DEI isn’t dead – in Britain
it’s burgeoning!
In the United States, Trump has declared that the woke dogma
has had its day. But it lives unchallenged in the UK
Annabel DenhamColumnist and Deputy Comment Editor
21 January 2025 5:24pm GMT
For years, those of us who dared warn that the dogma of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) was destroying rather than upholding Western values of meritocracy and equality were denounced as uncaring bigots who needed to get with the programme. Woke culture warriors subverted our institutions, embedded the doctrine of social justice in our companies, cancelled academics – yet claimed to occupy the moral high ground because they were creating a “fairer” and more “tolerant” society.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they insisted we had never been more prejudiced. They foisted on us the imperative of “equity”: equality not of opportunity, but of outcomes. And so many drank the Kool-Aid – two-tier Keir took the knee, privileged Columbia undergraduates cosplayed as Gazans, the Los Angeles fire chief proclaimed her devotion to DEI, as though anyone would give a moment’s panicking thought to a firefighter’s gender when their house is ablaze.
Governments tried to legislate for diversity, businesses talked themselves – or were gaslighted – into believing they should go woke or risk going broke. UK public authorities began spending over £500 million of taxpayer money a year on diversity and inclusion jobs, while US companies were pumping hundreds of billions into “driving racial equity”.
So forgive those of us on the unfashionable, low-status side of this argument if we succumb to momentary schadenfreude on hearing the news that Donald Trump is proscribing this pernicious ideology. As it happens, the trend was already being bucked: for months companies have been in a race to ditch their diversity schemes. Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s torched their DEI targets last year. Walmart is winding down its funding for the Center for Racial Equity. Meta and Google have cut DEI employees and programmes. Even the New York Times headlined a story: “The University of Michigan doubled down on DEI: What went wrong?” (To which the quick-witted on X responded: “It doubled down on DEI”.)
And now The Donald has issued an executive order directing state agencies to recognise only two sexes. His administration will also review and potentially end “discriminatory programs” such as environmental justice grants and diversity initiatives. Already, he’s fired the female leader of the US Coast Guard over concerns about her excessive focus on DEI policies. This re-embracing of meritocracy has elicited opprobrium from the usual suspects: the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest LGBTQI+ advocacy group, has vowed not to be “intimidated” – but they look to be battling against the tide.
Good for Trump, and good luck to America. But Britain is surely a lost cause. Labour cannot conceive of amending the 2010 Equality Act which underpins DEI, they want to take it a step further with a Race Equality Act in some time-wasting, tautological attempt to beef-up our anti-discrimination laws.
The Tories might have the appetite to scrap certain clauses, such as Section 149 which introduced a “public sector equality duty”, but recent experience indicates they lack the stomach for the fight. It was the Conservatives, after all, who introduced gender pay gap reporting – utterly pointless Maybot legislation which briefly turned EasyJet into public enemy number 1, until people realised it was probably acceptable for female cabin crew to be paid less than male pilots. Would Reform stand up to the professional managerial class, whose very jobs rely on DEI? They might bluster, but they’ll need an iron will to take on hundreds of thousands of people who now work in HR – among the best remunerated roles in the country and sustained by the growing body of rules to which firms adhere.
Part of the problem is that we now send too many not-very-bright people to university, where campuses are often insufferably woke and standards painfully low. As a consequence, we are creating a generation of young people qualified for professional jobs but unable to find them. But DEI fills the gap, providing well-paid sinecures for these “educated” elites to fill. They won’t let them go lightly.
Around the time Donald Trump was setting out how he intended to Make America Even Greater, the UK press reported on an NHS cleaner who took 400 sick days in four years, was fired, claimed her “complex mental health issues” constituted a disability and successfully sued for nearly £50,000. In the US, DEI is dying. Over here, it’s Britain that’s pegging out.
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