Britain’s National Trust is forcing all of its volunteers to undergo “everyday inclusion” diversity training tackling such alleged issues as so-called “unconscious bias”.
The state-backed conservation charity — the largest in all Europe — is responsible for almost 620,000 acres of land, close to 800 miles of coastline, over 500 “historic houses, castles, parks, and gardens”, and nearly a million works of art — but its leadership has become increasingly preoccupied with trendy, woke causes such as Black Lives Matter, LGBT activism, climate change, gender identity, and admonishing Britain for past links to slavery and colonialism in recent years, rather than its core mission of heritage preservation.
The latest such scheme is an initiative to make all Trust volunteers — even those with no public-facing role — undertake diversity training, including a module on redressing so-called “unconscious bias”, which some conservative social scientists have branded pseudoscience.
This has led some volunteers to simply quit once-cherished roles as Trust properties reopen with the easing of the coronavirus lockdown, according to the Telegraph, with resignation seen as preferable to submitting to leftist ideological concepts of “equity” in order to keep doing what is, after all, voluntary work.
A spokesman for the National Trust said offered a weak defence of its actions, wheedling that they were not “not forcing our volunteers to undergo everyday inclusion training” — at least not “as soon as they return.”
The spokesman went on to admit, however, that “As part of their ongoing development with the Trust,” volunteers would indeed be “given time” to “undertake a number of mandatory training courses including fire safety, data protection, safeguarding, and everyday inclusion.”
“We have been offering inclusion training for several years, and is similar training to that offered by thousands of other organisations across the country,” they added, as if that should quell any disquiet about said training.
They claimed that the training, “which is delivered in-house,” encompasses “a broad range of diversity and inclusion issues including age, disability, sexual orientation and religious beliefs,” and that nine out of 10 of the volunteers subjected to it had rated it “good or excellent.”
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