Sixty-six per cent of the slots are ringfenced for staff who are ethnic minority, disabled, or from a lower socio-economic background. Everyone else – including the white working-class kids the same government claims to champion – can take whatever is left. They’ve essentially built a public-sector caste system.
The Cabinet Office’s defence is the same tired formula used across the British state. The scheme, it says, complies with the “positive action” provisions of the Equality Act. In plain English: race, disability status and class background are now official sorting criteria for who gets accelerated towards the top of the machine that writes the country’s laws.
Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put the objection in one line: “Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone’s ethnicity.”
Hellbound and Down 