Last week Westminster Council placed an advert for a job paying up to £64,000 for a 36-hour week. In the small-print came this caveat: “…while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a Global Majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit.”
Let me translate that for you. “You can apply for this job if you’re white. But your chances of success (by dint of the skin colour you were born with) are virtually zero.”
Is this reverse racism? Plenty of people online thought so. Is it an outlier? Not really. In recent years we’ve seen how recruitment has been skewed to suit an ideological agenda that puts racial identity above actual ability.
It’s very big business. According to the management consultancy McKinsey, organisations spent $9.5bn in 2023 on what has become known as D.E.I. The acronym stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. But when applied to someone over-promoted as a ‘diversity hire’, it might just as well mean ‘Didn’t Earn It’.
Where did it come from? It started life, like so many strains of the Woke Mind Virus, on US college campuses. But it was given steroids by the corporate reaction to the killing of the American felon, George Floyd. Do you remember the mass hysteria in HR departments which followed? In the States, Coca Cola was said to have urged its thousands of employees to ‘be less white’. But the UK wasn’t immune. At Sky TV, where I was then working, panicked senior white executives issued emails dripping with self-abasement. Within months staff were given ‘inclusive language’ guides and forced to attend ‘unconscious bias’ courses.
It wasn’t just private sector firms. Taxpayer’s cash has been splashed on DEI too. Last year, for instance, staff at a West Midlands NHS Trust were told to “admit they have white privilege” as part of a training session. Of course, it’s one thing to be made to sit through an unconscious bias module. I have (when the instructor asked whether anyone had any questions I still regret not asking: “how much are you charging for this vacuous guff?). But the mania for DEI has had real world consequences.
Remember the scandal in 2022 of white pilots missing out on jobs because of RAF diversity targets? Or the story last year about the Royal Navy taking sailors off their main duties and redeploying them as ‘diversity and inclusion officers’, even though our surface fleet is chronically understaffed?
Well, you may have missed it, but the worm has turned. Take a company like Walmart. In the wake of urgings from the (now discredited) Black Lives Matter movement, the company went all-in on D.E.I. Shopfloor employees were told to ditch their ‘white supremacy thinking’, even though many of those working in stores were earning a fraction of what their diversity overlords were pulling in. Now though, with the Trump administration making clear its opposition, Walmart is ditching DEI. Not just Walmart, but blue-chip companies like Boeing, John Deere, McDonalds and Amazon.
Jobs should be given on merit not diversity, says Colin Brazier
GETTY
And in an extraordinary interview on the Joe Rogan podcast last week Mark Zuckerberg announced his company was ditching DEI programmes. The boss of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, drove home the point by stressing there would no longer be tampons available in any Meta men’s toilets.
Obviously, the arrival of Trump is key. But in truth, DEI was in retreat even before the Donald won in November. In 2023 the US Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether elite American universities like Harvard could legally use ‘affirmative action’ to give places to black students instead of better qualified Asian scholars. The court found against the colleges.
Even in corporate circles the very idea at the core of DEI – that adopting its strictures will help the bottom line – has been debunked. Last year an authoritative study found that increasing the ethnic diversity of executives did not improve profits. And what about those who notionally benefit? Many non-white candidates would rather pass on help getting a job given via DEI. Who wants to be seen as the person in the office there for reasons of tokenism not merit?
Will the UK follow in the wake of the US? We can only hope. But don’t hold your breath. No matter how many billions are trimmed from public sector diversity programs in America by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s hard to think Starmer’s Labour will follow suit.
But the end of DEI is coming. People know the Diversity it offers is intolerant of diversity of thought. That the Equity is proclaims is not about equality, but insisting that all outcomes are the same. And inclusion? Just try getting a public sector job with the ‘wrong’ opinions (observe the recent case of a housing official allegedly fired for supporting Reform).
Most of all, the recent focus on rape gangs is a counterpoint to where this all took off with the death of George Floyd. His death was weaponised by those who said that to be white was to be incapable of being a victim of racism. An analysis impossible to sustain in light of events in Oldham and elsewhere.