Steady EDI

The acronym in Britain is "EDI". "DEI" is American, the E stands for something different, those two letters are a universe, and the use of "DEI" in Britain is far more telling than a South African accent. Like an Australian or New Zealand accent, quite a lot of Reform UK voters have Marianne Overton's white South African accent, with Reform taking the votes of a high proportion of the people who spoke in each of those tones. I merely observe this, while wondering whom Donald Trump meant by Afrikaners, since Afrikaans is the first language of the majority of Coloureds, even if not of my cousins in the community of which that is most emphatically the name, and Coloureds are the majority of, so to speak, native speakers of Afrikaans. Trump may or may not know these things, but Elon Musk certainly does.

That said, Dame Andrea Jenkyns is opposed to Nigel Farage's assertion that Special Educational Needs were being overdiagnosed. The 10 years between them are a true generation gap. Farage may have been one of the last Boomers, but he is still of the school of thought that, "There was none of that in my day." A lot of us are highly critical of the policy response to anthropogenic global warming, but the people who deny its existence are something else. A lot of us wish that we had been more critical of the policy response to Covid-19, although we were right to have followed the medical advice while it stood, but the anti-vaxxers were something else, and many of them have mutated into deniers of the existence of SARS-CoV-2. There will always be, as there has always been, a debate to be had about immigration, but racists, including "race realists" or what have you, are something else. And something similar is emerging in relation to Special Educational Needs and Disability, by no means only in childhood, although it would be bad enough if it were.

Does the National Health Service spend £40 million per year on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion? If so, then that is peanuts to the NHS. Dame Andrea has already been famously unable to find a single EDI Officer in the employ of Lincolnshire County Council. And according to the TaxPayers' Alliance (so, if anything, an overestimate or an exaggeration), annual spending on all EDI roles across all local authorities in the entire country is £23 million, the crumbs of peanuts, 35p per person. Yet that money could indeed be better spent. On the inclusion of those of us who recognised that equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity; regional equality and regional diversity, and so on down within, for example, a county; the equal sovereignty of diverse states; and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. That would certainly be preferable to pursuing Zia Yusuf's doomed applications for injunctions, judicial reviews, and the rest, which would be liable to have the applicants banned from bringing any more such vexatious frivolities. Yusuf could afford these actions, so let him pay for them.