Compulsory “unconscious bias” training for MPs. Could there possibly be a more pointless, frivolous, or insulting way of making Britain’s politicians even more useless or bigger a waste of money than they are already?
To give you an idea of the horrors that await MPs should this ludicrous proposal go ahead, here are a few idiots who have bought into the nonsense.
“I am guilty of thinking it’s enough that I don’t make racist comments or actively discriminate. I am guilty of expecting that black colleagues will explain everything, rather than seeking out the answers myself . . . I am sorry.”
Emily Baldock, Parliament’s Deputy Head of Security
“I recognise the power, privilege and responsibility that comes with my position. I pledge to use this to tackle racism, remove barriers and work for a more diverse and representative House of Commons. I will also continue to listen, self-reflect and be an ally for black and ethnic minority colleagues.”
John Benger, Clerk of the House of Commons
Sarah Davies, the clerk assistant, told staff that she would seek a “reverse mentor” to learn about equality issues and pledged to address the lack of ethnic minority figures in senior management. “As a white woman and an ally I pledge to do more to amplify the voices of my BAME colleagues. I will talk more about race. I will bring the learning from conversations with my teenage children and their BAME friends — how they are thinking together about and discussing Black Lives Matter — into the workplace.”
Sarah Davies, Clerk Assistant
It sounds like something from China’s Cultural Revolution, doesn’t it?
There are lots of reasons why “unconscious bias” training is a seriously bad idea.
One is that it is yet another form of kowtowing to the Marxists of the Black Lives Matter movement, who pretend to be promoting racial “justice” when all they are in fact promoting is bitterness, division and, ultimately, revolution.
Another is that it is an outrageous imposition on the taxpaying public at a time when jobs are being lost, the economy is tanking, and hardpressed workers really deserve their money to be spent on more useful things than spivvy chancers from “workplace development” companies charging stupid sums for their crappy, intelligence-insulting “diversity awareness” and “unconscious bias” courses, most probably conducted by brainless pillocks with third-class degrees in gender studies from the former Kingston Polytechnic.
But maybe the most damning thing of all is that “unconscious bias” training simply does not work. Indeed, it may even be counterproductive: how many office workers have you heard grumbling about having to do these courses? Possibly you’ve been on one yourself and sat there simmering and resentful: did it fill you with warm thoughts towards the “diversity” industry?
There’s a very good, damning article on the subject in a recent Spectator:
When trying to effect any behavioural change, after doing an initial measurement, you carry out an intervention (such as training), then you measure whether it has had any effect. But without a valid measure of people’s initial state of unconscious bias, we have no idea whether it actually exists in that individual, or whether any intervention has worked.
As for the interventions, a 2017 meta-analysis of 494 previous studies of racial sensitivity training programmes found that ‘changes in measured implicit bias are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit bias or behaviour’.
Not only does it not work, it’s also deeply sinister:
The idea that a firm should seek to change its employees’ unconscious thought processes also deserves scrutiny. The nature of unconscious thought is that you don’t even know you are having it. We should be worried that firms are seeking to reprogramme their employees’ trains of thought, often through mandatory training, in which the refusal to participate would result in disciplinary action. When delivered by an amateur (and the people teaching these courses are not clinical psychologists), meddling with someone’s subconscious is like sticking a screwdriver into an aircraft engine and waggling it about in the hope it might fix something.
Indeed. Any Conservative MP, certainly, who agrees to go on one of these courses deserves to be de-selected by their constituency forthwith.
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