It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the Treasury is riddled with idiots who struggle to count and suffer from chronic ‘blob’ brain. But today The Spectator enlightened Britain as to one reason why this desperately sad state of affairs came to pass.
In the wake of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, Whitehall equalities zealots decided that not enough graduates joining the department were ‘diverse’. Their solution? To appease the woke ideologues saturating airwaves and column inches at the time by scrapping the ‘Numerical Reasoning Test’ from HMT’s graduate scheme application process. The geniuses at the department even had the temerity to boast about a rise in diverse hires after the test was abandoned in 2020.
While all eyes in Westminster today have been laser-focused on the Defence Investment Plan, the story has still managed to cause quite the stir. Mr S’s phone has been alight with messages from MPs – yes, even within Labour – furious at the revelation. Politicians have also taken to social media to vent at this most egregious instance of woke gone nuts.
Tory MP Jack Rankin said: ‘Truly through the looking glass stuff, the public sector is so sick. They’ve sat around and decided, without dissent, that ethnicity is more important than numeracy in appointments to the Treasury? We must change this thinking – top to bottom.’ Good stuff. Mr S would, however, politely remind Rankin that one Boris Johnson was prime minister at the time of this madness.
Also commenting on the revelation, Labour’s Dr Zubir Ahmed fumed:
I’m sorry but this is insane and helps no one.
Another Labour MP privately told Mr S: ‘I think the whole “landyard class” thing is a much bigger problem than is often appreciated.’ Reform’s Robert Jenrick quipped: ‘Explains a lot.’
Lord Agnew, Chair of the Lords Numeracy for Life Committee and former Treasury Minister, said: ‘This is symptomatic of a country that has quietly given up on numeracy as a national priority. If the Treasury itself doesn’t value numerical rigour, what hope is there for the rest of the public sector let alone the country as a whole? You cannot fix growth, productivity, or our public finances with a generation that has been let off the hook on basic arithmetic.’
The disclosure that DEI trumps knowing how to count, at least according to our intrepid mandarin class, raises serious concerns. If Treasury officials no longer need to pass a Numerical Reasoning Test, it is little surprise the nation’s finances are in such a state. And truly, it’s no wonder HMT’s sums never seem to add up – it stopped asking whether its recruits could do them in the first place.
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