Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

David Goodhart’s fatal mistake in the eyes of his EHRC critics

David Goodhart

What is the Equality and Human Rights Commission for? It’s definitely not for the likes of David Goodhart, according to plenty of progressive types reacting to the news of Goodhart’s appointment as one of the EHRC’s commissioners. ‘Appointing the spectacularly ill-suited Goodhart to the EHRC is an awful move from the government,’ says the journalist Rachel Shabi. ‘The EHRC’s credibility plummets further,’ says Corbynista David Rosenberg.

Goodhart, it seems, has made the fatal mistake of being out of step with a long-established orthodoxy that has stacked the governance of our public institutions with left-leaning facsimiles. His views on the impact of mass immigration on established communities and the deleterious effects on social solidarity are particular grievances for his critics. 

His 2017 bestseller, ‘The Road to Somewhere’, drew a sharp dividing line between footloose metropolitan ‘anywheres’ and their antithesis, geographically and socially rooted ‘somewheres.’ His detractors howled ‘racism!’ They haven’t stopped howling since.

Goodhart is clearly a man who won’t ‘shut his mouth for the good of diversity’.

Ian Acheson
Written by
Ian Acheson

Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also Director of Community Safety at the Home Office. His book ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’ is out now.

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