Imagine if this column broke off mid-flow because I had to go and “work on myself”. Because becoming a Better Human Being – one who was aware of my unconscious bias and privilege, fully inclusionary and 100 per cent healthy, inside and out – was more important than any article, level of productivity or job. 

And if you found yourself staring at a blank article on your screen, it would be because I’d been too busy self-flagellating at a diversity workshop/seminar/training day. You know, for the greater good.

Andrew Scarborough doesn’t have to imagine such a preposterous scenario. The 36-year-old project support administrator at NHS Health Education England (HEE) is living this reality daily. All he wants is to get on with the job he’s being paid to do, yet the barrage of woke emails and bulletins his bosses keep sending is making this hard, he told a Sunday paper. And when staff were “invited” to a virtual four-and-a-half-hour “white privilege” course, to address “unconscious bias” and “white fragility”, this civil servant decided to blow the whistle on HEE’s culture of “toxic positivity”.

“There’s constantly this dialogue on diversity and inclusion over anything else,” revealed Scarborough, whose grandfather was from Somalia, and who really didn’t appreciate allegedly being called a racist when he queried the time and money being spent on turning HEE’s employees into Better Human Beings.

You would think the NHS might have more pressing concerns right now, what with a pandemic, the record six million people who are currently in need of treatment, and the 300,000 who have been waiting over a year for that treatment. Then again, you’d also expect our embattled health service to prioritise nurses over fatuous woke missionaries like the “Workforce, Diversity and Inclusion Lead” that the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust put out an advertisement for last week, the “Matron for Well Being, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” that the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust is on the look-out for and the “Consultant in Gender Healthcare” – expected to help to “depathologise gender diversity” – that they’re after down in Devon.

But with salaries for these non-jobs between £47,126 and £114,003, it’s quite clear how little those £33,000-a-year-nurses are valued in comparison. Which has got to sting. Though not as badly as the fact that while you’re being taught which pronoun to use, no one’s tending to that octogenarian’s bed sores.

Even the British Army isn’t spared this bilge. Last Tuesday, “all non-essential and non-operational activity” was halted between 10am and 4pm for a “culture and inclusion” training day. “Operation Teamwork” was designed to “put an electric shock” through the army’s chain of command, although from what I gather it was more successful in stoking the simmering fury spreading across a force sick of being patronised. Oh, and giving Putin (not known for his humour) his biggest belly laugh of the year.

When did the workplace stop being a place where jobs were carried out and become some kind of woke finishing school (where you get rapped across the knuckles for using the wrong style of address), cum church (ready to dole out spiritual guidance you haven’t asked for and don’t want), cum women’s health centre? Because in their desperate attempts to be helpful – and virtue-signal – companies like the British accounting giant PwC even started offering “menopause training” to staff last year. This, in order to “break the taboo around discussing the subject in the workplace” and convince “colleagues who are not suffering from the menopause to become ‘allies’ to those that are”.

And at the weekend, top family law firm Burgess Mee became the first company in Britain to hire a “fertility officer”, who will help dispel the notion among junior female lawyers that becoming a mother is career suicide.

Quick question: is anybody getting any work done? And if so, how? All this is very commendable, and certain workplace cultures were indeed either toxic or outdated and in need of overhauling, but can this not be done sensibly? Without pathologising normal life? Because how does that help? It doesn’t.

Just ask the Sri Lankan friend of mine who now regularly has his skin colour pointed out in work meetings – “I mean as a BAME male, you must feel that…” – by over-schooled ‘diversity and inclusion’ zealots; or the women who, as grateful as they are for the support, would quite like to keep the precise state of their wombs out of the office and their gender off the agenda.

Let’s not forget that for decades people did manage to go to and from work without taking part in any lofty, overarching self-improvement scheme or being forced to embrace any particular ideology. Crazy notion, but how about we focus on becoming Better Human Beings in our own time, and keep the workplace a place, you know, where people actually get some work done?