Britain’s financial sector appears to be rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The City of London’s two principal regulators, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, have announced that they will now not be bringing in new diversity and inclusion rules for financial firms.
This decision comes in the wake of US president Donald Trump’s stated commitment to end ‘the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies’, and his declaration that the US ‘will be woke no longer’. US businesses seem to have got the message, too. Target, Facebook, WalMart, Amazon and McDonald’s have recently all shelved their own DEI policies. As a result, many are now asking if British companies are set to follow their lead.
There is little doubt that the White House’s move against DEI is going to have some impact on Britain. So far this year, both Lloyds Bank and BT have already dropped their own diversity and inclusion targets. Coupled with the City’s decision, these moves show at the very least that the arguments for DEI are being questioned in a way that they were not before Trump’s victory.
But the DEI agenda will not be that easy to dislodge from Britain’s private and public sectors. Some DEI policies themselves may be relatively new. But the roots of the diversity and inclusion agenda run very deep indeed.
Indeed, as early as 1980, Camden and Lambeth borough councils already had what were then known as ‘equal opportunities’ policies in place. By 1990, three quarters of all employees in Britain were covered by such rules and policies. Today they are near universal.
Equal-opportunities initiatives were initially a response to British employment laws, passed during the 1970s, banning race and sex discrimination. But they were also a reaction to popular worker-led campaigns against workplace discrimination. The equal-opportunities agenda effectively took grassroots campaigns against discrimination out of the hands of employees and put them into the hands of the employers.
From 1980, Lambeth’s Labour council started actively taking on more black trainees to address black underemployment in the borough. Lambeth councillor (and future London mayor) Ken Livingstone went on to make equal opportunities his flagship policy when he became head of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981.
After Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986, officials who had been working on equal opportunities at City Hall walked into new jobs in local government and banking. They helped reinforce employers’ growing embrace of anti-discrimination, equal-opportunities policies at work.
That these policies became ubiquitous under Thatcher’s Tory government might seem counter-intuitive, but it does make sense. Thatcher’s attempt to break trade unions’ hold on workplaces and industrial policymaking disoriented employers and managers. Without unions mediating between employers and employees, employers became aware of their own lack of authority over the workforce. And so they embraced equal-opportunities policies as a way to regain some moral clout over staff, not least because they cast employers and management as the good guys in the workplace.
Employers’ attachment to the equal-opportunities agenda benefited them in various ways. It enabled them to sack older managers on the grounds that their views were too ‘old fashioned’, while training up new managers who were more beholden to their companies. It also put the older, white male workforce on a warning – behave or else, they were told. In employers’ hands, anti-discrimination rules became a powerful tool for disciplining the workforce.
Then, in 2010, the Equality Act imposed an ‘equality duty’ on public bodies and employers. Public bodies were required to consistently improve their records on tackling discrimination and advancing equality of opportunity, and all employers were obliged to report their gender pay gaps.
Over the past 15 years, explicit DEI policies have been super-imposed on a workplace environment already shaped by equal-opportunities and anti-discrimination policies. Today, Britain spends £557million every year on government officials employed in diversity and inclusion roles. It now has more than twice as many DEI officials per capita, in both the private and state sectors, as any other country in the world
In recent years, certain aspects of the equal-opportunities / DEI agenda have come under intense scrutiny. Through its ‘diversity champions’ scheme, lobby group Stonewall has been charging companies and government employers for advice on how to meet diversity and equality targets in the workplace. But over the past few years, the scheme’s promotion of so-called trans rights, invariably at the expense of women’s rights, has prompted a growing public backlash. There has since been an exodus from the scheme, with government departments and countless employers withdrawing.
More generally, some left-wing champions of DEI have started to express doubts about the divisive impact of identity politics in general. But the pushback against DEI, especially among our cultural elites, remains very tentative. And this makes it very hard to dismantle the DEI agenda in the workplace – not least because British employers still rely on it for affirmation and a degree of authority. The impact of the Trump revolution may now be washing over the Atlantic towards Britain. But it will take more than that to rid us of our own vast DEI bureaucracy. It will require a concerted, political challenge.
James Heartfield is the author of The Equal Opportunities Revolution and many other books.
