RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Would you feel comfortable applying for a job if you knew they were against you?

White men don’t have to sign up. This is a not-so-subtle message from a leading investment company looking to increase its quota of women and ethnic minority staff.

Jess McNichols, Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Corporate Citizenship on State Street, which employs 39,400 people worldwide, including Canary Wharf, in London – he said: “This is now in the front and the central place, it is on the list of results of every CEO.” They can take this as a threat, not a wish.

Senior managers who fail to reach goals for BAME and recruits will have their annual bonuses reduced.

Yesterday, the U.S.-owned company tried to withdraw, saying it would still employ white men, but only after being interviewed by a “different” group that includes at least one woman and one “color person”.

But be honest, guys. Would you feel comfortable signing up for a job when you know the chips are pre-loaded against you? Why bother?

Is it because I’m white?

And how many one-eyed executives on their triple all-round bonuses will be bold enough to hire a white man in front of a female or black candidate?

Some of us have seen this. In 1995, the introduction to my first book, You Couldn’t Make It Up, read, “I was born in 1954, white, male, and in Essex. In 20 years, any baby who responds to this description will be hidden among the bulls.

As usual, I exaggerated for the comic effect. But my attempt at satire foresaw a modern trend to blame flat whites for all the evil in the world.

For the record, I absolutely support any sincere attempt to ensure that the workforce reflects the people it is meant to serve. In the mid-1990s, I was presenting a late night show on London Weekend Television.

I remember walking through the building with my executive producer, Trevor Phillips, who became head of the Equality Commission and currently enjoys the third act as a brilliant TV breakfast presenter and newspaper columnist.

It didn’t take me long to realize that besides Trevor, almost the only other black faces were pushing brooms or working in the canteen. We tried to make the production team, audience and guests on the program as similar as possible to London. We didn’t always succeed, but we tried.

A quarter of a century later, 40 per cent of London’s population is from the background of BAME. It would be commercial madness for employers to reject the most qualified job candidates based on their skin color or gender. Local television news and dramas happening in London, such as Lennie James ’excellent series Save Me, properly reflect this demographics.

But the self-confident metropolitan ‘elite’, which largely controls everything from the government to the broadcast media, advertising and big business, tends to forget that the rest of the country is not very similar to London. This did not stop them from trying to impose their cynical vigilance everywhere.

For example, at least eight out of ten people still identify as ‘white Britons’ despite unlimited immigration over the last 20 years. According to the latest official statistics, only 2.7 percent identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

However, if you watch TV commercials, you could be forgiven for creating the impression that half the population is either black, gay, or in a mixed or same-sex marriage.

White, heterosexual men are routinely portrayed as imbeciles. This is not advertising, this is proselytization. Every police show features a powerful detective inspector, despite the fact that whenever you see a senior Scotland Yard officer giving a press report in front of Old Bailey, he’s almost always a bald white man.

But in TV Land, there is diversity to the end. In Vera, which takes place in rural Northumberland, even hunters are black.

Look, I’m not opposed to color-blind casting. It’s called ‘acting’. And as I said, I welcome any attempt to further genuinely integrate and combat discrimination.

However, the interests of women and ethnic minorities should not be promoted by demonizing white men, especially if research for the survey shows that poor white boys are the most economically and educationally disadvantaged group in the country.

When Greg Dyke, my old boss at LWT, became BBC director general, he famously described him as “disgusting white”. Although this has undoubtedly changed on the screen these days, the upper echelons are still quite pale and masculine. Careful, you might say.

So do multinational companies, political parties, police forces, advertising agencies, banks, financial companies and obese professional football cats that are currently selling their patronage vigilance – everything from the destructive Net Zero propaganda to ‘trans-rights’.

As I said before, when Daniel Levy, president of Spurs, voluntarily resigns in favor of a black lesbian from the municipal estate of Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm, I could actually accept the club ‘taking over the knees’, BLM, rainbow laces. is honest.

Similarly, when Ronald P. O’Hanley, the white president of State Street who was educated at Harvard Business School, has his bonus reduced and replaced by a black woman from 110th Street in Harlem, I will take his “inclusion, diversity, and corporatism doctrine. responsibilities seriously.

Until then, unfortunately, women and ethnic minorities do not have to register in most sessions everywhere.

Following the lifting of Covid’s restrictions, flights to the US resumed yesterday. This is a welcome incentive for airlines struggling to make up for the money they lost during the pandemic. They could do worse than copy the first Vietnamese billionaire who has just donated £ 155 million to Oxford’s Linacre College, which will now be renamed in her honor. Part of Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao’s property (common spelling) belongs to a low-cost airline that represented air hostesses in skinny bikinis. Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson never misses a trick. He could always persuade his stewardesses over long distances to throw in towels only in a two-piece swimsuit.

I’m sure I would have no problem convincing some of my more lavish male stewardesses to pull Borat-style mannequins. If this turned out to be popular, I could extend it to my Virgin Voyages cruisers.

Welcome aboard the Bikini Line!

Is this a big hippocampus or are you just making me happy? According to a new study, London black taxi drivers have a hyperdeveloped part of the brain that regulates memory.

This is thanks to Knowledge, a test that allows them to encyclopedically recall thousands of titles and the fastest routes around the city, which are now closed due to the crusade against Mayor Genghis Khan’s cars.

That doesn’t surprise me. On LBC radio, I worked with the great Fred Housego, the taxi driver who won Mastermind. None of his traffic reports of congestion on the Hanger Lane rotating system were complete without a vague reference to George III or how many bricks were needed to build Wembley Stadium in 1923.

Regardless of the rapidly disappearing Uber, it’s best to always use black taxis in central London. At least they know where they’re going.

Mention the hippocampus to the average mini-taxi driver and you’ll probably end up at the Hippodrome Casino on Charing Cross Road.

The RSPCA is investigating a video in which the hunter appears to have hit a horse. The incident was condemned by both animal welfare activists and the hunting lobby.

So this is Blazing Saddles canceled. Fans may remember Mongo riding into town at the wheel and equipping a horse with a right-hander outside the saloon. Where also stays Two-Ton Ted from Teddington, who drove a bakery van in Ernie (The Fastest Dairy in the West)? When Ted discovered Ernie’s stroller parked in front of Widow Sue’s house in Linley Lane, at number 22, he jumped down from his van. . .

Hot blood ran through his veins,

And he went to Ernie’s cart and didn’t half kick his horse.

Sounds like another job for the RSPCA.

How long before the walkers for Thomas The Tank Engine arrive?

Classes that violate statutes accuse the railways of spreading ‘colonialism’. It can only be a matter of time before they demand the cancellation of all trains forever. That’s if the Network Rail and ASLEF engineering departments don’t beat them.