There is no such thing as positive discrimination. There is only discrimination — and when it creeps into life-or-death professions like policing, surgery or flying a plane, it stops being merely unjust. It becomes dangerous.
That lesson ought to be obvious. But in modern Britain, it seems it still needs spelling out — especially after the latest revelation from West Yorkshire Police (WYP).
As the Telegraph revealed earlier this month, the force had been ranking applicants not by ability, experience or potential — but by ethnicity. According to one whistleblower, candidates were being sorted depending on their skin colour.
A clumsy medal system for modern identity politics: gold for black and far-east Asian candidates; silver for South-East Asian; bronze for white applicants, including Irish and Eastern Europeans.
The so-called ‘oppression olympics’ is usually a glib online phrase, but here it has been given official form. It wasn’t just metaphorical — it was policy. All of this, in a country struggling to get a grip on rising crime.
We have seen record levels of mobile phone thefts in London. We have experienced what can only be described as a shoplifting epidemic. And to cap it all off, knife crime continues to soar in parts of the country.
And yet, even as criminals operate with near-impunity, some forces appear to be more concerned with assembling a Benetton advert than arresting burglars.
This isn’t new. In 2017, Cheshire Police rejected the application of Matthew Furlong, a physics graduate and son of a police officer, despite him being told he was “well-prepared“. He didn’t tick the right boxes. He was white, male and heterosexual. A tribunal later ruled he had been unlawfully discriminated against under the guise of ‘positive action’.
No institution is immune — not even the Church of England. In 2021, the CofE published its ‘From Lament to Action‘ report, setting an ambitious target of 30% UKME participation — despite ethnic minorities making up just 18% of the British population in England and Wales. The timing was no accident: the report was commissioned in the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Never mind that church attendance is at record lows. Winning souls for Jesus was apparently less urgent than assembling a demographically-balanced congregation.
The same logic now pervades policing. Recruitment is no longer about competence or calling. It’s about hitting quotas — often entirely divorced from whether the relevant groups actually want to join in the first place.
Following the revelation, WYP put out a statement arguing that “the most recent census found that 23% of people in West Yorkshire identified as being from an ethnic minority background. Our current police officer representation from ethnic minority backgrounds is around 9%.”
But this line of argument misses the point entirely. It assumes representation should always directly mirror the population — that any discrepancy is evidence of failure or injustice. It ignores the many reasons certain groups might not choose to join the police in the first place. And it treats complex questions of trust, culture and vocation as little more than a spreadsheet problem.
The obsession with identity, imported from the worst corners of American HR culture, has turned recruitment into an ideological beauty pageant.
Take United Airlines, which in recent years outlined its goal that at least 50% of the 5,000 new pilots it trains should be “women or people of colour” by 2030. Admirable in theory, perhaps — but less so when you’re 30,000 feet in the air and the only thing that matters is technical competence.
Nobody checks the diversity metrics of their surgeon when they’re being wheeled into theatre. They care about whether their surgeon is the best.
Nobody cares about the ethnicity of the pilot landing their plane in a thunderstorm. They care about whether the pilot is capable.
And nobody being mugged in broad daylight on a British high street wants their attending police officer to reflect the exact demographic contours of modern Britain. They simply want their phone back.
The purpose of the police is not to be a social experiment in representation — it is to safeguard the conditions of civil life for all, regardless of their background.
Yet the tragedy of EDI policing is that it does precisely the opposite. Far from bringing people together, it plants the seeds of resentment. It tells applicants in the so-called bronze category that no matter how talented or dedicated they may be, they will always be less desirable than someone in gold. And worse, it burdens those in gold with the suspicion — however unfair — that they are there for optics rather than excellence.
What is left is a police force divided, demoralised and distracted — a hollowed-out institution where merit takes a back seat to identity, and where the very people tasked with protecting us are sorted and judged by their surname or skin tone before their skill.
In policing, as in medicine or aviation, there is only one standard worth defending: the best person for the job.
Once you start discriminating — ‘positively’ or otherwise — the outcome is always the same. You get discrimination. And in life-or-death professions, that’s not just wrong. It’s unforgivable.
Daniel Fessahaye is a freelance business journalist and a political commentator with Young Voices UK. Find him on X.
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