Rees-Mogg accuses Treasury of assuming ethnic minorities aren’t as clever as white people
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused the Treasury of treating ethnic minorities “with contempt and condescension.”
Speaking on GB News he said: “Where would you expect a bastion of intelligence, brightness, cleverness to be? Where the biggest brains in this country foregather to give us their wisdom and their thoughtfulness?
“Well, you would have hoped that it would be the Treasury, and since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the middle of the 19th century, people were employed in the civil service on merit.
“They used to be given jobs because they were mates of the people in office. That went, and we used to have a civil service that was thought to be of the highest calibre.
“But what would you expect people in the Treasury to be able to do? Would you expect them to be able to build sandcastles or make mud pies, or perhaps even be experts in the study of ancient Greek?
“No, I think probably not. I think you’d expect them to be able to do a little bit of maths, to be able to add up, to be able to do sums, to know what a discounted cash flow is, to understand compound interest.
“You wouldn’t necessarily need them to tell you that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, though I don’t think that’s too difficult.
“But not if you’re the Treasury as it’s currently run, because the Treasury only wants to employ people who can’t pass a maths test.
“Why? Because it’s discriminatory. They weren’t getting a balance that they wanted from ethnic minorities.
“But this is dreadful, it’s outrageous, it’s so, so stupid. First of all, it assumes that people from ethnic minorities aren’t as clever as those from the white part of the population, and this is just not true.
“If they’re failing to get the numbers that they want who are good enough at maths, that’s not because ethnic minorities are stupid, it’s because the Treasury isn’t attracting the right people.
“And that may be they’re not offering enough money. It may be that they think there are better jobs to get elsewhere. It may be that they think the Treasury is an utterly useless institution and it’s not worth working for.
“But that requires different changes. Saying that we will lower the standards is bad for the economy, it’s bad for the way the Treasury is run, but worst of all, it treats ethnic minorities with contempt and condescension, because it assumes they’re not bright enough to pass.
“This cannot be true, and it is, in my view, the height of folly that an institution that once used to be in control of the greatest currency and economy in the world now doesn’t want to do the two times table.”
