Labour whinge about financial blackhole — but splash cash on divisive initiatives

Investment bank has ditched an internal diversity rule barring it from advising all-male, all-white boards on company flotations because it was “no longer needed.”

The company’s 2020 diversity policy stipulated that companies who wanted to float must have two board members who satisfied diversity requirements, including making one of them a woman (assuming they know what that is).

It seems in retrospect like a game of diversity Pokémon – where the aim was to collect one of every minority and then shout ‘Bingo’!

However, the bank has now rowed back on this, because it’s no longer fashionable to clobber white men over the head with diversity nonsense when the world is clearly moving in a different direction. And corporate Britain is undoubtedly taking its cues from their counterparts across the pond.

Over in the US, companies like Walmart, Boeing and Toyota have quietly (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives. has stopped tying executive bonuses to DEI goals, and Harley-Davidson scrapped its DEI programme last year. Even is looking to reverse its misfortunes after its identity politics-ridden films keep bombing at the box office.

Yet, the biggest wake-up call seems to have come in the form of Bud Light, which saw its share prices plummet precipitously after a simple promotion with a transgender led to boycotts and falling sales. The brand has been in agony ever since.

In fact, its advert at last week’s Super Bowl highlighted Bud Light’s efforts to make amends – so much so that it featured ‘real men’ discussing a colonoscopy, mowing lawns and shooting cans of Bud Light through a leaf blower. It was truly an ‘all-American’ bonanza – and the most grovelling U-turn by any company in modern memory. All that was missing was a man beating his chest and howling at the moon.

But Goldman Sachs’ move should send a powerful message to corporate Britain and the that we need to prioritise talent and improve training and education for everyone – not just to improve the diversity of the talent pool but also to do away with the ridiculous notion of shoehorning people into roles based on their diversity brownie points.

I’m sure companies can use some of the £114 billion they committed between May 2021 and October 2022 to “driving racial equity” to invest in true diversity. However, while DEI may finally be retreating in corporate Britain, the public sector is still dragging its feet.

According to an estimate based on Freedom of Information Requests to 6,000 public authorities, approximately 10,000 public DEI jobs exist in the UK – costing the frankly staggering £557million a year. The alone is reported to spend around £13million annually on DEI roles.

Yet, in terms of patient care, we have little to show for it. Indeed, have any of our public services improved because we have rainbow pedestrian crossings, politically correctly renamed streets or railway lines or compulsory DEI training?

And how can councils justify spending almost £23million on DEI roles when most are so heavily in debt that they are raising council taxes for the rest of us?

It is simply incredible to me that Labour can whinge about a £22billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, yet have the audacity to spend even a penny of our money on DEI.

But the outrage doesn’t stop there. We are now seeing the real-world consequences of our public sector being so in thrall to DEI doctrine. A recent and research by the opinion consultancy Public First found that nearly half of Gen Z believes that Britain is a racist country, and a similar proportion say that they aren’t proud to be British.

This is in stark contrast to a similar study 20 years ago, which found that 80% of young people said they were proud to be British. Has Britain somehow become more racist in the last 20 years? Well, considering that we had a majority of TV adverts featuring white people and the was still airing running around in blackface on episodes of Little Britain, I would think not.

What has really changed is our now perverse obsession with the idea that Britain is a racist country that should be ashamed of its past – thanks to the proliferation of woke ideology in our schools, universities and other public institutions.

We now have young people regurgitating jargon-filled claptrap like “safe spaces”, “structural bias” and “systemic racism” – without really knowing what any of them mean.

If we cannot get to grips with this toxic ideology infesting British public life, who cares if British businesses decide it’s no longer worth it to pay lip service to the vacuous DEI mantra? It’ll already be too late.