Here’s a quick test: if you were a city council leader, how would you manage your spending across said council? Take some time to think, and don’t worry, there’s no definitive answer.
You could adopt a policy of meritocracy, ensuring that the best person was appointed to each job, offsetting the loss of time and money due to incompetence. Perhaps you would do away with costly “non-jobs,” notorious in the public sector. Or you could be very brave and take a pay cut yourself!
The point is you should responsibly allocate funding to ensure the council is fit for purpose, effective at meeting the needs of your city and constituents and doing so at the minimum cost.
What you probably wouldn’t do is think to yourself: “Hang on a minute, the proportion of our ethnic minority council employees doesn’t accurately represent the proportion of ethnic minorities in our city! Let’s reduce spending in other areas and use the relocated money to make diversity hires so that the two numbers correlate to the nearest per cent!”
Well, you wouldn’t think that unless you were the City of York Council.
Just to be clear, this isn’t a parody. The City of York Council has enacted a plan of action to respond to the so-called “five-year anti-racism and inclusion strategy”. It includes plans to investigate why the proportion of ethnic minority employees in the council is “only” 6.3% and take steps to increase diversity in the workforce actively.
According to the 2021 Census, 92.8 per cent of people in York identified their ethnic group within the “White” category, compared with 94.3 per cent in 2011. We suppose that means that the proportion of the council’s ethnic employees “should” be 7.2%, which means they’re currently 0.9% out. Oh, the shame! Presumably, the fact the proportion has increased from 5% in 2019 isn’t good enough.
The City of York Council leader, Coun Claire Douglas, said the plan will help the council “move to a point where our employment base better represents statistics that show us how many groups actually make up the population of York.”
We assume she has been pressured by Haddy Njie, chair of the Inclusive Equal Rights UK (IERUK) campaign group, who said: “We appreciate the financial difficulty the council is facing. However, this challenge should never be an excuse to delay the implementation of the anti-racist action plan.
There are a few things to unpack here. First, why is there a need for an anti-racist action plan? Why are we never given details on all this racism which supposedly exists? It seems we are supposed to accept that it exists and not question anything.
Second, we essentially have an anti-racist plan which recruits workers based solely on their minority status, not their ability. What more hypocrisy could you ask for?!
Lastly, why must cuts be made for a more ethnically diverse workforce? If the council implies that they must lose staff who aren’t assigned to a minority group to make way for those who are, won’t the books balance themselves? In theory, the salaries should remain the same. Or does it mean they will recruit staff they don’t need so they can tick virtue signalling boxes and simultaneously reduce services to pay for it?
The council themselves probably don’t have the answers to those questions. After all, it is a Labour Council, and Labour has always been prone to doing things on a whim with no care or vision. If nothing else, it is certainly an eye-opener into the priorities of the liberal politicians.
Under a Homeland Party government, we would ensure that councils are only involved in providing essential services and that these are responsibly funded. All other activities which involve a political and ideological agenda would be scrapped along with surplus roles so that council taxpayers get value for their money. We would also enact a policy of meritocracy for recruitment – the best person for the job.
