In its biggest victory to date, the Free Speech Union has helped a civil servant secure a £100,000 settlement after she was forced out of her department for raising the alarm about its embrace of Critical Race Theory and gender identity ideology. The SundayTelegraph has the story.
A civil servant was sacked after blowing the whistle on the infiltration of political activism in Whitehall, including the exclusion of white men from a jobseekers’ event.
Anna Thomas, 32, has spoken for the first time about how her career was ruined after she warned colleagues that the Civil Service’s duty to maintain political impartiality was breached by the dissemination of critical race theory in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Ms. Thomas has received a £100,000 settlement from the Government after a three-year ordeal. During that time, she repeatedly tried to raise the alarm about how political activists have infiltrated the Civil Service, including with resources asking employees to “assume” they are racist and the promotion of a jobseekers’ event for the Metropolitan Police that excluded white men.
The payout comes amid growing concerns about widespread political activism in the Civil Service after Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the head of the equalities watchdog, faced an attempted coup by trans-activist civil servants.
Ms Thomas, a softly spoken mother-of-one, first wrote down her concerns towards the end of the summer in 2020, when she was employed by the DWP as a work coach at a Jobcentre in Portsmouth.
DWP employees were directed to an “anti-racism hub” on the Department’s intranet, which she says encouraged civil servants to treat racism like Covid-19 and to “assume that you have it” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the Black Lives Matter protests. The hub was prefaced with a statement by Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary, telling staff they were “responsible for being actively anti-racist” and asking them to “make DWP an anti-racist organisation”, she says.
Learning resources shared on the intranet advising staff “how to become race confident” included a diagram from the American activist Ibram X. Kendi asking staff to “admit that you deny racism is a problem” and to “promote and advocate for policies and leaders that are anti-racist”, she says.
Staff were also directed to the work of Robin DiAngelo, a critical race theorist who claims that white people, including children, are “inherently racist”.
“It listed a lot of resources that were very politically partial,” says Ms Thomas. “I did raise my concerns [that] we are only promoting one-sided very political stuff and not giving a broader overview from perhaps different authors.”
She says she believed that posts supporting Black Lives Matter and Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, were expressions of those group’s political or social aims, such as defunding the police or enabling people to self-identify as a gender.
After posting her concerns on the intranet, she faced a backlash from some colleagues.
“It felt a lot like gaslighting,” she says. “Comments saying that ‘you’re taking things out of context…you’re being politically partial. That was quite disturbing to me because it’s just like, this isn’t fair, I didn’t bring this stuff in, I’m just telling you that this is not neutral at all.”
Ms Thomas says she complained to the team responsible for the resources, and to the whistleblowing team, that she believed the DWP was breaching its impartiality obligations under the Civil Service Code.
She then learned that she was being investigated for misconduct, including allegations that she had said discriminatory things and was causing offence. The investigation included “fact-finding” meetings, where she claims her concerns weren’t taken seriously and investigators were trying to draw out her own politics rather than understand her concerns about political impartiality.
However, Ms Thomas’s whistleblowing complaint was upheld, and the DWP’s own behavioural science expert advised that the anti-racism hub was political and that Mr Schofield should not have gone down the road of anti-racism, she says. The DWP subsequently removed certain content from its online resources.
“By this point, I was well aware of what’s now called ‘cancel culture,” Ms Thomas says. “And I was just like, OK, this isn’t going too well, but this is bigger than me. This is about…a very toxic culture of politics in a civil service and the problems that could come from that [are] not great.”
Soon afterwards, Ms Thomas appeared to be right to have concerns about how the Department’s politicised approach would eventually impact the service it provided to vulnerable members of the public.
In January 2021, she was asked to promote a job-seeking event to the unemployed interested in a career in the Metropolitan Police. The event was directed at female, BAME and LGBT candidates. She says that straight white men, who made up the majority of her customers in Portsmouth, were explicitly excluded.
Ms Thomas discussed her concerns with colleagues on a Teams chat that the event was discriminatory and unlawful. However, she says her worries were dismissed by her superior, who made a complaint about her comments.
Ms Thomas was prescribed antidepressants and went on long-term sick leave. “You just start falling apart,” she says. “You know, you see people who get cancelled and they’re like you know, it’s okay, just get another job. That’s not the case. And once you’re disgraced for something that you didn’t even do, the effect of that, I don’t know how to describe it.”
An investigation into her comments on a Teams chat began in March 2021 and she was dismissed in November 2021. She says her understanding of why she was dismissed is that she was found to have caused “upset”, “distress”, and “offence”.
Ms Thomas began a claim against the Department in 2022, with the support of the Free Speech Union. She claimed she was the victim of unfair dismissal, belief discrimination, victimisation as a whistleblower, and harassment.
After three preliminary hearings, the DWP agreed to settle and pay Ms Thomas £100,000, of which £27,500 was for injury to her feelings. It did not admit any liability.
Worth reading in full.
You can join the Free Speech Union her, with membership fees starting at just £2.49 a month for discount members.
Stop Press: Watch Anna talking about her ordeal here.
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Whilst I’m glad the Free Speech Union/Ms Thomas won the case, it would appear that taxpayers got a bill for £100,000 and the corrupt Senior Civil Servant, Peter Schofield (the DWP’s Permanent Secretary) and his colleagues who allowed and promoted the politicised “woke” indoctrination, got off scot-free.
It’s about time any Permanent Secretary who allows and permits political indoctrination to be practised in her/her Department, in contravention of the Civil Service Code, was sacked.
Couldn’t agree more. But the probable outcome is that Schofield will be promoted.
Toby Young – words cannot adequately describe…thank you, thank you so much, for the work you do.
A lighthouse in a world of mad darkness.
Yes – those words can!
This is huge! Big congrats to Anna and the FSU. What happened to Anna is tragically a sign of the times and it must not be accepted as the new norm, ever. It’s like an insidious cancer spreading throughout society. I’m sure ”upset”, ”distress” and ”offence” is how the veterans that are still with us and who fought for our freedoms must feel when they look around, bewildered, at the world today.
Shame about the background music but this is really heartbreaking to see ( <1min clip )
https://www.tiktok.com/@rising.steel/video/7232170456827153670?_r=1&_t=8cgNYIUMViM
Very Well done guys! Let’s hope this leads to more transparency
Well done Toby, Bryn and team. An excellent result. The precedent is being set. Can’t thank you enough.
Congratulations to Toby and the team. Now Anna can finally feel vindicated by her actions. The battle has been won but, as we all the know, the war is by no means over. Thank you for all your efforts, both with the FSU and the DS. Crazy times indeed.
Wonderful news. The focus on anti-racism actually creates a bigger problem by the over intense focusing on an issue that is nowhere near as rampant as they make out and actually entrenching racism in those who just hate anyway. It’s all virtue-signalling of the ‘look at us being oh so conscious and accepting of others’ which, to be honest, most people do normally anyway. I couldn’t care less what colour or ethnic origin someone is. Just get on with living. Stop all this nonsense.
What is “racism”? What is “anti-racism”? I don’t think these terms have their original meaning any more. In the UK, did we ever have apartheid? Did we ever deprive people of their human rights based on their race? Personally I think it’s kind of daft to dislike people on principle because of their race – better to take people as you find them – but what we have now is that you must LOVE all non-white people regardless of how annoying or distasteful you might find some of them, or some ideas and behaviours typical of their culture (yes, different races have evolved with different cultures and cultures are what makes a society and a civilisation work, or not).
Well done Toby and the team at FSU HQ. (Anyone reading this who is not an FSU member should join now before it’s too late). That said, we should also be aware that no employee will be safe until the laws which drive this kind of thing are off the statute book altogether. Schofield was unfortunately ‘only doing his job’.
“we should also be aware that no employee will be safe until the laws which drive this kind of thing are off the statute book altogether.”
Within the DWP it is not so much the laws of the land that are the primary concern as the culture within the organisation. The place is a hotbed of vicious PC wokery which is seriously disturbing to those who stand against it.
I am ex DWP.
If ever there was a finer advert for joining the FSU I would like to see it. Congratulations to Toby and all the FSU team – brilliant work.
Or Department of Wa*kers and Paedophiles as me and my colleagues called them, during a brief and unpleasant contracting assignment there.
It’s heartening that there might still be some people in the state sector with integrity. Sad though that £100,000 or not, there is now one less.
Congratulations but that’s not really a good result. It means they DWP payed £100,000 of our money to hush up a lawsuit a wronged ex-employee brought forward without admitting anything so that the same people can now continue implementing the same policies unchallenged. The civil service has no business propagating speculativce sociopolitical theories of openly partisan American authors.
If “white people are inherently racist” then surely there’s nothing to be done. Btw, what an incredibly RACIST statement this was, by an anti-racist activist.
If “white people are inherently racist” then surely there’s nothing to be done.
Logically, that’s correct. But – as usual – these people want exactly everything from Christanity except God and morals. This statement is thus to be understood as White people are damned by their original sin and hence, must live their lives in penitence forever, with penitence defined as Whatever profits the people making these statements at the expense of those they’re supposed to apply to.
A good retort would be You’re not preaching in the name of an almighty God whose will everyone should better take into account and hence, you’re hereby unkindly asked to f* off back to where you came from.
It’s good that some are standing up for free speech.