Believe it or not, some judges in this country are starting to show signs of having a connection with reality and in possession of an outlook based on common sense. It’s hard to credit it, given the roll call this year of judges delivering over-lenient verdicts in regard to asylum seekers wanting to remain in Britain – often on highly dubious and sometimes ludicrous grounds. But it’s really happening. Change is afoot.
Believe it or not, some judges in this country are starting to show signs of having a connection with reality
This has become apparent not in the High Court or immigrant tribunals, the places where those notorious judgements are handed down, but in the less illustrious sector of employment tribunals.
Evidence of this trend was on display in the headlines over recent days. Reports recounted the case of a Nigerian support worker in South Yorkshire who had lodged a bias claim against his firm after a colleague had put a Dalek mug on his desk bearing the words: ‘You may think I am listening to you but in my head I am about to exterminate someone’. Joshua Aderemi, who came to the UK from Nigeria in 2022 on a student visa, lodged a health and safety discrimination complaint over the incident, while making other claims of race and disability discrimination. A judge at Sheffield Employment Tribunal Employment, however, decided that the mug was not intended to offend him. She dismissed this and all his other claims.
This story came only a day after a Cambridge employment judge decreed that asking a colleague about their ethnic background was not racist and can be ‘well-meaning’ and ‘genuine’. The case had been brought by an Indian Hindu who had sued her employers, St John Ambulance, after her manager asked her where she was from. In her conclusion, Judge Kate Hutchings said that it was important not to encourage a ‘culture of hypersensitivity’ in the office by placing legal liability on ‘every unfortunate phrase’.
Meanwhile, back in June another employment tribunal in London ruled that refusing to give a job to Chinese and Russian people in companies that dealt with issues of national security and require security clearance was not racist. Should this recent tendency continue, it would represent a significant hardening of attitudes in employment tribunals to cases presented to them on flimsy and vexatious grounds.
And no-wonder they’re losing their patience. A report in June by the campaign group Don’t Divide Us found that equality laws were causing racial discrimination lawsuits to ‘sky-rocket’. Between 2017 and last year the number of employment tribunals that included a race discrimination tripled, from 285 to 829. The reason for this surge, according to the director of Don’t Divide Us, Alka Seghal Cuthbert, was the 2010 Equality Act, which ‘handed inordinate power to those making malicious or bogus claims or to thin-skinned people willingly misinterpreting perfectly innocent comments or interactions.’
While such claims based on race had escalated, the report added, the number of successful cases remained more or less unchanged. This hasn’t stopped others making spurious claims – and with greater success – related to that other tenuous grievance of our times: ‘hurt feelings’. In June, we also read that an employment tribunal in Leeds found that the use of the word ‘lads’ in connection to a female executive at a farming and food production company amounted to ‘casual use of gender-specific language’ and could be legally regarded as ‘unwanted… given her account of how it made her feel’.
Recompense for ‘hurt feelings’ reached its apotheosis in May when an NHS worker in south London took her employers to court after a member of staff had compared her to Darth Vader, something that caused to her feel ‘unpopular’ and suffer from low mood and anxiety. The employment tribunal in Croydon found that the incident was a ‘detriment’, meaning that it caused harm or had a negative impact. She was awarded £30,000.
If the ‘Darth Vader’ ruling represented the undue seriousness now given in court to hurt feelings, then this year’s ‘Chicken Nuggets’ incident epitomises the inordinately lenient attitude of judges in cases pertaining to race and immigration.
In February, an immigration tribunal ruled that an Albanian criminal and illegal immigrant should not be allowed to stay in the UK partly because his ten-year-old son wouldn’t eat foreign chicken nuggets. That was but the most glaring and egregious verdict handed down by activist judges in a year that’s seen similarly deranged judgements reach us on an almost daily basis.
Optimistic proclamations that ‘woke is over’, which have proliferated this year, are at least starting to ring true in one sector of our institutions. And this change in tack by tribunal judges should serve as a salutary example to their colleagues in the High Court and immigration tribunals, areas where politicised judges detached from reality still have undue influence, and whose verdicts bring with them such unhappy consequences.
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