In London Ambulance Service v Garrett, the tribunal (by a majority) found direct belief discrimination in aspects of the disciplinary process that followed an employee’s comments rejecting the concept of systemic racism: he claimed that his denial was a manifestation of his belief in equal treatment.
The EAT (HHJ Auerbach) said: not so fast. The belief Mr Garrett relied on (that all people should be treated equally regardless of colour or culture) was a normative belief about how people ought to be treated, whereas his denial of systemic racism was a descriptive belief about whether a social phenomenon in fact exists. A person could hold the treatment belief while equally believing systemic racism does exist, so the one neither flows logically from nor is “intimately linked” to the other (per Eweida v UK), so the denial could not be a manifestation of the protected belief.
Note: the EAT did not decide that denying systemic racism is incapable of being a protected belief. At the CMPH Mr Garrett broadened it to a belief in equal treatment so the point was never determined: the claimant simply lost because it wasn’t a manifestation of the belief he actually pleaded. The irony is that the claimant reframed his belief into something uncontroversially protected — and that reframing is what severed the link to what he actually said.
This isn’t really about whether employers won or lost. It’s about the boundary between holding a protected belief and what counts as manifesting it – a line that’s going to matter every time someone says something controversial and then claims it’s their philosophical belief talking.
Consistency with a belief isn’t manifestation of it.
