At Our Wickes End

It’s Pride Month once again – a season that, I can only imagine, inspires terror in corporate leaders across the land. For any sizeable company, these are treacherous waters: the Pride flag is becoming increasingly embarrassing and toxic, yet companies still have to publicly ‘celebrate’ Pride, like some kind of Festivus, or face a backlash from Stonewall, a downgrade in their ESG rating, angry articles in the Guardian and minor politicians lamenting things.

This puts company directors in a difficult spot. They have to do something to appear to support drag queen story hour for kids, but not so much as to hack off their ‘bigoted’ customers. Finding that line can be tricky. A year or two back, my bank decided to transform their app icon on my phone into a rainbow flag for the entire month, but possibly in response to a lot of ‘technical feedback’ they haven’t tried it since.

The delivery company DPD came out of the gates a little enthusiastically this year, having decided to bedeck their app with rainbows. Given the economic climate, this could be stunningly brave, but I wouldn’t have noticed it were it not for the fact that Quentin and Boudica’s parcel was two hours late. (Those are our obligatory journalistic pets, who – being respectable obligate carnivores – don’t eat supermarket catfood when they’re not committing ecocide in the garden.)

Anyway, I opened up the app to see where the delivery driver had got to, using their handy GPS map gizmo. The reason for the late arrival of our driver, Peter, became immediately apparent. Rather than the usual van icon, the app was showing that – during this month of celebration – he now bestrode a rainbow unicorn. Daintily, I suppose. And while I was glad to have that information, which additionally allowed me to infer that (in order to have tamed this mythological creature) he must in fact be a trans-male or at least a non-binary asexual whose preferred pronouns I could therefore narrow down a little, nevertheless it was slightly unsettling that my house – which is normally indicated quite conventionally – was now covered by a gigantic pride flag, replete with BLM colours.

Waves of guilt ought to have immediately washed over me. You see, if there were any social justice in the world, I would be triggered by the Pride flag, being heterosexual, white, middle-class (look at the names of our kittens), able-bodied (before around 8pm) and also living in the Lake District – an area notorious for these horrendous traits and therefore indicative of bad character, according to the national park’s chief executive. But instead of writing a cheque to help cover some of the reparations for Peter Rabbit, or repenting that we’ve been misgendering Quentin for months (ever since the vet told us he is, in fact, female), I got in touch with DPD’s customer services and had a polite moan at someone called Prakash, in probably the worst colonialist tradition.

After a tense few moments during which he contacted his supervisor and we wondered if we were going to be blacklisted – sorry, cancelled – Prakash returned with words to the effect of: “No, there is no setting in the app to enable you to turn off the cryptozoological icons and the gay flag.” Of course, being a cryptozoological Anglo-Saxon myself, I had to repress my disappointment that he didn’t automatically address me as sahib, and wept for Empire. But a couple of days later, when I finally came around and started writing this article, I discovered there is now such a setting. They call it “switch to default theme” – but they should really call it “bigotry mode”, because that’s what we are, aren’t we? At least, that’s what Fraser Longden, the COO of Wickes, has said.

Of course, given the backlash, the directors of Wickes can’t have done a proper Pride Month risk assessment before allowing their COO to make that statement; but despite this lapse, Longden may be right to say that people like us shouldn’t be welcome in Wickes’ stores – after all, their ESG rating is languishing at a mere 99.8%. To get that coveted extra 0.2%, they probably need to extend the full diversity, inclusion and equity programme to include the customers, too. Perhaps some kind of social credit system, or at least snobbish staff, would help to ensure their customers don’t undermine the real goal of the company in advancing societal change. Why, for instance, is it still easier for a gender-critical person to get into Wickes than to get a reservation at Dorsia?

Of course, a big problem facing Wickes is that excluding gender-critical customers from their stores (as the COO seems to suggest they would) is illegal – just as excluding black people or Hindus would be. I therefore propose – in addition to boycotting their products – that next weekend, we go to our own local Wickes store, and in a polite and completely non-violent and lawful way express the view that a man can’t be a woman to a member of staff, and ask if they’re going to throw us out of the store because of that. Record everything on camera, of course, and let’s see how that turns out.