Western civilisation is being driven to oblivion by the false prophets of ‘diversity’

If you still believe that not everything should be about race and gender, I have bad news. Our side has been routed. While the Tories were asleep at the wheel, a new generation of woke activists seized control of most of our institutions, fomenting grievance, division and discord, undermining our economy, trashing our culture and costing the taxpayer millions. 

The “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI) movement is the wokerati’s provisional wing, the vehicle by which critical race theory, trans extremism and other post-modern garbage is taking over our lives. Many companies, as well as the public sector, have embraced DEI, wrongly believing that it demonstrates their anti-racism, and have tasked HR departments with indoctrinating employees in its precepts. Their efforts were condemned by Kemi Badenoch in an excellent article this week. DEI has failed to achieve any tangible benefits, but the waste of money is the least of our problems. 

Like other far-Left political projects, DEI is at once staggeringly low-grade and deeply Orwellian, perverting the meaning of words to bamboozle. If it sought to combat genuine racism, as the concept is commonly understood, I would be an enthusiastic supporter. I crave a world where race is irrelevant, and enthusiastically subscribe to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” vision, where he hoped that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Such a nation – meritocratic, fair, peaceful, prosperous, democratic and colour-blind – is what every Western polity should aspire to become. 

But it is not what the woke revolutionaries are working towards. They reject King’s vision as naive at best, or complicit at worst: for them, racism is inherent to Western society, intrinsic to a world of “patriarchal” families, private ownership, free enterprise, the rule of law and free speech. It cannot not exist. Facts demonstrating that we are becoming more tolerant, marrying people of different races at record rates, or that many ethnic minorities earn more, on average, than white people are brushed away: to the woke stormtroopers, racism is axiomatically omnipresent. 

By definition, no progress can ever be made, society is just as racist as it ever was. Woke campaigners believe such pathologies are intractable features of Western nations – but not of those in other parts of the world – even when nobody actively discriminates against anybody. Studying and working hard is deemed to be a new opiate of the masses: social mobility is impossible for members of “oppressed” groups. 

Racism, to these semantically challenged activists, is an invisible power structure that can only be smashed via total revolution, by overthrowing capitalism, the “imperialist” international system and by imposing a gender revolution. DEI is one tool to achieve that, by transforming institutions from within and brainwashing employees. 

DEI is only interested in racial or gender diversity. It doesn’t really care about poverty, class or geography. It loathes diversity of thought; it preaches an imbecilic groupthink that can never be questioned. It denies the scientific method. Its more extreme North American proponents occasionally even reject the idea that 2+2=4, claiming it implies “covert white supremacy”, the sort of lunacy that would have made even the Soviet pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko blush. 

The woke demand performative adherence to dogma, even when it is evidently contrary to reality, hence “Gays for Palestine” chanting pro‑Hamas and pro-Houthi slogans, even though both terror organisations are brutally homophobic, whereas Tel Aviv celebrates gay pride. Eliminating objective reality is every tyrant’s dream: citizens can no longer judge the validity of what they are being told. 

Woke ideology encourages vicious discrimination against groups it deems to be oppressors – white heterosexual “cis” men, gender-critical women and the “white adjacent”. DEI, as practised on US campuses in particular, is terrifyingly anti-Semitic, deeming Jews to be an oppressor group and Israel a settler colonial state. Other successful minorities – such as Asian Americans – are falling foul of DEI and suing universities for discrimination; where American leads, Britain surely follows.

Crucially, woke advocates believe in “equity”, not “equality”. They don’t think individuals should be treated equally before the law, don’t support equality of opportunity, fail to endorse the presumption of innocence and don’t truly believe in individual rights. Modern civilisation embraces Bonaparte’s famous maxim “la carrière est ouverte aux talents [jobs are open to the talented], without distinction of birth or fortune”. 

Instead, DEI advocates group “justice” that is at once unjust and inequitable, based on confiscation and redistribution. People don’t matter, only aggregate statistics. Individual merit counts for nought: DEI judges people solely on their membership of a tribe based on racial or sexual characteristics. This is a reversal of centuries of Western progress towards individual dignity, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals and a readoption of pre-modern group politics. 

DEI is horrifically exclusionary, seeking to cancel anybody who fails to pretend to agree: it embraces the permanent inquisition, the auto-da-fé, excommunication and (metaphorically) burning heretics at the stake. Staff are “encouraged” to take the knee, to wear special lanyards, to share pronouns. Employees are divided into “allies” and “adversaries”, with the “good” in-group pitted against the “bad” out-group. “Micro-aggressors” are denounced.

Companies are being turned into arms of the Left, no longer focused on the profit motive but on achieving politicised aims. The Civil Service, having jettisoned impartiality, promotes controversial ideas, spending a fortune on useless schemes.

Why hasn’t Rishi Sunak acted? This catastrophe has unfolded over 14 years of Conservative government, and Keir Starmer will double down on the woke revolution. The Tories, now and in Opposition, should go to war with DEI. They should enforce a prohibition on all forms of discrimination, including against white men. They should ban and eliminate all DEI jobs across the public sector and in every university, museum and state-funded organisation. They should legislate against woke capital to protect for-profit capitalism. But for now, prepare for everything to get worse before it gets better.