Many of us in Britain are cheering on President Trump as he moves to fire all Government staff working on Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) schemes.
Over the last fifteen years or so, both American and British cultures have become infected with the DEI virus which, in contrast to its stated mission, has made our society more divided, less equal and less inclusive.
Anyone who has worked in the public sector, set foot in a university or even filled in a medical form will know just how pervasive ‘DEI culture’ has become.
When I was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2019, one of the first meetings that new MPs were expected to attend was a training session entitled ‘valuing everyone.’
During the session we were invited to ‘check our privilege’ by completing a form to analyse whether we were oppressors or the oppressed. Been to private school? You’re an oppressor. White, male, heterosexual? A hat-trick of unearned privilege.
The only ‘outcome’ of this ridiculous waste of time was to make individuals feel guilty about aspects of their lives over which they had no control. Goodness knows how much Parliament—or rather the taxpayer—paid for such a worthless scheme.
Of course, DEI madness is not just infecting Parliament; no public sector organisation is immune from its grasp. From civil servants signaling their ‘trans-allyship’ through multi coloured lanyards to public libraries promoting ‘Pride’ month, not a week goes by without our schools, hospitals and even police celebrating another ‘awareness’ day in honour of some obscure progressive cause.
Some aspects of DEI are frankly hilarious, says Miriam Cates
GB News
Some aspects of DEI are frankly hilarious. A good friend of mine was recently sitting in a hospital waiting room when a nurse approached the elderly man sitting next to her and asked him if there was any chance he might be pregnant.
A few years ago, when checking in with my daughter for an appointment at Sheffield Children’s hospital the sign-in screen instructed my then nine-year-old child to complete a “gender identity” survey and asked whether she had been “misgendered” today.
But of course the real life implications are deadly serious. If even medical professionals don’t know – or pretend they don’t know – the difference between males and females, then it’s no wonder trust in the NHS is at rock bottom.
Far from increasing opportunities, DEI is compounding our national problems with productivity and economic growth. When I was an MP, I heard from constituents who were small business owners and couldn’t get contracts with the local council unless they could prove their ‘diversity credentials’.
And we are seeing increasing numbers of organisiations actively discriminating against white people, or straight people, or men, because they want a more ‘diverse’ workforce. For Britain to thrive, we need jobs to be filled by those who are most well qualified regardless of their personal characteristics; DEI is actively preventing this.
And at a time when public sector budgets are so squeezed, spending on DEI is an indulgence we cannot afford. UK public authorities are thought to spend over £500 million of taxpayer money a year on diversity and inclusion jobs, and yet not a single one of these positions improves productivity.
And far from reducing discrimination in the workplace, there is some evidence that DEI training can make things worse as this kind of force-fed moral preaching can increase bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy.
DEI policies have had a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace.In 2021, Lloyds Bank manager Carl Borg Neal was sacked after asking a sensible question to his trainer in a “Race Education” course.
DEI has also been a disaster for child safeguarding.
When I visited a local hospital, I saw a poster on the wall of the children’s A&E waiting room asking “Are you aged 0-28 and identify as part of our LGBTQIA+ community? Our public health team wants to talk to you” Age zero?! What exactly is a ‘trans baby’ or a ‘Queer’ three-year-old? And why do grown adults–strangers–want to talk to them?
There’s nothing good about DEI. At heart, it is a neo-Marxist ideology, seeking to overthrow our democratic meritocracy and replace it with an authoritarian approach where the “oppressed” become “oppressors”.
Conservative-minded people certainly believe that everyone should have opportunities, but only the naïve and the brainwashed think that it’s possible – or even desirable – for everyone to achieve the same outcomes.
Unfortunately, unlike in the US, DEI is alive and strong in the UK. One of the reasons for this is that the ideology is embedded in law dating back from Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
As far back as 1998, New Labour’s Human Rights Act and judicial reforms embedded the decisions of the overbearing European Court of Human Rights in British statute. This paved the way for the weaponisation of human rights that has turned large sections of the civil service into activists.
In 2004, the Gender Recognition Act introduced the legal fiction that men can become women. The cherry on the New Labour cake was the 2010 Equality Act, which turbocharged the embedding of identity politics into our public institutions, creating a culture that sees people not as individuals but as members of competing groups. Crucially, Section 149(1) of the Act – the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) – transformed public bodies into political activists.
Many of us are appalled by employers that openly seek to discourage white job applicants, schools that teach children ‘gender is fluid’ and hospitals that require female staff to undress in front of male colleagues. But these are not examples of organisations ‘going rogue’, rather they are (perhaps misguided) attempts to adhere to the PSED.
Under the Equality Act, it is no longer enough for institutions to ensure that they don’t discriminate against someone because of their age, sex, or race. The PSED demands public bodies must proactively ‘eliminate discrimination’ and ‘advance equality’.
Unlike in America, where the President can issue executive orders to shut down DEI, equivalent reforms in the UK will require extensive detangling of the Blarite legal knotweed, with a comprehensive programme of reform to repeal the Equality Act, GRA, and HRA. Such reforms should aim to return the UK to a position where every individual is equal under the law, and where our public institutions act as conservators of a shared national culture rather than activists against it.
I hate to be a pessimist but there is absolutely no possibility of these reforms happening under the Labour Party, whose progressive wing is committed to further embedding DEI in law through their proposed race equality act. However it should be a matter of priority for both Conservative Party and Reform UK to draw up detailed proposals for wide ranging repeal after the next election.
In the meantime, how do we fight the battle against DEI? Brave people in ordinary jobs can challenge poorly evidenced diversity schemes or demands to use preferred pronouns. We can all speak out against the idea that there is any sort of consensus behind DEI. And brilliant organisations like the Free Speech Union can continue to defend those unfairly accused of falling foul of the woke mob. And we should never underestimate the power of mockery – whether it’s a joke about 100 genders or identifying as a postbox, highlighting the absurdities of DEI is one of the best ways to loosen its grip.