Two white men in the media lost their jobs. Sound the alarm

I don’t know about you, but I’ve absolutely had enough of identity politics and people playing the victim when they face setbacks in life. I can’t imagine what it must be like being an employer, unable to make a single human resources decision without wondering whether you’re going to be sued or splashed on the front page of a tabloid for discrimination. Has it not occurred to people that sometimes it’s not about race or gender? The state we’re in, paralysed by political correctness – you just can’t sack a white man these days.

No really, that wasn’t some gotcha false equivalence, there is a new middle-brow version of “foreigners are stealing our jobs” – and it’s black and minority ethnic people and women allegedly coming for that most-threatened of species: the white man working in media. As we all know, the media industry in the UK is predominantly populated by people who got there entirely on merit, which somehow seems to have randomly overlapped with the fact that those people are also predominantly white and male. But no more.

The BBC, in particular Radio 4 and BBC2, those bastions of diversity and pan-class representation, have recently come under fire for allegedly sacking two white men to make way for more women and people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Jon Holmes was “axed” from radio comedy show The Now Show according to the Daily Mail (his contract wasn’t renewed) and the services of Martin Hughes-Games were “no longer required” and was “sidelined” from nature shows Springwatch and Autumnwatch (he was told he would have to share the main lineup).

Look, we’ve all done that thing where we blame others for us not doing well at work. That woman in HR who may have overheard you gossiping about her in the kitchen, the IT guy who you snapped at once and who you suspect threw you under the bus in your 360 review, that contractor who you’re sure is actually trying to destroy you so they can get your full-time job. It’s fine. It’s human. No one wants to admit that doing your job competently doesn’t make you completely indispensable and irreplaceable.

But to blame the intangible forces of diversity targets, especially when nearly all industries and professions in the UK are woefully poor on setting them and meeting them, is really quite desperate. It is an urban legend that seems to have survived no matter how little evidence there is of it in real life. These cackling job-eating zombies of colour marching into the peaceful white neighbourhoods of the employed, tearing up work contracts and terrorising bosses into giving them an interview – they do not exist. But you wouldn’t know it from seeing how this epidemic of two white men being sort-of-fired-but-not-really was covered.

If there is any doubt that the establishment not only objects to more diversity but is willing to bend the truth to meet the world view of those who run it, just look at how these stories have been reported. The angle was fixed and the story adjusted to meet it.

The headline BBC Presenter sidelined for being “too white and middle class” was followed by the text: “Hughes-Games, the wildlife presenter, is to be sidelined from the BBC’s much-loved nature shows to make way for someone less white and middle class, he has suggested.”

He has “suggested”. All you have to do is “suggest”, and there is a ready media to spin your implication into fact that the politically correct liberal elite remoaners are out to get you, even though you’re brilliant at doing your job because you’re the best person qualified to do it, and replaced with a less-qualified “diversity person”.

I also have a suggestion. I don’t want to be unkind, but sometimes maybe if you’re just fine at your gig and have been doing it for a while, it’s OK for your employer to want to shake things up a little bit, especially when they’re not actually terminating you mid-contract, and in Hughes-Games’s case, when you’re not actually being fired at all. And you know what? It’s OK if your employer wants to shake things up by hiring a woman or someone from an ethnic minority who can be a woman and a person of colour and simultaneously good at the job. It is possible. This assumption that white men are uniquely qualified and will only be replaced by an incompetent who is only going to get on by virtue of their gender or colour is not only wrong, but maddeningly ironic. The magic combination of maleness and whiteness are still, by an incalculable quantum, likely to turbo-boost any career, even those of mediocrities.