Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

It seems that every week a major employer is found to have broken its own Whistleblowing policies and persecuted employees for warning them they are at risk of breaking the law. ‘Zero tolerance’ policies and leadership teams in thrall to groupthink have created cultures of silence at work. In a recreation of the old fable: why did no one tell the Chief Constable he wasn’t wearing any clothes when he strode into that Employment Tribunal?

Last week in an article on my substack which was kindly picked up by the Daily Sceptic, I examined the background and events at an Employment Tribunal where Thames Valley Police (TVP) was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers by blocking the opportunity to apply for an internal promotion on the grounds that they had already promoted a BAME officer, without their seniority, to make the senior leadership team more diverse.

This was extraordinary for two reasons.

Firstly, because our post-Stephen Lawrence police force has embraced an American-style Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) model which has essentially re-created institutional racism, albeit against white people. We have seen many employers discriminating against white employees in an attempt to ‘reverse’ the racism against black and brown employees. Much of it is due to the extremely rapid adoption of EDI policies and training, post-George Floyd. In the corporate world we are already seeing a lot of back peddling on this, with an acknowledgement that EDI over-reach has resulted in breaches of the Equality Act 2010. Meanwhile, the public sector is doubling down.

Secondly, despite several warnings from internal experts that these actions were likely to breach Section 13 of the Equality Act (direct discrimination), TVP went ahead anyway – and to add insult to injury, convinced themselves they had a winnable case in the Tribunal. If you read the judgement of the Tribunal, the senior leadership team ignored TVP’s own policies and procedures. According to the evidence submitted to the Tribunal, Deputy Chief Constable Hogg, who ran the case for the TVP, told a subordinate to “make It Happen”, i.e., make sure the BAME officer was promoted. Under cross examination, Hogg admitted he wasn’t familiar with the policies TVP had ignored and expressed surprise that he couldn‘t promote more or less whom he liked.

Groupthink and the tyranny of ‘zero tolerance’

Fifty years ago, organisational development specialists in the engineering world looked at how groupthink emerges in teams and organisations and came up with a theory. They called this the ‘Abilene Paradox’ and you can read about it in this article and learn how to avoid it by watching this video.

In short, groupthink happens when a number of conditions are met – two in particular. These are:

A strong organisational culture
The presence of a ‘messiah’ in the leadership team. (This can be a person or a messianic ideology.)
Organisational culture and the unintended consequence of zero tolerance

In the late 1990s, I started to observe the emergence of the ‘zero tolerance’ concept in workplaces. It was applied to a number of reprehensible behaviours, e.g. racism. It sounds good, doesn’t it? Decisive, no nonsense. But at the time I can recall feeling uncomfortable because while the intent is good, it assumes that the scope and definition of what will not be tolerated will remain constant and ignores context. ‘Zero tolerance’ is the language of the Inquisition, the Chekist, the zealot.

Zero tolerance for racism in particular became the organisational culture in Britain’s police force smarting from the accusation of ‘institutional racism’ in the Macpherson Report. The problem is, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Zero tolerance of racism was behind the culture that resulted in the police turning a blind to the grooming gangs. Zero tolerance created a fear of being accused of racism. And those who did speak up were quickly shut down.

Messiahs in leadership teams

The argument here is that leadership teams who have self-styled ‘experts’ in particular areas can often be bamboozled by them and led astray – EDI being a case in point. I would add that ‘remote Messiahs’, i.e., consultants, can have the same effect. External ‘experts’ are quoted by people employed to ‘train’ the leadership team, books are recommended that read more like tracts and sermons, or simply summarised by ‘facilitators’ who have little understanding of what the ‘expert’ is actually saying. This appears to have happened at TVP where an EDI policy actually points out that people of all races can be victims of racism under U.K. law, not just black and brown people. Unfortunately, the training TVP relied upon seems to have been based on a TED talk by an American DEI ‘guru’ who believes white people cannot be the victims of racism (and nor can Jews or East Asians). No one in the leadership team spotted the problem and encouraged officers to soak up the guru’s words.

Of course, TVP isn’t the only public body to be captured by Critical Race Theory. Somewhere north of 300,000 employees in Britain have been fired for ‘wrongthink’ – the total is probably much higher than this. I did a deep dive into this here.

A good eample is the case of Anna Thomas vs The Department of Work and Pensions (2023). In the wake of the reaction to George Floyd’s death, this vast Whitehall department was very quick to introduce what we now know were unlawful EDI policies. Anna Thomas, a 32 year-old single mother, won a £100,000 payout from the DWP, thanks to the Free Speech Union, after it fired her for warning that it was acting unlawfully by basing its EDI policies on Critical Race Theory and Gender Identity Ideology. However, groupthink had manifested itself in the senior leadership team and the Permanent Secretary. The Department declared it wanted to become an “anti-racist organisation” and created an “anti-racism hub” which quickly started regurgitating the ideas of Ibram X. Kendi, an American Critical Race Theorist.

So Anna, following the dictums of her employment contract which stipulated she had to alert her employers to any unlawful conduct, blew the whistle, confident that the Department’s Whistleblowing Policy would protect her. She alerted colleagues to the fact that Ibram X. Kendi’s definition of racism was at odds with that of the Equality Act. She also alerted them to the fact that its transgender polices might also be unlawful under the same Act. Lastly, she pointed out that the policies were likely a breach of the Civil Service Code which required the Civil Service to be politically impartial.

So Anna was doing her job, starting an internal discussion around risk to the Department. What did the Department do? Well, it tore up its own rule book and fired her.

Now, both the Department of Work and Pensions and Thames Valley Police have ‘zero tolerance’ approaches to racism and bullying, so shouldn’t have behaved the way they did. These two incidents alone cost the taxpayer over £150,000 in compensation alone.

The reality is that for every Anna Thomas, there are tens of thousands who have gone quietly, forced to sign compromise agreements to silence them or who simply are too exhausted, demoralised or terrified to fight for their rights. In June, a team of women working at Tesco in the Midlands wrote in desperation to Graham Linehan. They were being forced to share changing facilities with biological men and when they objected were threatened – in one instance, physically threatened – by angry trans activist. They explained that they were low paid, terrified that they would lose their jobs and were being told to shut up by their employers. It’s a heartbreaking email.

So, now you know – this is why no one told the Chief Constable of TVP that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. Groupthink is driving the embrace of radical progressive ideology in our public institutions and employers are punishing their employees for trying to stop them breaking the law.

This behaviour is unlikely to change until some prominent CEOs, Chief Constables and Permanent Secretaries start to lose their jobs for allowing this to happen. “Lessons will be learned,” they always say whenever a wronged employee wins an Employment Tribunal case. But they won’t be until senior heads start to roll.

If you believe that your organisation has succumbed to woke groupthink and would like a confidential discussion about what steps you can take to remedy this, please get in touch. Fair Job Ltd specialises in resetting organisational culture and resetting HR policies in line with the law.

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. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of DEI and HR.