High on their EDI

For the last 60 years, we have been encouraged to embrace “equality, diversity and inclusion” as vital tools with which we build a sunlit utopia where every race, creed, sexuality and pronoun will join hands, love one another and increase corporate profits. The “global diversity and inclusion market” was estimated to reach $23.4 billion by 2030. I trust the recent election of President Trump is going to put a dent in this, at least so far as the North American market is concerned.

However, our domestic love affair with “EDI” shows little signs of growing stale. In September 2024 the Bar Standards Board proposed a new “core duty” to put barristers under a positive obligation to promote EDI. I am pleased to note that the profession reacted strongly against this, as indeed should anyone who values objective definition of terms and evidence of positive outcomes. Discussions on the podcast Double Jeopardy on 24th September 2024 between Ken Macdonald KC, Tim Owen KC and Akua Reindorf KC revealed that 2 out of the 4 barristers advising the BSB on their EDI position were members of Garden Court Chambers, who were found in 2022 to have unlawfully discriminated against a black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey, for her protected speech. 

Despite being around since the 1960s, few EDI programmes have been subject to rigorous evaluation or assessment of positive long-term outcomes. This lack of evidence base was highlighted in The Inclusion at Work Panel final report of March 2024 which noted that “EDI interventions are proving to be counterproductive or even unlawful”. 

If EDI was having a generally positive impact, it is curious, for example, to see the 2023 report from the National Centre for Social Research which found the proportion who characterise themselves as “not at all prejudiced” against transgender people fell from 82 per cent to 64 per cent in 4 years. Or that despite a decade of concentrated action, “hate crimes” remain a continuing scourge, and the current Government is calling for an expansion of the recording of “non crime hate incidents”.

I no longer assume those delivering EDI training have genuine motivation to tackle the real evils of inequality

The reality is that inequality is hard baked into our society, even before we are born. To tackle this requires a clear-eyed focus on what we are trying to achieve, beyond the deployment of pious mantras or colourful lanyards. If EDI had any impact beyond its declarations, I would expect, for example, to see some real and substantial improvements for disabled people in society, rather than continued despair over failed social care initiatives. I would expect to see something done about the de facto race and social class apartheid in state schools and our nation’s huge geographical disparities in income and opportunities. None of this is fixed by a lanyard, however colourful.

If we carry on down this road, we risk much more than mere exasperation about performative box ticking. To allow EDI to be weaponised to support one world view only, seriously harms social cohesion as it is antithetical to diversity. As the Khan Review noted in March 2024:

Evidence gathered by this Review reveals a wide-spread phenomenon of extreme forms of harassment leading individuals into silence, self-censoring, or abandoning their democratic rights. The Reviewer calls this freedom-restricting harassment (FRH), defined as when people experience or witness threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online and/or offline which is intended to make people or institutions censor or self-censor out of fear. This may or may not be part of a persistent pattern of behaviour.

The need for repeated legal actions to restore the law, are significant in terms of money, time and reputation. In 2021 the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in Maya Forstater’s action against the Center for Global Development affirmed that a belief in the reality of biological sex was worthy of respect in a democratic society. This ushered in an astonishing string of legal victories where “gender critical” women proved they were treated with contempt by employers and colleagues for manifesting this lawful and protected belief.

Despite these victories, the cases keep coming. In 2022, civil servant Eleanor Frances raised concerns about the lawfulness of various workplace policies about gender identity and single sex spaces. Her concerns were dismissed, and she resigned in 2023, claiming discrimination and victimisation. She offered to settle her claim for £1 provided that the guidance was reconsidered but the civil service preferred to fight on. In January 2025 The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) eventually settled the employment-tribunal claim for £116,749. The departments committed to return to impartiality and to develop a new policy in relation to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

This determined and persistent appetite for expensive legal humiliation suggests that something very odd is happening. Professor Jo Phoenix recently reminded her followers on X of the curious response of Professor Marcia Wilson (then Dean of EDI at the Open University) when cross examined about the unlawful discrimination and harassment permitted by the Open University against Professor Phoenix and her “gender critical” colleagues. Professor Wilson asserted that the hostile reaction was covered by “academic freedom”. But she did not know where to draw the line in this case, and was not prepared to even try. 

The tribunal was unimpressed. There are only two reasons for Professor Wilson’s refusal to identify the distinction between free speech and harassment, and neither are acceptable for someone claiming professional expertise in EDI. Either she genuinely had no clue or she acted out of self-preservation, knowing that EDI has been put in harness to protect only a certain type of worldview and that this was unlawful.

I have no doubt that Professor Wilson knew exactly what was going on. Her version of “diversity” and “inclusion” meant that those with the “wrong” views must be excluded as forcefully as possible. The law and the fundamental rights of others be damned. 

One might reasonably expect any competent organisation to speedily jettison any policy or practice which has no evidence of positive outcomes and attracts expensive litigation. But not so for EDI. It seems, along with the “hate crimes” industry, that reputations and livelihoods are now so enmeshed with harmful ideologies that even repeated expensive and humiliating legal defeats make no dent at all to the wilful blindness of its proponents. 

I am no longer willing to assume those delivering or commissioning EDI training have noble aims and genuine motivation to tackle the real evils of inequality and discrimination. The harm already done and the continuing contempt for outcomes is evidence to me that the whole edifice of EDI exists only to serve the ideology of a dominant group. It has nothing to do with promoting diversity — it is all about power and control.

In the event that I am subject to a professional obligation to promote EDI, I intend to affirm my rejection of that duty as publicly and as noisily as possible and will look forward to presenting all these arguments to my disciplinary Tribunal.