My friends, Romans, countrymen… lend me your ears, though I dare say the modern HR department might first ask you to tick a box confirming your identity, preferred pronouns, and whether you’ve completed the unconscious bias training.
You see, in the great and noble battle to be inclusive, a word that now has the mystical incantation of a priest’s blessing, we have reached the curious point at which inclusion, in its current incarnation, means exclusion for a very particular and rather untrendy group: white, working-class men.
Yes — I said it. And if you just gasped into your organic turmeric latte, I quite understand. Saying such a thing in polite, progressive society is like quoting Enoch Powell at a Guardian garden party. But truth, like liberty, often begins by causing offence.
Now, let us be clear: no reasonable person objects to the principle of equality. No one is against fairness, or diversity in the broad, humane, true sense, of opportunity based on merit, not melanin. But what we are now witnessing across our institutions, from the BBC to the boardroom, from Oxbridge to your local council, is not the blossoming of fairness but the bureaucratisation of identity. A sprawling apparatus of box-ticking, guilt-tripping, and gatekeeping that puts ideology before ability.
Just the other day, I found myself in conversation with a Labour councillor / EDI trainer at my local council. A pleasant enough person I thought at first… earnest, committed, lanyard bristling. We debated cordially until, mid-way through our conversation, she blurted: “But a white person might be more qualified than a person of colour. How is that fair?” I blinked. “Erm…” I said. “So you think the person of colour should be prioritised, not on merit, but because of their skin tone? Even if, as you say, the other candidate worked harder, had better results, and is more qualified?” “Yes,” she replied, unflinchingly.
She went on to explain they may not have had the same historical advantages. And that, apparently, settles it. These, dear reader, are the same people teaching your children they have unconscious bias and that guilt is inherited like red hair or freckles.
What began as a push to remove real barriers has become a system that builds new ones. And who ends up on the wrong side of this modern Berlin Wall? Often, it is the lad from Sunderland who got three Bs at A-level, not because of privilege but despite the lack of it. It is the bright boy from a Bedfordshire council estate who finds himself told, implicitly or explicitly, that he’s just not diverse enough for the scholarship, the internship, the glossy brochure.
The statistics, of course, are out there, hiding in plain sight, though few dare to cite them, lest they be daubed with the most radioactive label in British public life. But just open your eyes. On advertising billboards, quiz shows, corporate training videos, university prospectuses, NHS posters, children’s storybooks, and government campaigns, it is now less likely… yes, less likely that a white Briton will be represented in proportion to the population.
Watch a supermarket ad, a BBC drama, a teacher recruitment campaign, or a school assembly slideshow, and you’ll see the pattern: the majority is vanishing from the cultural mirror. Unless, of course, they need someone to play the villain.
From toothpaste adverts to train station murals, from bank web banners to public health campaigns, you’d be forgiven for thinking the white working-class lad had vanished into the hedgerows.
University admissions show the same pattern: in proportion to the population, if you are a white working-class boy, you are the least likely in the country to make it to higher education. But where is the EDI task force for him?
We are told EDI is about meritocracy and yet, in practice, it often displaces merit in favour of metrics. Targets. Quotas. Lanyard-led revolutionaries judging worth not by what one brings to the table, but by where one ticks on a form. Is that progress, or simply prejudice in reverse? In what moral universe is it just to overlook a more qualified candidate because they have the wrong skin colour or chromosomes?
And let’s not pretend this is just accidental collateral damage. No, there’s an unspoken assumption, increasingly spoken, in fact, that certain groups simply deserve to be deprioritised. That because they think your ancestors might have once been privileged, you, today, must sit at the back of the queue. This isn’t equality. This is revenge dressed up as virtue.
The truth, dear reader, is this: genuine inclusion does not mean tilting the scales until they break. It does not mean turning justice into a zero-sum game. It means recognising individuals for their talents, not their tick-boxes.
So let us call time on the well-intentioned but counterproductive EDI industry before it swallows itself whole, before it becomes the very thing it set out to fight: a gatekeeping, prejudicial machine that judges people not by the content of their character, but by solely the colour of their skin.
Meritocracy is not the enemy of fairness. It is its finest expression. And if we abandon that, if we abandon merit, we risk building a society that is neither equal, nor diverse, nor inclusive, but divided, bitter, and ultimately mediocre.
By Jack Lions
