The day DEI went up in smoke

What’s in a word? ‘Equality’. ‘Equity’. It’s the sort of thing that Channel 4 newsreaders find impossible to understand. Surely they’re the same thing, aren’t they? And even if they aren’t then what kind of pedant would keep trying to point it out? What difference does it make anyway?

Well, quite a lot. Potentially the difference between your home burning down and it not burning down.

In the past couple of weeks residents of some of the most ‘progressive’ neighbourhoods in America have had, in real time, an unfortunate crash course on the difference between these two words and are now raising questions on which has been prioritised. The wildfires that have destroyed the Palisades and other upmarket areas of Los Angeles seem to have been caused by many things. Locals report repeated sightings of arsonists, though the authorities seem to have taken a forgiving approach to the odd homeless – sorry, ‘unhoused’ – person walking around with a blowtorch. The winds have certainly whipped matters along. But the real story of the disaster, which has already caused billions of dollars worth of damage, is the response to the fires. Or rather the non-response, specifically from the people whose job is meant to be putting out fires.

Residents who have lost their homes and belongings have told me in the past week that they didn’t see even one firetruck in their neighbourhood from the moment the fires got close to the moment their whole area burned to the ground. Now it seems that people are finally putting two and two together and reaching that unfair, deeply inequitable number of four.

For instance, they have noticed that there seemed to be no water in the main reservoir –a reservoir that was meant to be full after an unusually large amount of rain fell in the past year.