U.K. Employers Supporting Division and Intolerance

How much longer will the corporate world attach its brands to causes that are being increasingly exposed as divisive and intolerant? How many more ‘Bud Lights’ do we need before the penny drops with these employers?

In all the noise, there’s an important point being missed by the mainstream media in the Tennant-Badenoch spat: that the awards dinner was being sponsored by numerous corporates including Tesco as headline sponsor. At a time when the whole value of DEI initiatives is beginning to be questioned in boardrooms, here we have an example of the folly of linking your brand to a third party involved in a highly febrile and bad-tempered debate that is dividing the nation. 

All the great and the good from the LGBT world were there, and so were their corporate sponsors:

• Tesco (Headline Sponsor) (supermarket retail giant)
• Macquarie (financial services)
• HSBC U.K. (bank)
• Swinton (insurance services)
• Network Rail (U.K. rail network)
• Johnson & Johnson (fast-moving consumer goods, FMCG)
• Just Eat (retail/logistics)

And as we all know now, during these awards, actor David Tennant won the ‘Best LGBT Celebrity Ally’ and during his acceptance speech attacked Conservative Minister Kemi Badenoch, who, for our overseas readers, is the most senior black female politician in British history.

Tennant said: “We shouldn’t live in a world where that is worth remarking on. However, until we wake up, and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more [rapturous applause and cheering]  – [pause when he realised what he said] I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”

Badenoch isn’t one to take things lying down and fired back the next morning on X:  “I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.”

Was one of her pithy replies.

The Prime Minister then waded in, as did Sir Keir Starmer who distanced himself from Tennant: “In politics, as in life, it’s important that we are able to robustly disagree with others – obviously that happens a lot in the general election campaign,” the Labour leader told reporters on a visit to a GP surgery near Nottingham. “But we should do it with respect for everybody involved in that robust discussion.”

This heated debate shows no sign of going away, and indeed, it’s rapidly becoming a major talking point in the election.

All this took place in front of a backdrop of the various brands of the corporate sponsors. Which prompts the question: if the sponsors had known there was going to be such controversy at the event, would they have sponsored it in the first place?

Having attended such corporate events in the past, I can tell you now that, along with the branding opportunities, all the above will have been given several tables at the ceremony as part of their sponsorship deal. At the last one I was at – a Marketing Awards Dinner in London – the lead sponsor, a large FMCG, had 15% of the available tables and all at the front of the stage.

Now I don’t know who these companies invited to join them at their tables: it will have been the usual mix of executives, advocacy group members, marketing team etc. I don’t know their political beliefs or their opinions about the issues of the day. But I couldn’t help hear the huge cheer Tennant got from guests when he said: “Until we wake up, and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore.” Caveat: we don’t know if any of the guests at the corporate tables were cheering this comment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. For some time now our larger employers have been increasingly diving down the DEI rabbit hole, driven by external factors – third-party initiatives, procurement and corporate finance ESG, Government funding requirements, aggressive activist groups etc. – and internal factors – board level sponsors, employee activism, DEI/EDI policies and training, employee advocacy groups etc. However, with the emerging evidence that contrary to the now debunked McKinsey report touting the benefits of DEI in the corporate world, EDI (the U.K. way of writing DEI – which I will follow from now on) has actually backfired spectacularly and is damaging British businesses, workers and the economy in general. Rather than spreading unity, it’s spreading division, resentment, disengagement and fear. You can read the details in the Government independent report here, in the Dynata and Free Speech Union report here and in the Datapoll/Policy Exchange report here.

On top of this, large employers are losing a growing number of employment tribunals where they have discriminated against employees who have objected to being forced to deny their beliefs, beliefs that are protected under law every bit as much as gay rights and trans rights. 

Corporate HR, so frequently blamed for EDI in the workplace, has rather belatedly woken up to the folly and we are seeing the brakes being slammed on across the U.K. Corporate Landscape. Only, the message has yet to make it through to marketing, comms, procurement and other departments. I can only imagine how the Chief People Officer Emma Taylor would have winced as Tennant attacked the U.K.s most senior black female politician underneath the Tesco Brand. Whether this dawned on the marketing and comms team, who would have decided the sponsorship opportunity, is up for debate. Those who saw what happened to the Bud Light brand and have learned their lesson were probably also wincing, but there would have been a decent number applauding and cackling along with Mr. Tennant.

Now, I am not suggesting the boards and shareholders of these companies hold the radical gender views that Mr. Tennant does. We don’t do guilt by association in the rational world; that is the woke Leftist way, not ours. However, brand association does matter: this is why companies protect their brands so aggressively and are incredibly sensitive when they are exposed, inadvertently or otherwise, to bad publicity. Risks are explored, scenarios gamed out.

So here’s the question: given the likelihood of a backlash in the current febrile public debate around the gender question, why would a corporate sponsor willingly wade into the fray like this? Didn’t it gameplay the risk? Is it an example of groupthink? (I’ve written about how this manifests in the corporate world here.)

It does appear to indicate a failure in governance. HR is frantically pressing the brakes here, realising the risk of indirectly discriminating against gender critical employees and those of faith, and the potential incoming Employment tribunals and discrimination fines, but the message seems to be too firmly embedded in the corporate culture to stop.

American academic James Lindsay has recently spoken about DEI in the context of the current Bill before Congress in the USA to overturn Joe Biden’s Executive Mandate to make DEI mandatory in the U.S. public sector. His analysis may explain the failure of corporate governance. This excerpt from his interview with Andrew Doyle this week is one of the best and most incisive analysis of the root problem of DEI:

What I call the “Politics of Compliance”, where you say: “This is how everything is going to be and it’s going to be a lot better when we all do this thing.” Everybody who complies gives in and then they are taught to resent the people who resist: “We would have a more inclusive workplace if only these racists and transphobes and homophobes and sexists and misogynists and everything else were silenced or kicked out.” So you end up making this dynamic that’s extremely polarising and extremely divisive.

Which is of course exactly what is happening in workplaces and other organisations all over the West, and the U.K. is no exception. Those of us who are students of history and who have read our Solzhenitsyn, Frankl, Sereney and Primo Levi will recognise this mindset as the same one used to dehumanise opponents and to permit the atrocities of the 20th century totalitarian regimes. As Lindsay goes on to say, it’s also precisely the mantra taught to the Red Guards by Mao before and during the Cultural Revolution, and if you want a harrowing example of the consequences of that, you can watch this Netflix trailer (trigger warning for those of you who don’t know this history).

There’s ample evidence that such politics of compliance is firmly embedded in some of the sponsors of this event who seem to have no problem with linking their brand to controversial and radical gender and Pride events. Network Rail’s ‘Pride Pillar’ at London Bridge Station, for instance. HSBC has gone all-in: check out its HQ reception:

Now, Macquarie was the leading company on Stonewall’s “league of employers” in 2022; it disappeared in 2023 (why?) but is back in 2024.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is commercial folly to associate your company or brand with any sort of ideological or political movement, especially if there is current controversy on the issues within or around that movement.

In The Fair Job Initiative we advise our clients to never get involved in politics or activism of any type because you will invariably upset and alienate a proportion of your employees and customers, and on occasion this may slip into unlawful discrimination against them, as we have seen multiple times (check the annals of the Free Speech Union).

Furthermore, corporate brand specialists spend a lot of time and money ensuring that their brand is appropriately used – when did you last see a Tesco delivery van speeding? When was the last time one cut you up at a roundabout? Why, then, are the same brand specialists willing to lend their brand to a third party like the LGBT Awards, trusting it not to do anything controversial that could damage the brand – like give a platform to a vocal actor who is well known for his radical position on the gender question and whose activism includes labelling gender critical women as ‘TERFS’ and ‘freaks’.

As already mentioned, whilst the mainstream media seem to have missed the role of the corporate sponsors in all this, X has not, with the ever vigilant @FlaggedOffUK questioning whether the Tesco Marketing Director should be immediately sacked – Tesco has a number of senior Group Marketing Directors but I would suggest that it’s the Group Brand, Proposition and Marketing Communications Director, Emma Botton who’s ultimately responsible here.

Given that Tesco U.K. was also a sponsor behind this year’s highly controversial Mayor of London campaign, it’s unlikely that Emma Botton’s job will be in danger because of a mouthy actor who obviously missed Ricky Gervais’s tips for slebs. But with this incident now being a focal point of a very public and loud election issue, maybe even this will be too much for the Tesco board and shareholders?

We may have witnessed a turning point in the enthusiasm of the corporate world to willingly fund and nod along with activists.

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.