HMRC lectures staff on “guilt of being British”

While taxpayers languish on hold for 23 minutes or more, HMRC staff have found time during office hours to explore their “guilt of being British”.

This week, it emerged that civil servants at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs hosted a remote listening seminar titled “The Guilt of Being British”, run by the HMRC Race Network. The hour-long session took place at 11am on a Wednesday, prime call-handling time. According to internal adverts, the discussion promised to explore “the emotional complexity of being South Asian and British”, including themes like “colonial guilt, pride, identity, and inherited trauma”. Staff were also invited to share personal stories about “career challenges”, “barriers, bias and expectations”.

How many actually joined this cathartic circle? Fewer than 0.1% of staff, says HMRC. But that’s beside the point. This wasn’t a lunchtime chat. It happened on the taxpayer’s clock. And the same taxpayer who’s told to self-serve online or endure Kafkaesque wait times now finds out that the department's priority is emotional healing over service delivery.

The political backlash was immediate. Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, called it “nonsense”, asking: “Is it any wonder the public hate dealing with HMRC?” She added: “Under my leadership, public bodies will be proud of Britain, not ashamed of it.” Jacob Rees-Mogg was more blunt: “It is peculiar that people who hate their country want to run it.”

The optics are hard to defend. HMRC’s performance is at what MPs call “an all-time low”, with nearly 40,000 callers last year cut off after waiting over 70 minutes. Meanwhile, civil service insiders told the Daily Mail that these DEI-driven “staff networks” have become political playgrounds for activists. “They operate without scrutiny,” one said, “and treat the workplace like their personal therapy centres.”

This is the core problem. Taxpayer-funded departments, failing in their basic duties, are now hosting in-house struggle sessions on national guilt. These events may be couched in soft HR language - storytelling, identity, reflection - but they reflect a hard truth: the civil service is no longer neutral. It's becoming politicised by proxy, via network-driven ideology that evades formal accountability.

HMRC insists the seminar had “no effect” on call-handling performance. But it’s not just about capacity. It’s about priorities. The modern state can’t answer the phone, but it can host a circle of introspection about empire.

Welcome to progressive Britain, where your call is important to us, just not as important as our feelings.