07-07-2025
Angela Rayner's banter police will suck what little joy we have left out of our lives
'The playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks in the workplace.' That's the official definition of 'office banter'. So you can see why it has to go – why Angela Rayner is doing everything in her power to bring about a 'banter ban' that will put an end to this perilous form of human connection.
In our stark, new, legalistic world, even the most innocent words are heavy with sinister subtext. I mean, 'playful'? That's an HR summons, right there. Then there's 'friendly', which in 2025 conjures up only one thing: Harvey Weinstein, in a bathrobe. As for 'teasing', you might as well skip HR, the lawsuit and the trial, you're going down.
Under the Deputy PM's Employment Rights Bill, which is currently working its way through Parliament, businesses would be forced to protect staff against such traumas – and by that, I mean the humorous and life-affirming daily exchanges that make communal existence in brick boxes bearable.
Failure to safeguard employees against offence caused by casual office chats about 'protected characteristics' such as race, sex or religion would mean that a worker could take a firm to a tribunal, it has emerged. Or facilitate that process, I should say. Because, even without Rayner's Bill in place, tribunal claims over work banter rose 45 per cent in 2021 alone. All of which begs the question: what could possibly go wrong?
Let's start with the wonderfully elastic concept of 'offence' – an abstraction that might have been invented for cynical, work-shy, opportunists the world over. The real beauty of 'offence' is that no third party will ever be qualified to judge what you happen to find offensive, so you can just throw it out there, like a grenade, and watch everyone freeze.
Whiteboards offend me. It's their whiteness. And their squeakiness. That birthday card featuring a fat, middle-aged lady drinking wine could be deemed terminally offensive both by fat, middle-aged lushes and skinny, young, teetotallers. Any joke about clothing basically pertains to gender; any joke about food or drink could be made out to be about race or religion. Is there any form of small talk that doesn't, even in an oblique way, refer to 'protected characteristics'? 'You look nice' certainly isn't safe. Honestly, it's amazing how much untapped offence there is out there, once you know how to look for it.
On the off chance that your subject matter passes the offence test, there is also always the possibility that you used 'harmful, triggering or emotive' language. It doesn't have to be intentional. For the purposes of the complainant, accidental will do just fine. And that, I'm afraid, takes us back to 'offensive'. Just last year, Lloyds Bank made itself the object of mass derision when it circulated guidance to employees cautioning against the use of the words 'guinea pig' and 'headless chicken' in the office: both apparently trauma-inducing for vegans.
The great irony here is that Rayner's Bill has supposedly been designed to boost productivity for British workers and grow the economy. I'd love to hear the logic. Because everyone else has done the maths. They know that employers, who are already bleeding out, will either feel pressured into putting employees through expensive DEI training or hiring the 'diversity officers' some firms see as the only way to guard against the scourge of the perma-offended. They see this as a clear stepping up of Labour's 'war on business' – and there is no universe in which that leads to growth.
As for productivity, we know – even without the endless studies that prove it – how beneficial happiness, connection and humour are. We have felt the boost prompted by a simple human exchange or bout of laughter in the middle of the working day. And perhaps one of the most infuriating aspects of these woke rules is the way they assume zero emotional intelligence on our part.
Yes, there will always be that one character who is a little too fond of innuendo in every workplace – the one who tends to misjudge and overstep (and I work very hard to maintain that role, I can tell you). But most people are well aware of the perimeters of propriety. They don't need some government-issued diktat to tell them to behave like a cyborg, to stifle their working relationships or kill off the enormous amount of joy that can be had through the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks. Otherwise known as 'banter'.
