Mick Hartley

Simon Fanshawe – a founder of Stonewall back when it was a gay rights organisation who's since become a strong critic of the new trans-driven organisation – on how the new "diversity and inclusion" industry in fact just serves to push us apart:

Since the Black Lives Matter movement was born in 2013 and #MeToo in 2017, the approach in businesses has become increasingly driven by younger employees — either those in the new “diversity and inclusion” roles at big companies, or through staff groups and networks that unite to get the ear of the chief executive.

Increasingly, they see themselves as activists, people with similar “progressive” agendas, rather than employees. What do I mean by that? Well you’d be hard pushed to find an active pro-Brexit group in a university, a group of lesbian and gay staff who advocated for the binary nature of sex and therefore for sex separation in company gym facilities or a group of black staff who don’t believe that the UK is “institutionally racist”.

As a result, the perfectly right-minded desire to pursue greater diversity by focusing on opening up opportunities and the removal of blocks to people’s talent, is instead distorted into corporations playing out particular political agendas.

The activists who now have the upper hand seem instead mostly concerned with policing language and striking campaign poses. Rather than making any material differences to staff by widening their prospects, they would rather just point and punish. The effect of this is that, under the cover of diversity, “inclusion” has, with breathtaking irony, become a tool of “exclusion”.

This permeates to the very top so that the now former chief executive of NatWest, Dame Alison Rose, can with no sense of paradox, run a bank that says Nigel Farage’s “views were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”.

Appalling as Farage’s opinions might be to many people, it is puzzling to the great majority how we’ve ended up in a Humpty Dumpty world, where “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Where to be ‘inclusive’ now apparently is defined as ‘you have to speak like this, think like this and behave like this. Or we’ll exclude you’.

Rose, and her colleagues at Coutts, were using ‘diversity and inclusion’, along with so many leaders in D&I (to which it is inevitably abbreviated), to foster the very opposite. Their view of inclusion is, in the end, a form of coercion. While this panders to the activist employees, it alienates swathes of staff from the goal of increasing diversity by effectively telling them that their views are not welcome.