Firepersons urged to hide light under a bushel

If your house were on fire, how worried do you think you would be about the gender, faith, sexual orientation or hair colour of the person doing their best to put it out?
If you needed to be carried, dragged or otherwise physically removed from a burning building, how desperate would you be to know the extent and intensity of the diversity training the person saving your life had enjoyed in the previous 12 months?
These are not rhetorical questions. They actually need to be addressed and answered.
If the Lincolnshire Fire Service is to be believed, the thorny problems that firefighters have to confront are to do with gender and faith; not the physical strength or mental ability needed to save life, limb and home.
So, they have splurged precious time and money designing a range of clothing which does not, apparently, compromise Moslem restrictions on dress and public modesty in order to attract more female members of that faith into the fire service.
Take a long moment to consider the sheer lunacy of this proposition if you really want to appreciate the damage that the PC culture is doing to our society.
Like most Fire Services, Lincolnshire does not struggle to attract would be firefighters. In fact, they have candidates queuing up for the job. The big problem is that they're the wrong type of candidate; white, male and, like most of the population, either irreligious or CofE. All of which, from the standpoint of the Lincolnshire Fire Service, disqualifies them from applying. What they desire, above all, are female firefighters and, preferably, female firefighters of a Muslim persuasion. They have quotas to fill and Brownie points to earn. Hence the lady Muslim firefighter's uniform complete with all-enveloping skirt and blouse and a hoodie that shields the face and covers the hair.
Now, Lincolnshire is not the South of England and, although it attracts its fair share of immigrants, they tend to be agricultural workers drawn from Eastern Europe; Poles, Czechs, Estonians and the like. Not too many of a Muslim bent, in other words. So, no meaningful argument can be made for the need for more Muslims - male or female -to be recruited to achieve some bureaucratically contrived racial balance.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were some Muslims who might be interested in firefighting as a career - and that some of them were female. Now, here is where the conundrums really start to roll.
If these women's beliefs were orthodox enough to welcome a westernised version of the burkah as a uniform, they would have husbands of an equally orthodox bent. And these men would be the last people on earth to allow their wives to take a job that involved direct, unchaperoned, contact with men every working day.
On the other hand, no self-respecting woman - Muslim or otherwise - would seriously entertain the notion of doing the tough, physically demanding job of a fire fighter wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. Like their counterparts in the Police and the Armed Forces, they would want to wear clothes that were practical, comfortable and suited to the rigours of the role. That takes our mock-burkah out of the equation straight away.
What this sorry tale tells us is that the Lincolnshire Fire Service, like so many of our traditional services, has been infiltrated and taken over by the PC tendency. It's main purpose is no longer to provide protection for life and property but a career path for social engineers whose only goal is self-advancement and aggrandisement. The day is not that far off when people's lives are lost because some PC idiot prevents firefighters actually confronting a fire until it has burned itself out because of Health & Safety issues. Don't bet against it being someone from the Lincolnshire Service who issues that command.