Allison Pearson in the Telegraph thinks she’s put her finger on what’s really driving the U.K. labour crisis and putting older people off working: the unrelenting, soul-destroying wokery that now permeates every workplace and makes anyone to the Right of Chairman Mao feel like they don’t belong. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s true that lockdown showed a lot of busy people that time at home with family could be more rewarding than the gerbil-wheel of a daily commute. But something else is going on here, I think: increasingly, the modern office feels like hostile territory to baby boomers. Relentless wokery is driving the more mature into retirement before it drives us round the bend.
Gareth, a Planet Normal listener, wrote to tell me he retired last year from his job as a lawyer to a major public inquiry after three-and-a-half years engaged by the Cabinet Office. “The CO strives hard to promote a ‘woker than thou’ attitude (about the only department in which it does strive hard!) and since the pandemic this went into overdrive,” says Gareth. “It encompassed the entire woke canon from compulsory ‘unconscious bias’ training through finger-wagging lectures on ‘micro-aggressions’, ‘white fragility/privilege’, critical race theory, BLM and structural racism, aka all the shibboleths of the progressive Left, but under a supposedly Conservative Government.”
According to Gareth, the Cabinet Office “is symptomatic of the whole civil-service culture which treats the elected Government with disdain and pursues its own ultra-woke agenda which is entirely contrary to official policy”.
Like many members of staff his age, he was appalled by the “all-pervasive propaganda”. He couldn’t stand a climate in which often entirely innocuous comments were treated as “micro-aggressions” and any deviation from the official view (formerly known as “a difference of opinion”) was treated as heretical.
The civil service, the NHS, higher education and far too many private companies have become a paradise for “recreational offence-takers” who love to air their concocted grievances. On one occasion, Gareth had a complaint lodged against him for using the term Anglo-Saxon. “Apparently, it has negative connotations for the woke. Who knew?”
I reckon there are an awful lot of Gareths out there. Talented, hard-working men and women in their 50s, 60s and 70s who, earlier in their careers, were not exposed to this relentless and rather scary politicisation of the workplace and don’t want to tiptoe about in what Jon calls “this divisive and pernicious Maoist culture”.
Why would any 56-year-old wish to return to work when chances are they will be judged for the crime of not being in possession of the correct pronoun (or even comprehending what that means)? Only recently, a reader told me that a position in the NHS trust where he worked remained unfilled because no one sufficiently “diverse” had applied. It was an important job, one which really needed doing, but far better to leave it vacant than appoint some old white bloke with the right experience, eh?
Allison says that if the Government is serious about persuading over-50s to stay in their jobs, a good start would be to punish employers who discriminate against them.
But that would involve overhauling (or scrapping) the Equality Act, with its ‘protected characteristics’, public sector equality duty and licence for ‘positive’ discrimination, which is the legal fountainhead of all wokery in the U.K. But that’s not something the Tories have shown any interest in in all their 12 years in power.
Worth reading in full.
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– Sir, I stopped you because you’ve been driving at 50 miles over the limit! Explain yourself!
– It’s because of, uhm, the climate change, officer
– say no more and have a great rest of your journey
and many more examples of sheer stupidity awaiting us
The claim that climate change de-calibrates breathalysers can often be used to your advantage!
I like it!
Articles such as these are always worthwhile but the bottom line is that my starting point with any BBC story is that it will always be a pack of lies. All stories remain lies until I can verify via responsible and respectable alternative media sources.
The BBC is nothing more than a crude, very crude propoganda organisation and once that is accepted and understood there is no need to partake of its output and it can be treated as the rubbish that it is.
Yep I can’t even be bothered to read these articles though I fully support what DS are doing. I’m fully aware co2 alarmism is a total scam so don’t need to read about it any further, but props to Chris et al for fighting the good fight.
But dangerous rubbish, because millions still tune into it thinking they are receiving impartial reporting, when infact they receive biased reporting with a world view on everything all to the progressive left. They are also mostly oblivious to the fact that they actually fund their own brainwashing via the license fee.
Spot on Hux and it is of course one of the many reasons I have not watched the BBC for nearly 4 years now.
The thunderstorms there are probably unaltered this looks rather like an improvement in data recording starting in around 1990. It is preposterous bs to claim there is any terrifying pattern here and moreover link that to co2 concentrations which would be marginally monotonic over the period.
BBC will report on “the science”, when in reality what we are really talking about are “scenarios”. —– Climate scenarios from the IPCC are not “science”. They are models of assumptions speculations and guesses. It is these model scenarios that are used by all manner of policymakers, environmental organisations, banks, financial institutions, media etc etc. This then gets reported on the BBC and other mainstream media and influences how the public perceives the so called “science”. But these model scenarios have greatly overestimated and exaggerated what is likely to occur. So we have a situation where governments are basing energy policy eg on computer models that are telling them there is going to be way more warming than can really be expected. This then leads to very bad policies. Like “The Climate Change Act” and “Net Zero”.—– Insurance companies and banks will then be assessing risk based on biased models which will tell them floods, droughts, sea level rises, damage from storms etc are going to be extreme. —So what we have is really a cocktail of science and ideology. It is this cocktail that is being presented on MSM like BBC and SKY as ” the science” and we are all supposed to accept that as some kind of ultimate truth. —–It isn’t. ——So when we hear eg that there will be a “million climate refugees”, or “half a million deaths from increases in tropical diseases” we are hearing something that is at best misleading and at worst a pack of lies. But worse than that, it is trying to tell us that if we get rid of fossil fuels none of that will happen. This is seriously misleading people. Plus it is also the case that not all impacts regarding climate will be negative. But it is only the alleged negative impacts, and never any positive ones that ever appear on MSM, with BBC the main cheerleaders for this doom and gloom.
I doubt if deaths were accurately reported or recorded in earlier years. I also wonder where the lightening strike data came from.
There is a theory that electrical currents flowing through the atmosphere (of which lightning is a visible and extreme example) contribute to global warming.
Generally these are microscpic, but when integrated over the entire atmosphere the are responsible for a quantity of resistive heating. I am sorry, but a quantitative mathematic analysis is beyond me.
Mike Hulme in a new book called “Climate Change Isn’t Everything” calls out what he refers to as “Climatism”. —-This is the ideology that the explanation for all social. economic and ecological phenomena is human changes to the climate. The only way to solve all the political social and ethical problems of the world is by addressing “climate change”. It is an ideology that sees everything through the prism of climate change and is how the “climate left” frame their political agenda. ——The “Climate left” includes ofcourse the BBC. If their is a storm, flood, or drought anywhere in the world, the climatists at the BBC will by default assume those to be caused by humans and no other explanation will be sought. ——–The dangers of assuming everything that happens is due to humans is that we will end up with very bad policies eg Net Zero, and that is what is happening all over the western world where governments insist that if we only get rid of fossil fuels none of those weather events will happen.
A good thing about lightning is that it zaps all the methane in the local atmosphere, very good for canceling the warming effects of bovine wind. So, come on BBC, miserable sods. Let’s hear the positives.