Liz Truss launches culture war on equalities via Foucault
Equalities Minister Liz Truss has launched another Tory Culture War on equalities in a speech on 17th December.
It didn’t of course actually say much specific except that the Tories plan to end unconscious bias training in the Civil Service.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness
One entertaining passage referred to the late French philosopher Michel Foucault who died in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish has relevance in 2020 in particular. However this wasn’t what Truss was on about.
Unfortunately the reference has been deemed to be party political and not allowed in an official speech and cut from the version now on-line. The text is below.
Foucault was a student of another French philosopher Louis Althusser, the nemesis of English Marxist historian E P Thompson. Indeed in the Poverty of Theory, Thompson’s attack on Althusser, Foucault does get a passing mention.
Thompson is critical of both Althusser and Foucault’s structuralism. He argues:
One can study how concepts are engendered one after the other within determined categories. But neither time itself nor, consequently history, can be made the object of a concept’
Thompson’s point is that it is not structures but people that make history.
Truss’s argument is that equalities agendas have focused too much on polices and statements and not enough on grappling with the problems faced by individual people.
No doubt but that doesn’t mean the policies need to be abandoned. They are there as a way of holding power to account if it doesn’t actually act on them.
Judging by the very unequal composition of employees in Truss’s own department it could be a good place to start.
Truss on Foucault
“While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write.
“These ideas have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.
“In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.
“Rather than promote policies that would have been a game-changer for the disenfranchised like better education and business opportunities, there was a preference for symbolic gestures.”
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