming London streets were safer under her management, the crime figures recorded by the police told a different story. The number of “police reported crime offences” in London rose from 774,734 in 2016-7 to 820,920 in 2017-8, then again to 865,214 in 2018-2019 and up to 912,487 in 2019-20. Some of the largest rises were in crimes of violence, especially knife crime. Though crime levels fell in the following two years during the Covid lockdowns.
Just in the year Cressida launched her campaign to increase the number of female ‘policepersons’, there was around a 20% increase in violent crime. People unfamiliar with the intricacies of policing might be forgiven for wondering whether increasing the gender diversity of the Met really should have been a priority during a period of rising crime.
Cressida herself ticked a few important diversity boxes: female – tick; lesbian – tick; married to a woman – tick. If only she had been black or Asian, she’d have had a ‘full house’. A cynic might be tempted to conclude that Cressida Dick was chosen for her diversity credentials and not for any ability to fight crime, which increased inexorably under her watch. Cressida was eventually pushed to resign (with about £166,000 of our money plus a massive pension) after a series of blunders and scandals. When she left, the Met was put in ‘special measures’ due to the force’s apparent inability to do the job it was supposed to do.
I made a short (two minutes) YouTube video about Cressida Dick’s rise to fame and fortune (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan).
The latest boss at our envy-of-the-world NHS is Amanda Pritchard. Wikipedia tells us that Amanda Kate Pritchard is a British healthcare official and public policy analyst who has been the Chief Executive of NHS England since August 1st 2021. Pritchard previously served as Chief Operating Officer of NHS England and as Chief Executive of NHS Improvement from 2019 to 2021.
She gets paid about £260,000 a year and no doubt will soon get a few gongs and a seat in the Lords as all those of her ilk invariably do.
You may have thought that there were some small problems with the NHS England – people waiting 10-20 hours for an ambulance, possibly 500 people a week dying early due to failing healthcare, some of the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world and so on. It may well be that Ms. Pritchard has a laser-like focus on solving the NHS’s many problems. We should all hope so. However, some of her managers, many of them also on six-figure salaries, could seem to be blissfully unaware of these issues and are pushing ahead with hiring even more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers apparently in the belief that more DIE managers is just what is needed to solve the NHS’s current problems and improve patient care.
Here are just a few extracts from some current job descriptions of these individuals. The words ‘patient care’ are absent from these job vacancies. In fact, most focus on achieving the NHS’s internal organisational DIE targets:
- The post-holder will seek out and interpret national guidance and legislation relating to equality, diversity, and inclusion giving specialist advice to directors and managers, clinical leads and Board members to ensure due regard for equality and diversity in their ongoing work programmes
- Working as part of the Workforce and OD Directorate and reporting into the Deputy Director of Workforce and OD, you will need to be passionate about developing a diverse and inclusive culture and have a value set that fits with our Trust and the NHS
- You will lead on the development and implementation of the Trusts strategic EDI objectives ensuring the involvement of diverse groups and people with lived experience in the development and implementation of our plans
But the main issue with the NHS’s current obsession with trying to increase the diversity of its workforce is that in terms of the ethnicity of its workforce, the NHS is already more diverse than the U.K. population:
- Of the NHS’s 1.3 million employees, 77.9% are white compared to 85.6% of the working-age population and 86% of the total population; 10.7% are Asian compared to 7.2% of the working-age population and 7.5% of the total population; and 6.5% are black compared to only 3.4% of the working-age population and 3.3% of the total population
- Among consultants 59.9% are white compared to 77.9% of NHS employees being white. A huge 29.1% are Asian compared to only 10.7% of NHS employees being Asian. And 2.9% are black compared to 6.5% of NHS employees being black.
In fact, the ethnic group which is most under-represented at the NHS is white British.
Moreover, some old-fashioned people might wonder about the amounts of our money the NHS spends on woke initiatives. The latest seems to be the Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme.
We all know there have been major problems at many NHS maternity units. Partly these have been due to a lack of midwives and partly due to mismanagement. The latest was the scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital where over 200 babies and at least nine mothers died reportedly due to poor care. People unfamiliar with the intricacies of healthcare might be forgiven for wondering whether a Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme which would train midwives at 40 NHS Trusts on the use of ‘trans inclusive language’ and pronouns – due to it being based on the Improving Trans Experiences of Maternity Services – really was likely to solve the problems in the NHS’s collapsing maternity services. After all, most of us know which sex can have children and which can’t. Moreover, there’s a bit of a clue in the word ‘maternity’. There must be a reason they’re not called ‘paternity’ units.
Amanda Pritchard may turn out to be the best leader the NHS has ever had. She may well be relentlessly focused on cutting waiting lists and improving patient care. But looking at the number and type of DIE roles our crisis-hit NHS is currently advertising and the ‘progressive’ re-education programmes being forced on NHS staff, a cynic might be forgiven for concluding that the Cressida Dick woke managerial car crash at the Met is now being repeated almost word for word in the increasingly woke NHS. Like the Met, the NHS could seem to be becoming a totally dysfunctional organisation which has forgotten why it exists. Like the Met, the NHS could seem to be spending more time obsessing about and woke-ifying its own internal organisation than on trying to deliver what it was set up to do.
I think we all can imagine what happens next. And it won’t be good for patients.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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In 2005, Cressida Dick headed the operation which led to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Screw up and get promoted to the top job – as long as your political credentials are right.
She ticked at least 2 “diversity” boxes.
“…the ethnic group which is most under-represented in the NHS is white British.”
Indeed, and that has been so since I qualified in 1976. In my first house job my Registrar was Pakistani and my senior Reg Indian, and I worked for and with Lebanese, Syrians, Saudis, Ghanaians, Indians, Egyptians, Maltese, Nigerians, and others, not to mention the equally diverse nursing sisters, until I moved out of hospital work. Most of them were competent, even brilliant, and pleasant (apart from one Egyptian gynaecology reg, who was incompetent and arrogant, and a Soviet-trained African locum who was just incompetent). This ethnic mix, needless to say, was completely out of kilter of any of the local populations in the 1970s, so one would think the NHS would be hailed as a champion of diversity, though there was not a single diversity officer in the country.
Instead we hear of directives for trusts to provide written justification for the employment of any white people, which apart from being racist is perversely blocking the NHS from utilising native talent.
All good points. I wonder if the issue, or one of them, is that whites are over-represented in the senior management, in comparison to their proportion of the workforce overall. I don’t know whether that is actually the case or not, but it may be analagous to football where blacks are over-represented among players but this is not reflected among management, ditto in American Football with players in general vs coaches and players in general vs. Quarterbacks (the big glamour role, on-field captain, playmaker).
Very possible. I’d be wanting to take careful note of non-discriminatory reasons for such an imbalance, though. For example, foreign-trained doctors and nurses come here to gain experience, and many go home or elsewhere except when we poach them from their own needy populations. but I doubt so many hospital management graduates from Guatemala decide to apply for NHS admin jobs.
There may also be other non-discriminatory reasons – simply that those people who end up being employed in those roles are better candidates.
The whole business of monitoring racial origin in this way is just a rabbit hole which you’ll never get out of. Depending on who you ask, the current situation will always be the result of something nefarious that needs to be addressed by tinkering. There are only two outcomes possible – we simply decide that every workplace, occupation, role must have a racial mix that exactly reflects that of wider society, or we stop looking at race. The former is utterly impractical for many reasons, and the latter will not be accepted by the race hustlers.
Cressida Dick was very effective in doing the job the people who put here there wanted her to do – make the Met Police a tool of the left wing establishment.
Back in the spring of 2020 I remember thinking what a pleasant change it was; a welcome relief, that the NHS rainbow was being used as a symbol of ‘hope’ rather than to promote the LGBT+ causes.
How stupid of me!
And people wonder why we’ve got a productivity crisis in the UK.
A crisis of NHS maternity units can obviously by solved by renaming them ternity units in the name of trans inclusion. And who knows if these new ternity units will end up having the same problems the clearly discriminatory maternity units of old had.
The brilliant German Covid sceptic blogger and anti-woke academic Eugyppius describes this as “Head Girl Syndrome.” It’s not sexist to say that DIE policies have over-promoted many of these women. They are generally mediocre, bossy, followers defined by their agreeableness but who are often highly neurotic. They use girl boss passive aggressive
power techniques to cement their power. They often surround themselves with more submissive women. They are just as toxic for educated and sceptical women as for men. Their main focus is on exaggerating the idea of female exclusion and thus DIE. They are obsessed with work life balance, to the detriment of actual work. That said they often want the minions they preside over to do real work. They will also be Queer Best Friends, QBF’s to the LGBTQWhatever lobby as it’s a good way to show you are on the right side of history, even if it’s the wrong side of science. That sums up their pro-lockdown zealotry as well. Meanwhile their organisations remain unimproved and they move on to bigger things.
You can;t just mow people down and then apologize afterwards. Would be nice if you could but hey ho.
When I was 22 an Indian doctor misdiagnosed a tumour as glue ear.
That’s a pretty fucking huge misdiagnosis.
Since then I’ve expected Third Worlders to be utterly crap and I’ve rarely been wrong. My heart sinks whenever I hear somebody say, in an Indian accent, “Hello, my name is Julie, how can I help you?” because I know they won’t be able to, and if I’m lucky I’ll eventually be put through to someone in County Durham.
Don’t do it and don’t pretend the real stuff isn’t happening. I don’t say this for any alterior motive I’m just sayng because of my love of humanity. Mu deeper message is, dont expect that the next couple of years will resemble the last couple. If you’re a person who is on the ball you will know what I mean already/
The point is that this is a kinetic war. We might be sitting back and commenting here but it is a genuine power struggle. Did you really think that it would last forever, just sittinng idly by and letting the army do the busuness. Anyway I bring in strangers from all sorts of backgrounds.
Recognise that thee is only one real issue and I say this with a hundred percent certainty – everything that is going bad is because of a denial of theworled of the spirit. This world recharges and refills everything. So I say to you I stand for the world of the spirit you can join me or not.
Hnestly you are barking up the wrong tree entirely.
Once we allow the real world of communication then all alse opens up. I tell you straight we will mount a battle of the spitit. I will support anyone and in my experience no one bothers to argue I wish they would.
Honestly I ask the question but frankly I feel rather sad about the situation. Not the decline of the world but the decline of the people around me. I don’t care talk to me tomorrow!
I would suggest that you take stock of your circumstance. Most of my family live abroad so if you have family here then you shold acknowledge it. Listen I have been fighting this shot since 1988. I’m glad it is hitting the mainstream.
Honestly wait until April when the gloves come off;
The new Met Police Commissioner apologised yesterday for the policeman who had been allowed to rape and abuse dozens of women.
I realise he was apologising on behalf of the Met, but I wanted to see the utterly useless Dick forced to account for yet another abusive policeman who had been allowed to carry out his crimes throughout “her watch.” She has destroyed the Met Police through her incompetence, just as surely as Amanda Pritchard is destroying the NHS through hers.
But ultimately, it comes down to the Governing Class and in particular this dreadful Not-a-Conservative-Government which appoints lefties to lead Quangos grovels at the alter of Diversity/Equality and does nothing whatsoever to stop the imposition of Wokery throughout the public sector.
Let’s remember though that Ms Pritchard, despite her high salary, does not have authority over the actual NHS. The NHS is composed of Trusts (hospital trusts, ambulance trusts, mental health trusts etc etc) and GP surgeries that are private businesses. None of these actually work for NHS England.
They don’t even have contracts with NHS England. The contracts are between the trusts and the clinical commissioning groups, who are (in theory at least) run by GP’s.
So what do NHS England actually do? Answers on a postcard…
On a postage stamp??!!
Pritchard is only in the job as a result of positive discrimination. If she was really so upset by EDI wrongdoings she would have turned down the job due to her lack of competence. But there again self-awareness is not a trait associated with the ‘woke’ crowd.
“A cynic might be tempted to conclude that Cressida Dick was chosen for her diversity credentials and not for any ability to fight crime” – and said cynic would be absolutely right.