Just as Corporations are Waking Up to the Chaos of EDI, Labour is Poised to Make it Worse Than You Can Imagine

Just as the corporate world is finally waking up to the catastrophic damage EDI has caused over the last four years, Labour is about to make it worse than you can possibly imagine. 

In an earlier article I examined how corporate and public sector ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) commitments have forced EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) down the supply chain onto hapless small to medium-sized businesses through procurement policies which demand suppliers implement it. 

In this article I want to explore where we go from here in light of a Labour Manifesto which, should the party win power, has serious implications for employers and especially smaller businesses by making the imposition of EDI through the supply chain a statutory requirement. What are the implications and how are British employers, especially the smaller ones, who employ 62% of all workers, going to fare?

The EDI Debate

It may come as a surprise to many readers that since the publication of the Cass Report earlier this year there has been a robust and open debate on LinkedIn between senior executives about how EDI has backfired, producing the opposite results to those intended. Many are now having second thoughts and the corporate world is some steps ahead of the Labour Party in understanding how damaging this has been to our economy. The much touted McKinsey report on the positives of DEI (American EDI) has been roundly debunked as hokum yet is still quoted by Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s Chair.  As I discussed previously, much of this has been down to the implementation of EDI rife with Critical Race Theory, lifted from American sources and sold by chancers into U.K. businesses, desperate to virtue-signal post George Floyd. 

The conclusion many are coming to is that ‘good EDI’ is extremely difficult to deliver and has to be handled extremely sensitively, being specifically written for the nuances of the target market. How much of this is a result of the more responsible EDI providers waking up to the fact that their days might be numbered and frantically re-packaging, and how much is the industry recognising it has made a catastrophic error is currently unclear. Can we expect it to dawn on employers that they have no business ‘re-educating’ their employees whatsoever and that EDI training is a gross overreach and interference in their lives? We can certainly hope so.

Who exactly thought it would be a good idea to imply that your employees and colleagues are all incorrigible bigots, racists, homophobes and transphobes who require ‘re-education’? Because, even if ‘good EDI’ doesn’t do that, the reality is that an awful lot of it does and as a result the entire concept of EDI training is irredeemably flawed. The concepts behind EDI have no business being trained as facts in the real world and should only exist in theoretical debate in the academy. It is naive of HR Professionals to think that ‘good EDI’, involving nuanced discussions with employees, wouldn’t simply degenerate into any other corporate training format, complete with zero tolerance enforcement.

Employers who have spent tens of millions on employee engagement now face a reality that out of the 65% of British workers who have been trained in EDI in their most recent or last jobs, a whopping 31% say they left a previous employer because they objected to the EDI policies and training at that employer. That rises to 43% for black employees, 46% for Asian and 46% for LGBT.

So to my colleagues who are desperately trying to shore up EDI as a valid and positive contribution to the workplace, I say: sorry folks – the boat has sailed, the grift is over. EDI is a failure, should never have been implemented and has caused catastrophic damage to our economy. It is time to dismantle it and repair the damage and make a commitment to our employees and colleagues that we will never, ever seek to force politics or ideologies on them again.

Only, that won’t happen. As I write we are facing a Labour landslide on July 4th. Labour’s Manifesto and it’s New Deal for Workers have some serious consequences for businesses and employers and especially for smaller businesses. You won’t be surprised to read that Labour puts EDI front and centre, promising to make it a statutory requirement for procurement to demand suppliers of all sizes can demonstrate that they have trained their staff in EDI and have ‘robust’ EDI policies in the workplace. Now, you can argue that this has pretty much become universal over the last 10 years under the Conservative Government, but there is a problem. Just as companies were on the cusp of waking up to the extent of the damage and huge costs, the sackings of resistant employees, the devastating impact on productivity, just on the cusp of winding this back in the corporate world, with the knock-on effect through the supply chain, along comes Labour to enforce it through law.

Last month Sir Keir Starmer claimed that his Government would “tread lightly on people’s lives”. If this is what he means by that then God help us all. 

How to protect your business

It appears very likely at this point that Labour will win a big majority which will allow it to implement its manifesto and New Deal for Workers in full. Even more disconcerting is the form that EDI will take under Labour. Despite promising to implement the Cass Report findings, Starmer’s manifesto appears to promise gender self-ID through the back door and, worryingly, a ban on ‘conversion therapy’ which will essentially reverse the findings of the Cass Report. So what will be the implications for the hundreds of thousands of gender critical women, many of whom have been unlawfully fired over the last few years in an emerging national scandal? Furthermore there are promises to further legislate against racism, Islamophobia and LGBT outside the Equality Act 2010, which was meant to be the final say on discrimination in the U.K. This will result in the divisive and controversial move of ‘intersectional’ victimhood groups becoming elevated for special protection under law. 

Add to this the plans for the extension of worker’s rights from two years to day one of employment and you have the cocktail for the weaponisation of new employment and equality laws against employers. The new legions of disgruntled workers will be able to call on help from their union because, as a sop to the unions, Labour plans to force employers to promote union membership and to allow ‘shop stewards’ access to workers who are not union members themselves in the workplace. There are no details as to whether small businesses will be exempt but given that the unions have been desperate to get into SMEs (employers under 250 workers) which employ some 62% of British workers, I suspect that this will include at least some of those employers.

Just how the hell is an employer meant to manage this? Small businesses don’t have HR departments. How is an SME meant to stand up to a union? How is an SME meant to deploy EDI training, forced on it by law, without destroying workplace and colleague relations that have taken decades to form?

I suspect the Free Speech Union will be very busy over the next five years. My colleagues and I founded the Fair Job Initiative to give SMEs support and guidance over how to protect their businesses from activism and politics. We’re now rapidly forming strategies to cope with the plethora of laws Labour wants to impose – watch this space. In the meantime, we have recently introduced monthly subscriptions to allow the very smallest of employers to affordably join the initiative. Only by uniting can we have a voice, while existing organisations meant to stand up for small businesses are as captured as any other of our institutions. 

Batten down the hatches, it is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.