An internal advertisement within Britain’s HMRC, seen by The Telegraph, seeking to fill a deputy chairman position for the tax collector’s LGBT+ staff network reportedly stated that the successful candidate would be given “20pc of your time to dedicate to network activities.”
“Your current role is not as important as your experience and drive to promote fairness,” the civil servants were told.
The paper identified at least three HMRC staff members as receiving their full pay while receiving the equivalent of one day off per week to focus on their role in the department’s Prism LGBT+ Network.
A whistleblower from the tax agency said that such staff members often use working hours to give presentations focussing on leftist gender ideology, including on what it means to be transgender and the importance of pronouns.
The unnamed HMRC civil servant, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, told the paper that the network is essentially comprised of “trans activists” who are “getting paid by the taxpayer to do peer-to-peer political activism.”
In one such session, which lasted 45 minutes, staff were told the differences between so-called cisgender, intersex, non-binary, and transgender individuals. They were additionally pressed to share their own pronouns to show their “allyship” towards transgender staff and were educated on gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie/zen”.
The HMRC defended the initiative, claiming that they are legally required under the Public Sector Equality Duty to promote issues facing groups of people with “protected characteristics”.
“By getting equality, diversity and inclusion right, we retain and recruit people with the skills we need and deliver effectively for our customers,” a spokesman for the tax collector said.
However, critics have maligned the agency for focusing bandwidth and dedicating taxpayer resources on woke initiatives rather than fulfilling its mandate to the public, with the HMRC failing to meet its annual target for telephone advice for taxpayers every year since 2017-2018.
Former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “Civil servants are not meant to involve themselves in politics and this is just another type of campaigning which ought not to be funded by taxpayers. We ought to learn from [Donald] Trump and stop all this costly nonsense.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage added: “This all has to end. A Reform government will end DEI lunacy.”
The HMRC is not the only public body in Britain to be committing cash towards promoting leftist ideology. A 2022 report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) found that the National Health Service was funding at least 493 staff networks, most of which focussed on LGBTQ+ or racial issues.
The report found that 108,807 staff hours were dedicated to such enterprises over the preceding three years at a cost to the taxpayer of £1,081,878.
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