Discrimination

Consider the following:

1. A Boris Johnson aid fired because of alleged ‘racist’ remarks, which were not so.
2. Complaints about a Heinz Mayonnaise ad for ‘gay’ kiss that wasn’t, and the response of gay pressure groups.
3. Some new government laws on discrimination. The BBC report later says:

But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce.

Some employers argue they already do this, while others may say these policies will need careful handling to reduce the risk of causing resentment amongst existing staff.

Contemporary conventional wisdom assumes that discrimination is – of necessity – a bad thing and therefore when people insist on discriminating then the only option is to create laws to end that discrimination. Of course, the biggest problem is that people can be endlessly discriminating, and quite good at spotting where they themselves are unfairly discriminated against. So, once you start creating such laws there will never be an end to them.

But what such laws do is define people into groups: blacks, Asians, gays, women, one-legged underwater pole-vaulters and so on, each group becoming a victim group, creating a victim culture where each group attempts to outbid all other groups for the available resources. This means that often self-appointed spokespeople for these victim groups use such laws to self-promote themselves and their own pet projects and concerns, sometimes at the expense of the very groups they purport to represent. This division of society into competing groups exacerbates the group mentality (us and them) thus inevitably increasing tensions between competing groups who feel the other groups are getting benefits, attention, etc that they are not. Other groups demand such things as anti-hate speech laws for themselves, i.e. religions demanding hate-speech protection and the recent invention of ‘Islamophobia’.

Not only that these laws bring no end of unintended consequences with them, such as firms avoiding employing women of a childbearing age because of the cost of maternity leave, and other such costs placed upon businesses by such legislation.

The law should not be used attempt to control attitudes and behaviour as a form of social engineering. In the case of a job the only discrimination that should matter is the ability to do the job and that should be solely at the discretion of those doing the hiring – subject, of course, to any professional requirements necessary for the job.

It should also be up to any business, club or whatever to decide who they want as customers, members or whatever. If they are stupid about it and ban people for arbitrary reasons, then it will be their loss.

Making discrimination illegal doesn’t stop people from being prejudiced; it just forces them to hide their true feelings. It would be better if such discrimination could be allowed to be openly displayed, so that the rest of us can ignore, shun and deride those – quite frankly – stupid enough to judge people by their race, sexuality, sex or whatever.

Another unintended consequence seems to be that such laws help perpetuate the attitudes they are attempting to combat because people see such things resulting in tokenism and other forms of reverse discrimination. Reverse discrimination is, of course, just as bad as the discrimination it attempts to combat by being just as unfair but to a different subset of people.

Forcing people together – women into a formerly all-male environment, other ethnicities into a former homogeneous area or so on, creates tension, resentment and exacerbates minor differences into major stumbling-blocks. These things can only happen slowly over time which allows people to gradually adapt to each other. Nowadays, there isn’t any trouble between Saxons and Normans, but it took a long time for that to come about. In most parts of the country -apart from a few notorious exceptions – there is little or no conflict between Protestants and Catholics.

Such laws lead inevitably to politically-correct thought control with people masking their true feelings, which leads to hidden tensions and prejudices. It also gives succour to the delusions and fantasies of racists and similar unreflectively prejudiced people by exacerbating differences – real or not real – between these mostly artificial groupings, and any advantage perceived to reward a particular group is seized upon and used as evidence by such bigots. The same happens in reverse with – often – self-proclaimed spokespeople for minority groups claiming and manipulating the slightest of ‘incidents’ as evidence of widespread - and sometimes even the mythical ‘institutional’ - prejudice.

Quite simply, such social engineering does not work and we end of with situations like this.

So adding even more of these laws is bound to make the situation worse, leading to even more legal cases brought by disgruntled workers, or putative workers, more time lost for businesses, many more small businesses being hamstrung by even more red-tape.

In an ideal world, we would look towards a Conservative government to come along and repeal such nonsense, but the Tories are terrified of how Labour would spin this as the nasty party having it in for women, gays, ethnic minorities and so forth. So it is unlikely that once laws like this get on the statute book, that any government would have the courage to remove them, leaving everyone to have to step gingerly on through this legal minefield, instead of getting on with their jobs and lives.