The idea that overworked nurses and stretched consultants have the time to hurl racist or homophobic slurs at patients seems farcical. But given the huge sums of money wasted on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), clearly the NHS leadership believes there’s a problem with bigotry among its employees. Yesterday the Telegraph reported that since Labour took office in July, at least 35 new DEI jobs have been advertised within the health service, some with salaries exceeding £80,000. This is the equivalent of one every week since the election.
The progressive mania infecting the health service has not gone unnoticed. In 2023, then health secretary Steve Barclay attempted to scrap DEI roles, asking NHS leaders to “justify in public why such roles add more value than additional medical or healthcare staff”. He was ignored. Current Health Secretary Wes Streeting has echoed his predecessor’s words, demanding that the NHS tackle health inequalities rather than focusing on “pointless ideological changes”. But despite his criticism, the NHS leadership is determined to throw taxpayer money at solving a confected problem.
The lack of brazen bigotry within the NHS is somewhat inconvenient for the cadre of newly employed professionals. And so it has been necessary to widen the definitions of “-isms” and “-phobias” and lower the threshold for transgressions to give them purpose. Some NHS employees have found themselves stymied in their careers and embroiled in legal battles as a result of this ideological creep.
Amy Gallagher was a mental health nurse studying at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. As part of her course, she attended a lecture where she was expected to “confront the reality of white privilege”, and another during which she was informed that “Christianity is racist because it is European.” Gallagher said she disagreed with the teaching of Critical Race Theory as fact. For daring to challenge the DEI orthodoxy, she was accused of inflicting “race-based harm” and is now suing the NHS for discrimination.
The NHS justifies DEI spending by citing health inequalities, such as the disparity in maternal mortality rates between black and white women. But how online training sessions about white privilege, pronoun badges or LGBTQ History Month posters are supposed to solve these problems remains unclear.
While bosses defend these questionable measures as vital for staff retention and patient outcomes, the reality on the front line is bleak: morale is low, waiting lists are growing, and emergency services are in crisis. It seems fair to ask: if DEI roles are so essential, why are NHS services continuing to decline?
Ultimately, the notion that NHS employees cannot be trusted to treat patients or each other fairly without constant oversight is an insult to the hardworking doctors, nurses and medical professionals who dedicate their lives to saving others. Although the responsibility for creating an inclusive and respectful culture is carried by each of them, this can only happen in workplaces where management is sufficiently engaged and interested.
Instead of leading, vain NHS bosses have surrendered to ideology, squandering public money to ease their own consciences and indulge niche interests. Hiring an army of well-paid DEI officers is nothing more than an expensive cop-out — outsourcing the job of fostering a fair workplace culture rather than taking real responsibility.
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SubscribeThe Brits are realizing Woke Ideology is more than just a silly but misguided attempt at tolerance. It’s a merger of the social and hard sciences and privileges relativistic principles like “lived experience” over objective findings. That’s a problem in medicine.
A ‘misguided attempt at tolerance’?
See Mr Littlewood’s previous post about the Left’s ‘repressive tolerance’.
The author seems to be a feminist campaigner. She doesn’t mention feminist training in her piece, but does she have the same opinion about the hours of feminist DEI training people have been forced to attend over the years?
Was this also a silly waste of time and money better spent providing a health service – or is her own pet ideology the exception?
And that is why woke will not die in UK.
It has two pillars. Gender and Race . They will go down together. Or remain standing together.
I’ve no idea which outcome will prevail in UK.
The ignorance of what Race is, and what Gender is amazes me.
Very true! Most people seem to fail to recognise that anti-semitism is racism.
There was a lengthy diversity training I had to attend.
The first slide said it wasn’t about just “women”, but the initiative covered a variety of groups.
The rest of the long assortment of slides went on and on primarily about how we needed to hire more women.
Hence, from them on, even though less than a quarter of applicants were women, they constituted close to 75% of graduate hires – and the majority of the female diversity hires quit and ran at the slightest hint of pressure or stress.
Do you really expect anyone to believe a single syllable of this garbage?
I’m embarrassed for you.
Real progressive socialists shouldn’t be questioning people’s lived experiences … perhaps you’re letting the side down here ?
Your comment is low on actual information and I doubt your ‘statistics’ – was it in a civil service or NHS or independent company hire? If a company, what industry? You do not mention other diversity issues being addressed as is usual, such as race which makes me think that your report is not entirely accurate.
So woke is a disaster. We all know that. What is to be done?
The game is lost. The only hope is elect a Right wing party who promise in their manifesto to remove all woke dogma from Education and the Law if they are elected.
So four more years of articles like this I suppose…
There is another way which would prepare for that. Tackle the Theory of the Far Left head on, expose it and refute it, but that’s not going to happen while followers of woke dominate the media.
Gender and Race are very fragile constructions. If only there was a good media outlet which would publish the Right’s refutation of the ideas which created woke.
You’re absolutely correct. It’s a disgrace that £80k+ of taxpayers money is being wasted by the NHS on DEI roles, which this article points out.
No need therefore, to continually rant about Unherd when it’s one of the very few platforms where these things can be aired.
Do you have to follow me around everywhere?
Are you quite sure you aren’t stalking us ?
Stop trolling Unherd, one of the few platforms where real “long-form” debate can be had, otherwise you’ll get pushback
It’s as straightforward as that
You follow us, Richard, with your johnny one-note posts.
Some people on the Left are critial race theory and all aspects of the trans issue except for genuine gender dysphoria which is extremely rare
I get really fed up with people casting woke as a left/right issue – it ain’t! I am a lifelong socialist and feminist. I hate misogyny and racism – and I also hate the current narcissistic obsessions with identity. It is self-obsession that totally deflects attention from the issues that really should be concerning us – you can guess what I think those are so don’t bother offering a nasty response – but clearly, in this instance it is taking the time and energy to re-shape the NHS to actually do its job.
Im not quite sure what you mean. Feminism and antiracism are part and parcel of identity politics. What do you mean by identity politics?
Stupid question though. Why would DEI people in NHS admit DEI is dead? Of course they wouldn’t. They are the ones who promote it. They won’t just surrender their beliefs and power.
It has to be taken away from them through the democratic process.
It’s not their money. No-one holds them to account for wasting it. Why wouldn’t they p1ss it away? You have to experience the fecklessness of middle management in the public sector directly to have any sense of just how lazy and irresponsible these people are.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told that the millions spent on this or that failed project was ‘just a drop in the ocean’. It never seems to occur to any of them that enough drops and pretty soon you’ve got an ocean.
Meanwhile the real grafters at the sharp end, paramedics, for example, are forced to try and get by on salaries of £27-35k.
It won’t. It will just double down. The far-left have an iron grip on the institutions, and until that changes, nothing changes.
Time for our equivalent of a presidential order?
Despite a small smattering of good intentions, it was, is, and always will be a scam….
When will you people understand that DEI is not the problem. It is hopeless politicians who seek to divide people and use things like DEI as wedge.
If Trump’s lunatic performance earlier today didn’t convince you of that then I don’t know how to help you.
DEI can be a problem when better qualified people are excluded from employment positions, in favour of somebody from a ‘preferred’ group just to meet arbitrary targets.
It is hopeless politicians who seek to divide people and use things like DEI as wedge.
Absolutely. The whole point of identity politics is to divide the opposition so that the property-owning suburban champagne socialists can continue the project of transferring all the country’s wealth into their grubby hands whilst silencing any blue collar people who object to the systematic asset-stripping of their country by these lying middle class Blairites. Well said.
Spot on, you’ve nailed it!
I’d like to see the details of these 35 posts (out of 1.4million). My place has supposedly one of the highest proportion of ‘Global Majority’ staff mixes in the Country and we don’t have one. I suspect as ever with these things the myth runs a bit ahead of the fact especially when it makes for a handy headline. There are no quotas, no positive discrimination, no enforced having to listen to CRT. Remember the Tavistock was an outlier in a number of ways and has been pulled up for it post Cass Report. It’s not the typical, far from it.
As it is the bit of diversity training we’ve had I thought was pretty good, especially in a healthcare setting when you have to make connections with people of all backgrounds. A million miles better than anything I ever got in the RN, which when I first joined was laced with racism and class prejudice. Sickening when I think back to what was normalised. Furthermore, and here’s where a bit of DEI within reason underpins good British values, getting the so called Global majority to all appreciate being Brits means valuing tolerance, fair play and ‘live & let live’ ain’t such a bad thing.
Wait a minute. You’re back at work? A month or two ago you were retired. What happened?
“valuing tolerance, fair play and ‘live & let live’ ain’t such a bad thing.”
The vast majority of British people would agree with you on that. I’d suggest those that don’t will not be converted by being lectured on ‘white privilege’ and the evils of our colonial history or by having ‘gender-neutral toilets’ imposed on them in the workplace.
Common sense piece, thank you.
“NHS bosses” are an anonymous and foggy bunch. They are never accountable to parliament. Surely this has to be the crux of the problem?
Remember clinic bosses refusing to partake in the Cass report? On what possible basis can a civil servant refuse to work with a parliamentary inquiry? They are by definition paid by the public to serve the public. In a normal Britain, you are in breach of contract and you are fired.
Only in a world where civil servants have grown accustomed to delivering power without the hassle of a democratic mandate. Spectacularly true and visible for the NHS, alas, applicable to many more state and semi state agencies.
Or was ‘race-based harm’ inflicted on Ms Gallagher?
The NHS staff profile is far more diverse than the population at large. Shouldn’t the DEI officers be prioritising recruitment of more white men?
I do hope they have included mycophobia since it is only reasonable to be afraid of zombie fungi. Might one of the Ophiocordyceps species be affecting the DEI acolytes e.f. Ophiocordyceps diversinclusequiti?
Unpopular opinion:
I won’t make a long argument, but if we objectively compare the West to our adversaries, it becomes clear that our strength lies in diversity. The only way to compete with China and Russia is to double down on diversity—to make it the new trend, the next commodity. Just like in biology and biodiversity, or even the Amazon rainforest, the more diversity you have, the more unique ideas emerge.
Diversity means different languages, perspectives, and innovations. The only way to outcompete China is to fully embrace DEI. Yet, the fact that we are pushing back against DEI suggests that we are resisting something that has always been fundamental to our society. Just look around—you can see how diverse the West is. That is our next great resource.
China and Russia do not have the same level of diversity as we do, and that is where our advantage lies. Diversity is the next form of energy, the next electricity. While political discourse may complicate the narrative, if you look at it objectively, both biodiversity and human diversity drive innovation and progress. And that is something China and Russia simply cannot match.
Tomorrow you will hear China harvesting DEI, then, you will wonder why we didn’t see it. Give groups equal protection and free speech, no fears, and utilize!
It is what makes us very different from China and Russia countries!
Do not shoot me, just an opinion.
How can it be our strength to choose people for a role by the colour of their skin, parentage or sexual proclivities rather than their suitability to do the job in hand?
‘this ideological creep’
Wrong vowel, surely?
The NHS ignored the previous health minister, and is controlling the current one. They know they are right, you see, and anyone who disagrees is a bigot or a Tory and can thus be safely ignored.
Does our Health Sec have the power to cut off funds to those who refuse to comply with directives?
Extraordinary stuff. Trump’s attack on DEI will help but years of further struggle lie ahead.