Everyone else - including the white working-class kids the same government claims to champion - can take whatever is left. They've essentially built a public-sector caste system.

The Cabinet Office's defence is the same tired formula used across the British state. The scheme, it says, complies with the "positive action" provisions of the Equality Act. In plain English: race, disability status and class background are now official sorting criteria for who gets accelerated towards the top of the machine that writes the country's laws.

Reform UK's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put the objection in one line: "Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone's ethnicity."

"Positive action" is the legal fig leaf. Positive discrimination is illegal in Britain. Positive action is the workaround: employers may favour a candidate from an under-represented group if they are "as qualified" as the other person. In practice, the ringfence comes first. Two-thirds of the places are already spoken for before a single application is scored on competence.

The Civil Service already runs dedicated fast-tracks for favoured identities. META - the Minority Ethnic Talent Association - sits on top of the Future Leaders Scheme. DELTA does the same for disabled staff. Mentoring, mock interviews, senior sponsorship and extra visibility are reserved for those groups. The leaked 66 per cent figure is simply that architecture made explicit: most of the taxpayer-funded pipeline is not open competition. It is a reserved lane.

Official numbers make the "under-representation" story look thinner by the year. Civil Service Statistics 2026 put ethnic minority representation at a record 19.2 per cent, against 19.6 per cent of the economically active working-age population.

Declared disability among civil servants is now 18.4 per cent - above the national working-age average. The gap that remains is concentrated at the Senior Civil Service, where ethnic minority staff sit at 10.6 per cent. The official answer is not to test harder for the best people. It is to fence off two-thirds of the development scheme and call it justice.

This is not an isolated HR experiment. Britain's domestic intelligence service has already told white students, including poor ones, not to bother applying.

For the 2026/27 academic year, MI5's Summer Intelligence Internship is confined to people "from a Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background and from a socially or economically disadvantaged background."

The agency's own careers page states: "We're confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce." White British applicants - even those from the most deprived postcodes - cannot submit a form. A narrow "White other" box exists for Romany Gypsy, Scottish Travellers or Irish Travellers. Ordinary white Britons are out.