by James Heartfield, spiked
It will take more than Trump’s war on woke to dislodge identity politics from the workplace.
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.