High profile cancellations in the wake of the Cass Report are front and centre in the media as those whose lives were destroyed are once again in the spotlight, this time for vindication. A recent survey of U.K. employees, however, indicates that the number of British people who have lost jobs and careers for falling foul of woke workplace policies which clash with their legally held opinions and beliefs may be considerably higher than first thought.
The fallout of the Cass Report is gradually exposing the level of persecution of those who dared question the nation’s healthcare strategy for the treatment of children suffering from mental illness. Jobs and careers lost, families broken under the subsequent social and financial pressure, some people, notably Graham Linehan, lost everything. To understand the consequences of being cancelled I would recommend reading Linehan’s book Tough Crowd.
The wholesale adoption of radical ideologies that, until a matter of months ago, were the polar opposite of accepted majority or at least reasonable opinion by institutions led to the extremely rapid spread of such ideologies across employers under the flag of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Last month, the Free Speech Union published a paper on the British workplace and its survey makes disturbing reason for anyone concerned with the assault on freedom in the U.K.:
- 62% of workers said they have had to conceal what they really think about the EDIC (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Climate) training they have received
- 22% have been compelled to say things they don’t believe. This rises to 31% among BAME respondents
- 45% report that the training they have received conflicted with their personal, religious or political beliefs
- 31% have left a job because of their employer’s promotion of woke ideology. This rises to 43% among BAME employees and 46% among LGBT employees
- 36% said that they witnessed staff being penalised in some way by their current employer because of EDIC training. This includes 12% who have witnessed staff being fired for the same
Surveys like this are routinely dismissed as being flawed, but the methodology here was sound: the survey ran between January 25th and 31st 2024; 800 people were interviewed, the sample taken from Dynata consumer access panels and designed to be representative of the U.K. by working age, industry, geography and employer size. Excluded groups included: the self-employed, students (not working), homemakers, the unemployed and retirees.
In February 2024 there were an estimated 29.71 million people employed in the U.K. out of a working population of 32.9 million. 65% have taken some form of EDIC Training, so that’s 19.3 million. The 800 interviewed were from that group. so what do those percentages look like when we apply them to the 19.3 million?
- Workers concealing opinions about EDIC: 62% = 12 million
- Compelled to say things they don’t believe: 22% = 4.3 million
- Training conflicts with beliefs:political, religious and personal: 45% = 8.7 million
- Left job because of employer’s promotion of woke ideologies: 41% = 7.9 million
- Witnessed staff penalised because of EDIC training: 36% = 6.9 million
- Witnessed a member of staff fired for same: 12% = 2.3 million
That last point is especially concerning and needs unpacking. Now, obviously we cannot conclude that over 2.3 million people were fired. The witnesses may have got it wrong, the individual may have been fired for bullying or harassment related to a protected group or may have been fired for a completely different reason.
However, if even only one in 10 of those are correct, that’s still hundreds of thousands of people who may have lost their jobs over ‘wrongthink’. The aggression and zealousness of the trans activists is such that any dissent from their orthodoxy immediately results in accusations of transphobia. We’ve seen this in the treatment of the likes of Graham Linehan: the dedication of activists to sniffing out and silencing dissent was only matched by the speed at which most of Graham’s friends and colleagues abandoned him as too toxic to be associated with. If you apply the same behaviours to the workplace then it’s fairly safe to assume that anyone who dared question woke trans policies in the workplace has been subject to similar vigour. Certainly, we have spoken to dozens of people, especially women, who report that they have been fired for challenging things like pronoun and toilet room policies.
All the evidence suggests that HR departments have been falling over themselves to ensure that their employees comply with the tenets of radical gender theory, to the extent that some have failed in their due diligence and have fallen foul of the Equality Act 2010 in employment tribunals. The Free Speech Union has been doing a sterling job fighting on the behalf of workers’ rights and has to date taken on over 2,500 cases. The wheels of justice turn slowly: there are currently 420,000 cases in the backlog.
If you want justice, that’s over three years you have to wait before your case is heard, so its hardly surprising that 24 million are keeping silent. Who can afford to lose their job with families, debts and responsibilities?
The impact this must be having on our workplace culture is worth considering. In my essay published in the Daily Sceptic last month I discussed how totalitarian governments like that of the USSR required the population to wear a metaphorical mask in public to hide their true thoughts, opinions and beliefs. The thickness and absurdity of those masks eventually caused the whole Soviet System to collapse under its own bullshit. Humans cannot live a lie, and when they are forced to, stress, depression and mental illness all follow. The FSU survey suggests that over 18,000,000 workers are wearing masks hiding their true selves.
What impact is all this having on productivity and the economy in general? Kemi Badenoch and others have spoken out about this. Freedom of thought and expression and confidence of challenging convention at work are all core requirements of economic growth. This is why free societies prosper. It is no mistake that it was the Enlightenment and the retreat of orthodox religion in the 17th century that took Europe and then the world out of the economic stagnation of the medieval period and saw the colossal advance in technologies we have seen since 1700. Incidentally, modern humans have been around for 250,000 years or so – exactly the same as us physically and mentally, the only difference being technologies and their view of the world. When we see nations retreat into totalitarianism, like Venezuela, we see once-prosperous states slip backwards.
This report and its implications should concern us all, not just on principle for those of us who cherish freedom, but because the chilling effect this will be having on our economy is clearly having an impact on our wealth as a nation, and hence our ability to fund the social programmes that those who enforce woke ideologies themselves value.
The project to identify those who lost their jobs over this is going to be a long and tough road. However, the early indications are that this figure could be very high. The remarkable common denominator is that those who lose their jobs over these issues tend to be exemplary employees in all other respects; many seem to have years of service behind them and, due to the nature of the trans debate, many are women. It could easily prove to be a national scandal of huge proportions.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack.
Figures in this article have been corrected after identifying a mistake in the number of U.K. workers who had taken some form of EDIC training. The overall argument is unaffected.
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This is too sensible… unless proving the link to real membership numbers would expose the Kemi Badenoch claims as untrue, just politics.
I suspect they have been kind of cheating. At a guess I expect they have been taking batch imports of members or at least batched member totals and then have the membership ticker regularly count-up to the batched figure. If they have been really naughty they have been guessing a future figure and then adjusting the count rate to the next figure to reconcile inaccuracy.
That way the count increase occurs at a regular interval which is what the ticker has been showing. The problem is it is too regular (which is why I think what I have described is most likely). This is a similar technique as is used by “limited seats” counters on ticket sales websites.
I suspect you are speculating based on no data.
I’m speculating based on the clear regular update to the count and having run web services with sign-up for large digital to services I know it tends to happen more in fits and starts than the Reform count is showing, but most significantly it will vary massively depending on time of the day. The Reform counter has been showing uniform progress throughout the day – which has led me to think it is using the kind of “sales counter” code I mentioned. I hope not because it will end up being a distraction. But the truth is the truth. If they have used such code it is bad judgement. I support Reform (with big reservation because they are in a rather cowardly fashion putting the boot in to Tommy Robinson), I’m just not, unlike some on here, a fan-boy.
Processing in batches is not deception.
when Reform accounts are submitted to the Electoral Commission the membership number will be stated together with membership income (perhaps – don’t think mandatory).
What about scrutinising Conservative membership figures?
The gap toothed Nigerian and her Rona-fascist-Net zero-open borders-party…..and I am supposed to believe her and these convicts? Pass on that.
Just a reminder of who the Nigerian supports
Course she does – she wouldn’t be in the position she is if she didn’t…
Reform would have to be monumentally stupid to cheat, especially when they have zero need to and any 12 year old geek could catch them…wheras the tory party have every reason to debunk Reforms claims .
If it increments but doesn’t decrement is that cheating?
Do I care? Either way Reform is on an up escalator while the Tories are on the down escalator. The only question is the relative steepness of them.
There is a very clear winner here. Nigel has cast a fly and waited for Kemi to rise to it. There is no good side to Kemi’s assertion. She has to prove her own membership number to have credibility in doubting Reforms, she has made herself look petty and on the defensive and given considerable free PR to Reform also. Are the numbers quite accurate.? Who cares. Its about winners and losers and Farage has won this round comfortably.
That’s a great point.
Like with Trump’s hyperbolic claims and exaggerations, what he really achieves is that everyone starts talking about whatever issues he’s talked up and it becomes a thing. Even if he’s not 100% right, he’s sort of right, or right enough that his overall point is made and inserted into everyone’s consciousness.
Not saying that Reform are exaggerating but more people are aware today that Reform is either catching up or has caught up to the Tories than yesterday. As you say, the numbers are the least of it, that’s the real win right there.
Back in time, when I ran a business which was competing with much more established players. I decided to start our ‘Quotation Numbers’ off, not at 1, but 573. Its juggling a bit with perception, but it isn’t lying.Same when we had two vans and I had an obvious ‘van number’ put on them. One was ’07’ and the other was ’12’. We didn’t have 12 vans but what the hell. Just perception. Thats what Nigel is doing. He could have started membership numbers at 1 or at 54,392. Whatever, Kemi has taken the fly, and although putting up a struggle, she’ll be in the keepnet very soon.
But we know how the numbers have increased all year.
Sadly your theory doesn’t stack up to reality. I joined in August and my membership number is well over 1200000, so they are not allocating them numerically, but presumably, as we used to do with bank accounts when I was responsible for opening new ones back in the 1980s, using the number to indicate something more than just the next person to join. Many sales organisations use numbers to subset customers by region, age, sex or anything that makes it easier to market to interest and maybe they are using membership number for the same purpose.
I still don’t understand the suspicion here. There is no benefit to Reform to falsely inflate numbers so quickly. The growth has been steady since I started watching the ticker a while ago. The expectation was that the number would exceed the Tories in a few months, which would still achieve the result wanted but it happened in days, over Christmas when a lot of focus is elsewhere, so the question remains, if the number is not credible, why would they fake it. They don’t need to, but the engineer has done a great job of making it news and embarrassing herself.
I’m member 414xx – joined February last year.
Yes …. she demonstrated how rattled the Treacherous Tories are.
Petition DOT parliament DOT uk/petitions/700824
Close the borders! Suspend ALL immigration for 5 years!
Let’s get on board.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700824
The Tory Party’s real problem is that it’s dead in the water, and has set itself the task of voluntarily getting into the dustbin of history. It has no realistic policies relating to the central crisis of our time: the Great Replacement. Instead, it adopted a deranged version of the mad mass unlimited unvetted immigration so beloved of the haters of our people and our country. Good riddance to the Tory Party.
I don’t understand why anyone is questioning this, just because the engineer doesn’t believe it and unless there is a demand for all parties to be independently audited, why should Reform have to? It all seems very simple to me, I joined Reform, paid my money and a line was created on the list of members, increasing the number by one. A fairly basic process, surely, but of course it probably won’t show people who have left the organisation.
Now, this is the big one, because it is inconceivable that someone would leave Reform within the first year of joining, as they have really yet to do anything to upset their membership, although Richard Tice probably came close by branding all of the Summer protesters as those people, as though they were a amorphous mass of extremists, which they certainly weren’t, many being ordinary, fed up British people, and probably some Reform voters. However, turning to the Tory numbers, these are almost certainly wrong. Many, possibly tens of thousands, will have quit the party in the last twelve months, probably without bothering to tell them, but even those who had mentally left earlier in the year, possibly paying for their membership of Reform, may still have voted in the Tory leadership contest, just to queer the result. So, we can be fairly sure the Reform number is right but the Tory number is wrong, despite what the engineer (and she isn’t really one you know), might want to believe.
They’re using NationBuilder, which is used by a number of political organisations and which I had a look at when setting up the FSU’s systems. I think the Conservatives also use NationBuilder, but don’t quote me on that. The owners of NationBuilder won’t be open-sourcing it — it’s very much proprietary — but the chances of them somehow “faking” membership numbers for the benefit of Reform, when they have a lot of other political customers to worry about, is next to zero.
Thanks for that Ian.
Thanks, Ian.
Kemi just trying to drag Reform back into the infantile non politics beloved by WEF puppets. If I was the developer I’d check the trend over the past few months, make a linear regression to slightly undershoot the projected numbers, and randomly update the ticker. So if there ever was a dispute, we’d already be past the reported number. The website is just an illustration, and since the membership is clearly going up, it’s only a matter of time before any specific number is passed. Tories are going down. Nigel would obviously have checked the real membership numbers before making the announcement.
He will then explain WHY. Where we get to adult policies about immigration, energy policy, and food and drug regulation. Three broad areas where our political classes are failing, and have failed catastrophically.
Of course she mentioned it which means people talk about.
Maybe she should be trying to talk about something more important.
She’s giving Reform free publicity – dumb.
Let her fire away. The sooner the wretched fake Tory Party is buried the better.
Off-T.
All we wood burning stovers are destroying the planet… scented candles cause cancer… digital ID for muppets and more, but all utterly barmy.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/12/25/this-christmas-in-the-new-normal-3/
I can only comment based on my personal experience.
I bought my wife membership for Christmas (a step up from the usual festive mop!).
This morning I bought my membership in direct response to Badenoch’s petulent comment.
“Festive mop”!
The huz got me a lovely necklace this year, which was a step up from the Soda Stream I got last year ( allegedly to be environmentally friendly and save buying plastic bottles ), and to make matters worse i took receipt of it from the delivery guy so I knew exactly what it was.
I got him some fancy star-gazing binoculars, the super powerful ones so that you can look at the moon and parts of the solar system. Despite declaring they’re the best present he ever had he’s used them once. I went back to 
this year.
You were an estimable wife last year; I am sure you have worked out that with us blokes it is the ownership thereof not the use of high spec items that confers bragging rights.
My wife bought me a super powerful laser cutter/engraver (cuts half inch hardwood!) this year although she didn’t know she had done it. Wionderful woman.
Kemi, mate, this is not going to help you. It smells of desperation.
It quacks like it too.
It seems that Reform have explained how the number is determined, via NationBuilder and that is based on membership payments data.
Looks like Kemi will need to apologise.
Why should we believe a sceptical leader of the Conservative Party. If DS can’t prove where the number comes from how does she claim to have done so. Has she or an IT specialist hacked Regofm
Why would she not expect there membership to rise.
Why would we not expect her membership to have wilted this year. If she says it is bigger than the last known number why did she not provide that.
It was very foolish of Badenoch to cry “fraud” without having absolute proof that fraud was being carried out.
She’s outed herself as a “shoot from the hip” reactionary who is terrified of Farage and Reform.
The Conservative Party under Badenoch is floundering. Where are her membership winning policies….? She and her Party have done their best to destroy this country and now have the gall to expect new followers. Dream on Kemi. Vote Reform UK
Politicians manipulating numbers? Well I never!
Kemi Badenoch is not going to save the Conservative Party. They needed a radical change, instead they have double downed on mediocrity. They are still in self-destruct mode. Why not publish their own numbers daily to show their trajectory or would that be too embarrassing?
This is nothing but a playground spat. Where are the adults in the room?
Reform have no need to prove anything. Never explain, never complain.