Kemi Badenoch’s diversity crusade doesn’t go far enough

This week, the equalities minister and business secretary Kemi Badenoch took aim at Britain’s woke bureaucracy.

The government’s Inclusion at Work panel, convened by Badenoch last year, has unveiled its new report into UK employers’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practices. Composed of private and public-sector experts and advised by a Harvard professor, the panel noted that 10,000 EDI jobs in the public sector are estimated to cost the British taxpayer £557 million per year.

According to the report, many EDI initiatives have little evidence behind them, are often ‘polarising’ and in some cases ‘unlawful’.As Badenoch put it in an accompanying Telegraph op-ed, concepts like ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white privilege’, regularly employed in diversity training, are ‘bunkum’. The report joins existing research on diversity training in finding that by calling attention to differences and casting whites as oppressors and blacks as oppressed, such initiatives often