The Creative Diversity Network has been trumpeting its latest initiative – Project Diamond – which will monitor the gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity of those who work on TV programmes like EastEnders and Coronation Street.
According to the Guardian “all key staff, from actors to sound technicians, will be asked about their gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity via a confidential, encrypted computer system.”
DIAMOND is now live and will tell us 'Who’s on TV?' & 'Who makes TV?' with details never seen before. https://t.co/KVR37IjktK #CDNdiamond
— cdn (@tweetCDN) August 22, 2016
This dangerous obsession with personal information is a clear attempt at social engineering.
Here’s the proof: CDN executive director Amanda Ariss said these details will help to “create an accurate picture” of who works in television today. She said: “This is a big tool to help us speed up diversity and do it better. Everyone agrees the more detailed the data is the stronger the driver for action is.”
Apparently, as soon as a show is commissioned, Project Diamond will swing into action. Each workforce will be emailed a set of diversity questions and the monitoring can begin.
Where will this end? It all sounds suspiciously like a box-ticking exercise. The logical conclusion is that if the CDN deems there are an insufficient number of gay or bisexual people working on a particular programme, for example, it will name and shame the programme.
But whose business is the sexual preference of a TV sound technician? And how does the TV technician’s sexual preference have anything to do with his or her ability to do their job?
The risk of all this is that appointments will in future be made not on the strength of skills and experience but to conform with the wishes of the CDN and its backers.
I thought the whole point about 21st century Britain was that we didn’t need to highlight the differences between individuals any more. Apparently I was wrong.
But doesn’t the militant monitoring by the CDN serve to strengthen those differences rather than create a greater sense of unity?
I was also struck by something else Ariss said:
“The whole point of Diamond is about transparency. It’s unprecedented the amount of details that will be in the public domain – it’s far more than for any other industry.”
Taking the word “transparency” as a cue, I checked to see who the CDN’s directors are. They include none other than BBC director-general Tony Hall. I had no idea of this. Companies House records show he became a director almost 18 months ago, in April 2015.
But nowhere in Hall’s personal BBC or House of Lords register of interests does he declare this. It’s not included in his Who’s Who entry either.
The BBC, in common with other broadcasters (none of which rely on public money) even bankrolls the CDN, which receives £239,000 per year. The BBC is understood to give the lion’s share of this cash.
Why is Hall showing such a lack of transparency in this matter? Anyone would have thought he was uncomfortable with the CDN’s tactics.
