The BBC has been slammed for spending £600,000 on staff members responsible for implementing “diversity and inclusion”.
Information gathered by a Freedom of Information (FOI) request exposed the eye-watering sum, and critics have blasted the broadcaster for spending excessive amounts on “woke nonsense”.
The BBC said it employs 15 members of staff in such roles, some of which are part-time positions.
Whilst the broadcaster did not give an exact figure for money spent on the roles, they did give salary ranges for the positions.
WATCH NOW: BBC branded ‘woke’ after Doctor Who episode
Based on the figures, the lowest estimate for cost per year is £678,071 and the upper is £1,116,796.
One of the positions includes a “creative diversity partner”, paid between £50,481 and £85,470 per year.
Between April 2021 and March 2024, the BBC is spending £100million on “diverse content”.
The broadcaster wants its production teams to be “at least 20 per cent diverse”.
It also wants “at least two individuals in senior decision-making roles” on productions to be from underrepresented groups: black or minority ethnic, working class or disabled.
The BBC requires all of its “suppliers to have a diversity and inclusion policy in place”, Charlotte Moore, chief content officer said.
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Sir John Hayes, the Conservative MP for South Holland and The Deepings told The Mail: “Given the BBC’s patchy record it’s about time it dropped all this stuff and concentrated on what the viewers and listeners really want which is high-quality programming.
“I think diversity and inclusivity sounds good in theory but in practice, it’s used as a vehicle for all kinds of horrors.”
Conservative MP Gareth Johnson added: “It’s so depressingly unsurprising from the BBC. They seem to be obsessed with wokeness rather than programme making.
“If the BBC spent a little more time concentrating on programme making and a little less time on being woke we would have better quality production from them.
“It’s astonishing the BBC spends so much money on diversity yet still gets so much wrong over the Israel/Hamas conflict.”
Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said: “What ‘diversity’ means at the BBC is people that look different, but all think the same way.
Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, has allocated £100m of its budget for ‘diverse content’
PA
“It means a privately educated daughter of an African diplomat who is pro-Palestinian and anti-Brexit is much more likely to get a job than a white working-class man who voted Leave and wants to call Hamas a terrorist organisation.”
The BBC was embroiled in another woke scandal over the weekend.
A number of Doctor Who viewers have insisted they’ll be boycotting the show following a number of “woke” and “cringe” scenes from the first episode.
Whilst the return of Catherine Tate and David Tenant was lauded by a number of Doctor Who fans, a number of plot lines in showrunner Russell T Davies’s The Star Beast have come under fire.
One scene in particular that has gone viral on social media is when Tennant’s Doctor was collared by trans character Rose, portrayed by Heartstopper’s Yasmin Finney, for “assuming” a furry fictional alien known as a Meep was a male.
Upon meeting the alien, the Doctor insists he can “help get him home” thanks to his time-travelling talents.
His presumption of the Meep’s gender prompts an irked Rose to interject and tell the Doctor: “You’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun?”
The Doctor apologises before asking the Meep their pronoun.
The uproar sparked by the scenes even led to the hashtag #RIPDoctorWho gaining traction on Saturday evening across social media.
