Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have come under fire from both sides of the Atlantic. They have been defunded by the Trump administration and in Britain Reform UK has vowed to scrap them in the nine councils it won control of in this month’s local elections.
But criticism of such initiatives – designed to promote equality of opportunity and representation within organisations – has not been exclusive to the right. Leftwing academics, writers and organisers have criticised what they describe as the shallow corporate exercises that have come to define DEI.
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has been making these arguments since the early 1980s, when the government first commissioned the Rampton and Scarman reports, looking at education and policing, in response to the 1981 riots in cities across England.
There have been 12 reports into racial inequalities commissioned by ministers since 1981, often in response to scandals and unrest. Guardian analysis found that of the nearly 600 recommendations fewer than a third had been fully actioned.
But some were. Unconscious bias training, as well as attempts to increase representation of the workforce, became cornerstones of corporate and public sector DEI strategies (sometimes referred to as EDI – equality, diversity and inclusion) in the UK.
John Narayan, the new head of the IRR, argues that this was intentional. The anti-racism movement in the UK between the 1960s to 1980s was making radical demands on a range of issues, from citizenship and how the UK border is managed, to access to decent housing and education.
“So you had these radical demands, and then normally what the state gives you, is a co-option,” he said. “We can all do saris, steelbands and samosas … But the radical response was taken out. So the exploitation continues, the bordering regime continues, the everyday racism continues, and the racist policing continues.”
For Ash Sarkar, the author of Minority Rule, which offers a Marxist critique of left-liberal politics, this dilution is precisely the problem. “So much of liberal DEI is bullshit,” she said, citing examples of weapons manufacturing companies having diversity training on microaggressions, while creating products used to bomb weddings in Yemen.
Sarkar links the rise of corporate DEI with the decline of trade union militancy, and many on the left, she said, have realised “representation is a poor substitute for collective bargaining”.
“Representation is inherently passive. Collective bargaining is base-building and empowering – it’s less about what you think and more about what you are doing,” she said. “The latter creates a much more useful kind of political agent than someone who’s just waiting to see a brown face in a high place.”
Both Sarkar and Narayan, however, caution that the goal is not to pit race or gender against class, but to connect the two more meaningfully. “The debate around EDI made the class component disappear,” Narayan said. “We need to reframe those things around the original demands.”
He pointed to the successful campaign to end zero-hours contracts, which has been taken up by the Labour government’s race and equality bill, as well as the union victory securing equal pay for Jamaican teachers at the Harris Federation chain of academy schools in London, as key examples where class-based struggles intersect with race, gender and migrant status.
While Zita Holbourne, a longtime trade unionist and co-founder of the campaign group Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, criticised the corporate DEI model as tokenistic, she said: “Equality is always supposed to be at the heart of trade unions.”
She said corporations often “set things up in a way that [black and migrant workers] are held back … They do very little to address the people that are held in the bottom, often the toughest roles, the lowest paid, the most precarious work.”
Kudsia Batool, the director of equalities at the Trades Union Congress, said: “There’s a real misconception that if you’re black, LGBT+, disabled, or a woman, you want something different. No, no, no. Everyone wants the same things: good-quality jobs, the ability to live your life, go on holidays, save a bit of money, live with dignity and respect, and get ahead.
“When we do equality work properly, we’re dismantling the barriers that exclude, limit or hinder working-class people from participating in the labour market. That’s the bottom line.”
Batool was critical of what she saw as performative gestures: “Too often, people reduce this work to checklists or gestures, like wearing pink T-shirts for a month or putting a black square on LinkedIn during Black History Month. But does that improve anyone’s life?”
She said unions must focus on closing the ethnicity, disability and LGBT+ pay gaps, securing flexible work, banning zero-hours contracts and ensuring accessible workplaces.
“We need the employment rights bill to deliver in full. We need mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting. These things will help close the equality gaps in ways that EDI, DEI and whatever other acronyms we come up with just can’t.”
She said it was about who held the power. “HR policies are important, but they’re not enough.”
Narayan and Sarkar warned of a darker, ideological project behind the backlash to equality initiatives.
“When people are talking about DEI, they’re not talking about the same things. And the version which is under attack by the right does seem to be an all-out assault on some of the gains made by the civil rights era. And what they want to do is roll back on protections from discrimination in a much broader sense,” Sarker said.
Narayan said: “I don’t think we on the left should celebrate the end of it, expecting it to lead to some nirvana. [That argument is] very similar to people that said Brexit would allow a leftwing Britain to emerge. You remember that? Lexit? We saw how that played out.
“What we find in the end of EDI is the harbinger of a far more rightwing, fascistic politics.”
Some argue that is already under way in the UK, with the campaign against EDI now attacking the UK’s landmark 2010 Equality Act. The former Conservative ministers Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg have called for it to be abolished.
“We won’t concede ground to those who want to divide and weaken us. And the US has shown us what happens when DEI is defunded. Workers lose rights, they lose protections, and ultimately dignity,” Batool said.
