At last! A judge rules discrimination as officers were passed over for job because they were WHITE

I have long since argued that we will never have true equality in this country until whites are as protected as blacks, heterosexuals as gays, males as females and old as young.

Positive discrimination in favour of one group is by definition negative discrimination against another. Merit alone should be the determining factor.

For several decades now we have seen increasing and undisguised favouritism towards certain groups and the slow strangling of meritocracy. Both major political parties have adopted positive discrimination with the inevitable result that the quality of parliamentarian has declined sharply. I personally witnessed a selection of a parliamentary candidate where, in order to obtain a balanced shortlist of equal numbers of men and women, we were told in terms that we could not select on merit.

More insidious still has been the slow but sure erosion of free speech to the point where people feel they cannot state their point of view without threat to their career prospects.

Of course the acceptable point of view is that dictated by the state or social media, demanding conformity with menaces. The laws against religious discrimination rarely protect Christians and there has been an underlying assumption that you can only suffer racial discrimination if you are black, that you can only suffer sexism if you are female and that victims of age discrimination are invariably the elderly.

The decision in the case of the three police officers gives a welcome clarity and a long overdue challenge to the obsessive drive to replace the criterion of merit with one of identity. The awards of compensation in such cases should be made with one eye on deterrence if the trend is to be reversed.

Next should come a serious scything of the expensive and divisive plethora of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion officers which now clutter up private and public sector alike.

In the last General Election only the Reform Party addressed this issue and that was not because the other manifestos ran out of space.

The current government has been in power for five minutes but is already attacking free speech. Not only is the law banning no platforming in universities to be dropped but pupils in schools are to be taught how to spot fake news on social media, a reasonable tool in safe hands but not in those of teachers who already instruct children that they can be any gender they like. Presumably any post stating that this is harmful could be categorised as fake news.

There is a very long way to go but this judgement and its concomitant publicity could be the first step.