telegraph.co.uk
'Citizens advice service' launches to help employees in woke workplaces
By Tony Diver 25 January 2021 • 6:00am
4 minutes
A new “anti-woke” version of the Citizens Advice service to support workers threatened by the culture wars launches today.
The organisation, “Counterweight”, will “support people at work, school, and university who feel isolated and under threat from the imposition of anti-liberal policies and ideas,” its founders said.
The service was conceived by Helen Pluckrose, a British author who became concerned about the imposition of “unconscious bias training” and other forms of woke “critical social justice ideology” in the workplace.
“Think of Counterweight as Citizens Advice for the culture wars,’ Ms Pluckrose said. “We want to empower a groundswell of knowledgeable, compassionate, evidence-based opposition to woke extremism, by supporting people brave enough to defend liberal values in their day-to-day life.”
Counterweight has designed online materials that advise people who encounter “woke activism” and help them to make the case for “universalism, humanism and viewpoint diversity,” organisers said.
Ms Pluckrose said she first became concerned about the culture wars when she heard about a BME employee who was frustrated by emails from white colleagues apologising for their “privilege” and lamenting his “oppression”.
Another employee faced disciplinary action from their company after they refused to take part in unconscious bias training, she said.
The group’s launch comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed that an unconscious bias course for civil servants was to be scrapped after a Government review found little evidence that it works.
A Cabinet Office review of the training found that requiring employees to attend a course to explain social justice concepts such as white privilege and systemic oppression had no effect on equality in the workplace.
The training, which is designed to alert people to hidden prejudices that could affect their decision-making, was rolled out to nearly 170,000 staff across the civil service at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of more than £370,000.
A similar course for MPs was boycotted by Tory backbenchers including Ben Bradley, who called it “undemocratic”.
"What I doubt here is that these things are somehow buried deep in all of our subconscious, steering us at every turn, and that with the help of some genius ‘educator’ I can be cured of my unseen evil,” he said.
“I’m yet to see the evidence of it achieving a great deal, apart from big profits for the training company.”
Other unconscious bias training has been rolled out at Oxford and Cambridge universities and at the BBC, amid resistance from conservative commentators.
Will Knowland, a former teacher at Eton College, was sacked from his position last year after he refused to remove a video from his YouTube channel which challenged feminist theory on “toxic masculinity”.
He lost an appeal against his dismissal in December.
A launch video for Counterweight argues that “woke” activism is a “restrictive ideology” that judges people based on their gender, race and sex rather than their actions.
“This doctrine is often at odds with empirical findings that contradict its core principles, and there is little evidence that it solves the problems that it aims to fix,” the group said.
It promises to provide “resources to casualties of the culture wars”, including mental health support and “expert guidance”.
The group, which began as an online community of woke sceptics, launches on social media and a new website today.