The Diversity Illusion.

 

Britain seems to have an obsession with what it calls 'diversity' and identity politics. It also seems to have obsession with categories, targets, and measuring things. If you fill a form in today, there's always some standard question about private and confidential matters such as your sexuality, racial origins, or religion.

We're frequently told that this information is necessary for the purpose of monitoring equality, diversity, and social inclusion. Although Britain is a highly stratified, class ridden society, where social class, caste, and estate, will limit access to resources and prestige to some people, the question of social class is curiously always omitted in questionnaires.

In the Equality Act 2010, 'social class' - defined sometimes by a person's occupation -  isn't even a 'protected characteristic', yet we know that social class, is often used as a basis of discrimination in Britain. Identity politics, takes issues like social class, equality, and redistribution, out of the equation.

According to the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), just 7% of all Britain's MP's, can be considered working-class compared with 34% of all UK working-age adults. Only about 1% of the current crop of Tory MPs, entered Parliament from a working class job. In 1987, some 28% of Labour MPs came from working-class jobs and that proportion has since halved. You might say that British Parliamentary politics is a racket for the middle-classes.

In France, it's illegal to ask people questions about their sexuality, religion, and racial origins, and to do so, can lead to imprisonment and fines. Given the history of France this seems to be perfectly reasonable and understandable. In WWII, the country was occupied by Nazi Germany and some French citizens were Nazi collaborators. The Nazi persecuted people because of their sexuality, religion, and racial origins, and many millions of people were murdered because of it. To have had information about a person's sexuality, race, and religion, would have been very useful to the Nazi regime, but very detrimental for some people.

The British don't seem to fear that personal information can be used by governments for nefarious purposes, because they view the State as largely benign, utilitarian, and harmless, a kind of fairy godmother that dishes out free bus passes and social security benefits. Yet all states and governments, are capable of degenerating into repressive dystopias, and we also know that the people are quite capable of putting dictators into power and turning democracies into dictatorships, as was the case in Nazi Germany.