Perhaps the most troubling aspect isn’t just having to watch Clacton’s elusive MP reel off his contempt for anything he deems ‘woke,’ it’s that businesses are doing exactly what these right-wing populists want.
As Parliament heads into its summer recess, Right-Wing Watch is also taking a break. We’ll be back in early September, rested, recharged, and ready to take on whatever chaos and nonsense the right throws our way.
It seems only fitting, then, that we end this series with a look at the most brash and divisive figure in British politics and his Trump-like antics – Nigel Farage, and one of his biggest targets, diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).
Farage, who famously thew a tantrum after he was deemed too much of a political risk to bank with the elite at Coutts, and his Reform party have repeatedly claimed that scrapping government spending on DEI could save the country £7 billion a year. These schemes, designed to reduce discrimination and create more representative workplaces, have become the latest bogeyman for the right. But as ever with Farage, the numbers don’t add up.
In his ‘badass bobbies on the street’ speech in Westminster this week to launch Reform’s six-week “Lawless Britain” campaign, which was basically a parade of populist promises including more prison spaces, mass deportations, and life sentences for repeat offenders, Farage doubled down on his pledge to end DEI once and for all.
There’s just one problem: DEI, as Farage describes it, doesn’t even exist in Britain.
Writer Samuel Earle points out that the UK equivalent to DEI is called EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion), and it’s nowhere near as extensive or expensive as Reform would have you believe. At the national level, Reform claims axing these programmes would save £7 billion a year but in reality, government figures from 2022–23 put the cost at just £27 million.
Despite Farage’s insistence that “lefties obsess about DEI” and that voters would applaud the sacking of so-called “woke” council members, the facts paint a very different picture. A Guardian investigation into the 10 councils where Reform has representation, found that the total number of jobs related to equality and diversity amounted to fewer than five full-time roles, making up just 0.003 percent of their combined budgets.
Farage’s manufactured culture war over DEI mimics what’s happening in the US under Trump, whose team has pushed similar anti-DEI narratives, blaming it on everything from the wildfires in LA to the plane crash in Washington. These attacks are typically accompanied with wildly exaggerated claims of cost savings. One especially ludicrous example saw an $8 million saving misreported as $8 billion.
Back in Britain, a recent government review found just 380 full-time EDI staff working across the entire civil service, out of more than 500,000 employees. According to Lucille Thirlby, assistant general secretary of the civil service union FDA, “these couple of hundred EDI staff represent a small cost of the overall salary bill.”
“Scaling back EDI staff would likely leave departments exposed to challenges around discrimination – be that individual cases or structural issues like equal pay and failure to apply reasonable adjustments – eroding any potential cost savings while making the civil service a much worse place to work,” Thirlby told Byline Times.
Cultural intimidation – scaring businesses into silence
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of all this isn’t just having to watch Clacton’s elusive MP reel off his contempt for anything he deems ‘woke,’ it’s that businesses are doing exactly what these right-wing populists want. Whether out of shared ideology, political naivety, poor understanding of best practice, or simple cowardice, many companies are backing away from their DEI commitments. Some are willingly jumping on the anti-woke bandwagon, while others are retreating in fear, terrified of backlash if they dare to stay the course on inclusion.
In the US, this trend is especially pronounced. Companies, particularly those holding federal contracts, are increasingly backing away from DEI initiatives altogether. Under pressure from President Trump’s executive orders dismantling DEI frameworks and relentless online attacks from conservative influencers, many corporations are quietly retreating.
Among the latest to scale back are tech giant IBM and beverage company Constellation Brands. Bloomberg reported that IBM has shifted its supplier diversity goals away from race and gender to focus instead on all small businesses and veteran-led firms. The company has also stopped tying executive incentives to diversity hiring targets, a move justified internally as an attempt to resolve “inherent tensions in practicing inclusion.”
Constellation Brands has taken similar steps. The company rebranded its DEI team as “Inclusive Culture,” reframed its supplier diversity focus to all small businesses, and announced it will no longer participate in Human Rights Campaign external surveys, Bloomberg reported.
It’s a remarkably short-sighted move that favours excessive risk aversion at the expense of long-term business sustainability.
As Gary Ford, managing director of Men for Inclusion describes in Computer Weekly :
“If you’re a woman or from a traditionally under-represented ethnic group, LGBTQ+, or have a disability, and your company suddenly abandons DEI, what does that say to you? There is a very strong chance that you are likely to start reconsidering your career options. While the job market may not be ideal for a current change in position, in the long run, this strategy will surely hurt these businesses by making them less attractive to diverse talent.”
Other companies, meanwhile, are opting for quieter adjustments, keeping DEI principles in place but rebranding them to avoid becoming political targets. McDonald’s, for example, recently tweaked its DEI messaging to emphasise ‘inclusion’ over ‘diversity,’ following misleading headlines that suggested the company was abandoning its efforts altogether.
The shift is strategic, an attempt to preserve internal culture work while dodging the crossfire of the culture wars.
As Ford rightly notes, the problem lies in how diversity efforts are being misrepresented:
“Overemphasising diversity numbers has possibly fuelled the false narrative that companies are hiring unqualified people just to meet quotas. This is the kind of zero-sum thinking that Trump and his acolytes are suggesting; that it has somehow led to companies hiring completely unqualified people to tick a diversity box. There is no empirical research to back up this claim.”
What about in Britain?
A similar trend is unfolding in the UK, where many organisations are rebranding their DEI efforts to avoid attracting political and media scrutiny. Right-wing newspapers like the Sun frequently criticise so-called ‘woke’ business practices and praise organisations that ‘follow Trump’s lead‘ in abandoning DEI initiatives, adding to a climate in which diversity policies are seen as liabilities.
Paul Sesay, founder and CEO of the National Diversity Awards, whose sponsors include Amazon, Auto Trader and HSBC, explains: “It’s rebranded to ‘wellbeing’, ‘belonging’ and ‘culture’. Even with roles, it’s no longer heads of DEI, it’s heads of culture, heads of people, heads of wellbeing.
While the Equality Act and the legal risk of discrimination cases provide a degree of protection against a full-scale rollback in the UK, some companies, particularly those headquartered in the US, have already scaled back their commitments. In April, for example, Barclays scrapped gender and ethnicity targets for its US staff. Previously, managers were expected to consider how promotions and hiring decisions supported the advancement of women and ethnic minorities, groups traditionally underrepresented in the banking industry.
Then again, this is the bank that regularly comes under fire from climate and peace activists for being one of the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels and for its ties to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. So, in that sense, it’s not surprising that the bank would be among the first to roll back DEI initiatives.
Still, it’s not all bad news. In response to the backlash, some organisations and trade bodies are doubling down on their commitment to diversity.
Richard Atkinson, president of the Law Society, acknowledged that “the current climate in the United States has made diversity and inclusion work increasingly difficult,” but confirmed that the Society would remain “wholeheartedly committed” to building a more inclusive legal profession.
UK Finance, representing the banking and financial services industry, echoed this, calling diversity “a driver for economic success.” Likewise, the Local Government Association maintained that the case for DEI remains “compelling.”
Seeping into advertising
But despite some resistance, the DEI backlash is seeping into other areas of business life as well. In advertising, for example, brands are increasingly scaling back or abandoning socially-driven campaigns under pressure from anti-DEI sentiment.
During this year’s Super Bowl, American audiences saw a throwback to a bygone era, reviving its once-abandoned “burgers and bikinis” campaign, complete with scantily clad women. The brand had ditched the approach in 2017 but now appears to be leaning into a more provocative, nostalgia-driven style amid shifting cultural winds.
Polly Shute, founder of Out & Wild, Britain’s largest LGBT+ festival, and a former board member of Pride in London, observes that corporate sponsorship has noticeably cooled.
In 2017, Pride “was turning brands away as they did not meet criteria,” Shute told the FT, but “it’s very different now”. She informs how some brands and companies had stopped changing their logos to Pride colours on social media such as LinkedIn. In the UK, these include firms that have extensive operations in the US such as WPP, Linklaters and Freshfields.
As America’s culture wars continue to wash up on British shores, with Farage riding the wave with a trumpet, business leaders would do well to ignore the theatrics. DEI isn’t about ticking boxes, it’s about building stronger, more resilient organisations with a strategic advantage.
But as it’s the last Right-Wing Watch for a while, let’s end on an optimistic note. The attack on EDI is part of a false narrative which seeks to relocate responsibility for people’s disquiet with the modern world away from where it belongs – with neo-liberalism and years of poor politics. There is no evidence that the political obsession with EDI policies resonates with people outside the weird and not so wonderful world of Farage, Reform, and those who like parading their prejudices on social media. For most people, we live in a diverse world and that should be reflected in the companies we deal with. The trouble with Farage et al, is not that they are right, or on this subject have much appeal, but that they are so very noisy.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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