How much longer will the corporate world attach its brands to causes that are being increasingly exposed as divisive and intolerant? How many more ‘Bud Lights’ do we need before the penny drops with these employers?
In all the noise, there’s an important point being missed by the mainstream media in the Tennant-Badenoch spat: that the awards dinner was being sponsored by numerous corporates including Tesco as headline sponsor. At a time when the whole value of DEI initiatives is beginning to be questioned in boardrooms, here we have an example of the folly of linking your brand to a third party involved in a highly febrile and bad-tempered debate that is dividing the nation.
All the great and the good from the LGBT world were there, and so were their corporate sponsors:
- Tesco (Headline Sponsor) (supermarket retail giant)
- Macquarie (financial services)
- HSBC U.K. (bank)
- Swinton (insurance services)
- Network Rail (U.K. rail network)
- Johnson & Johnson (fast-moving consumer goods, FMCG)
- Just Eat (retail/logistics)
And as we all know now, during these awards, actor David Tennant won the ‘Best LGBT Celebrity Ally’ and during his acceptance speech attacked Conservative Minister Kemi Badenoch, who, for our overseas readers, is the most senior black female politician in British history.
Tennant said: “We shouldn’t live in a world where that is worth remarking on. However, until we wake up, and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more [rapturous applause and cheering] – [pause when he realised what he said] I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”
Badenoch isn’t one to take things lying down and fired back the next morning on X: “I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.”
Was one of her pithy replies.
The Prime Minister then waded in, as did Sir Keir Starmer who distanced himself from Tennant: “In politics, as in life, it’s important that we are able to robustly disagree with others – obviously that happens a lot in the general election campaign,” the Labour leader told reporters on a visit to a GP surgery near Nottingham. “But we should do it with respect for everybody involved in that robust discussion.”
This heated debate shows no sign of going away, and indeed, it’s rapidly becoming a major talking point in the election.
All this took place in front of a backdrop of the various brands of the corporate sponsors. Which prompts the question: if the sponsors had known there was going to be such controversy at the event, would they have sponsored it in the first place?
Having attended such corporate events in the past, I can tell you now that, along with the branding opportunities, all the above will have been given several tables at the ceremony as part of their sponsorship deal. At the last one I was at – a Marketing Awards Dinner in London – the lead sponsor, a large FMCG, had 15% of the available tables and all at the front of the stage.
Now I don’t know who these companies invited to join them at their tables: it will have been the usual mix of executives, advocacy group members, marketing team etc. I don’t know their political beliefs or their opinions about the issues of the day. But I couldn’t help hear the huge cheer Tennant got from guests when he said: “Until we wake up, and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore.” Caveat: we don’t know if any of the guests at the corporate tables were cheering this comment.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. For some time now our larger employers have been increasingly diving down the DEI rabbit hole, driven by external factors – third-party initiatives, procurement and corporate finance ESG, Government funding requirements, aggressive activist groups etc. – and internal factors – board level sponsors, employee activism, DEI/EDI policies and training, employee advocacy groups etc. However, with the emerging evidence that contrary to the now debunked McKinsey report touting the benefits of DEI in the corporate world, EDI (the U.K. way of writing DEI – which I will follow from now on) has actually backfired spectacularly and is damaging British businesses, workers and the economy in general. Rather than spreading unity, it’s spreading division, resentment, disengagement and fear. You can read the details in the Government independent report here, in the Dynata and Free Speech Union report here and in the Datapoll/Policy Exchange report here.
On top of this, large employers are losing a growing number of employment tribunals where they have discriminated against employees who have objected to being forced to deny their beliefs, beliefs that are protected under law every bit as much as gay rights and trans rights.
Corporate HR, so frequently blamed for EDI in the workplace, has rather belatedly woken up to the folly and we are seeing the brakes being slammed on across the U.K. Corporate Landscape. Only, the message has yet to make it through to marketing, comms, procurement and other departments. I can only imagine how the Chief People Officer Emma Taylor would have winced as Tennant attacked the U.K.s most senior black female politician underneath the Tesco Brand. Whether this dawned on the marketing and comms team, who would have decided the sponsorship opportunity, is up for debate. Those who saw what happened to the Bud Light brand and have learned their lesson were probably also wincing, but there would have been a decent number applauding and cackling along with Mr. Tennant.
Now, I am not suggesting the boards and shareholders of these companies hold the radical gender views that Mr. Tennant does. We don’t do guilt by association in the rational world; that is the woke Leftist way, not ours. However, brand association does matter: this is why companies protect their brands so aggressively and are incredibly sensitive when they are exposed, inadvertently or otherwise, to bad publicity. Risks are explored, scenarios gamed out.
So here’s the question: given the likelihood of a backlash in the current febrile public debate around the gender question, why would a corporate sponsor willingly wade into the fray like this? Didn’t it gameplay the risk? Is it an example of groupthink? (I’ve written about how this manifests in the corporate world here.)
It does appear to indicate a failure in governance. HR is frantically pressing the brakes here, realising the risk of indirectly discriminating against gender critical employees and those of faith, and the potential incoming Employment tribunals and discrimination fines, but the message seems to be too firmly embedded in the corporate culture to stop.
American academic James Lindsay has recently spoken about DEI in the context of the current Bill before Congress in the USA to overturn Joe Biden’s Executive Mandate to make DEI mandatory in the U.S. public sector. His analysis may explain the failure of corporate governance. This excerpt from his interview with Andrew Doyle this week is one of the best and most incisive analysis of the root problem of DEI:
What I call the “Politics of Compliance”, where you say: “This is how everything is going to be and it’s going to be a lot better when we all do this thing.” Everybody who complies gives in and then they are taught to resent the people who resist: “We would have a more inclusive workplace if only these racists and transphobes and homophobes and sexists and misogynists and everything else were silenced or kicked out.” So you end up making this dynamic that’s extremely polarising and extremely divisive.
Which is of course exactly what is happening in workplaces and other organisations all over the West, and the U.K. is no exception. Those of us who are students of history and who have read our Solzhenitsyn, Frankl, Sereney and Primo Levi will recognise this mindset as the same one used to dehumanise opponents and to permit the atrocities of the 20th century totalitarian regimes. As Lindsay goes on to say, it’s also precisely the mantra taught to the Red Guards by Mao before and during the Cultural Revolution, and if you want a harrowing example of the consequences of that, you can watch this Netflix trailer (trigger warning for those of you who don’t know this history).
There’s ample evidence that such politics of compliance is firmly embedded in some of the sponsors of this event who seem to have no problem with linking their brand to controversial and radical gender and Pride events. Network Rail’s ‘Pride Pillar’ at London Bridge Station, for instance. HSBC has gone all-in: check out its HQ reception:
Now, Macquarie was the leading company on Stonewall’s “league of employers” in 2022; it disappeared in 2023 (why?) but is back in 2024.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is commercial folly to associate your company or brand with any sort of ideological or political movement, especially if there is current controversy on the issues within or around that movement.
In The Fair Job Initiative we advise our clients to never get involved in politics or activism of any type because you will invariably upset and alienate a proportion of your employees and customers, and on occasion this may slip into unlawful discrimination against them, as we have seen multiple times (check the annals of the Free Speech Union).
Furthermore, corporate brand specialists spend a lot of time and money ensuring that their brand is appropriately used – when did you last see a Tesco delivery van speeding? When was the last time one cut you up at a roundabout? Why, then, are the same brand specialists willing to lend their brand to a third party like the LGBT Awards, trusting it not to do anything controversial that could damage the brand – like give a platform to a vocal actor who is well known for his radical position on the gender question and whose activism includes labelling gender critical women as ‘TERFS’ and ‘freaks’.
As already mentioned, whilst the mainstream media seem to have missed the role of the corporate sponsors in all this, X has not, with the ever vigilant @FlaggedOffUK questioning whether the Tesco Marketing Director should be immediately sacked – Tesco has a number of senior Group Marketing Directors but I would suggest that it’s the Group Brand, Proposition and Marketing Communications Director, Emma Botton who’s ultimately responsible here.
Given that Tesco U.K. was also a sponsor behind this year’s highly controversial Mayor of London campaign, it’s unlikely that Emma Botton’s job will be in danger because of a mouthy actor who obviously missed Ricky Gervais’s tips for slebs. But with this incident now being a focal point of a very public and loud election issue, maybe even this will be too much for the Tesco board and shareholders?
We may have witnessed a turning point in the enthusiasm of the corporate world to willingly fund and nod along with activists.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
So despite the fact lockdowns killed the economy, old people, small businesses, pubs, education, they were a success.
Who’s going to jail?
Oh, and by the way, we should never have propped up the Ukrainian meat grinder in a war they could never win.
Modern politicians have caused every problem this country now faces.
Politicians (i.e. the sort of people who seek power to execute their crackpot ideas) always cause every problem “their” countries face. It’s just an eternal truth.
What i wrote 1 year ago:
If we were to put £20 notes in a suitcase then 1 suitcase would contain about £100,000. So 10 suitcases would be £1,000,000.
Now imagine a (very big) field that contained 500,000 (half a million) of these suitcases.
Now imagine getting all those suitcases and putting them in a big pile, pouring petrol on them and setting them alight.
That’s in effect, what we have done with the taxpayers money spent on Covid in the UK ALONE, a virus that, at worst, is cured by a Lemsip Max.
That is why we, and the rest of the world, now have eye watering inflation.
It’s not rocket science.
The majority of people are having their assets devalued which makes it easier to relieve them of all they own. There’s no problem for the minority that benefit from this and are in a position to influence policy such that it continues.
Jail is for the plebs unless you’re an Ernest Saunders type in which case you can get an incurable disease and then recover from it once released.
Ah yes, Ernest ‘Deadly’ Saunders. Senior managers in all corporate enterprises climb the career ladder faster than other people of the same age/experience. This means that in their rapid ascent they sometimes tread on the toes of others on the same ladder. The decent ones recognise what they have done and apologise. Deadly was the sort of person who got on to other people’s ladders just to tread on someone’s toes.
More fool the judiciary who believed in his miraculous recovery from a fatal illness and the lies of his doctors who diagnosed his illness and recovery.
By NOT doing what we elect them to do.
I’m shocked
I never before believed that printing money and paying the laptop class and teachers for doing F. all while they hid behind their sofas could ever have contributed to inflation.
It’s obviously all Putin’s fault – just as he’s responsible fpr the vast increases in energy prices – which started well befor the Ukraine “invason”.
Something afoot.
I’m not buying this outpouring of faux honesty.
Badenoch telling us Britain is the best place to live if you are black, Barclay threatening to have a word with the NHS nutjobs and now Hunt, a man who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it, is admitting that printing trillions of pounds might perhaps have caused a touch of rampant inflation.
The con Tories have had 13 years to do right by this country – and most definitely including Brexit – and all they have done is drive us to the brink of collapse. Now however they would like to fess up to some failings and give a promise that they have the best interests of the country at heart.
You know what Fishy and the rest of your traitorous bunch …
You can all F. right off!
I think what’s afoot is simply positioning themselves just far enough away from Labour that they might stand some chance of getting reelected. But of course they cannot be trusted. Too little, too late. Promises made will be reneged on, as they have been for 13 years as you rightly point out, and measures will not go far enough. Turning down the heat just enough to fool the frogs.
Would life be marginally more tolerable under the Tories than Labour? I think so, yes. But surely sooner or later this has to stop and I think the only way that happens is if Tory voters wake up and realise they have been had. I’m not optimistic.
The train driver may change and make the journey more or less comfortable or hair-raising but the destination is the same.
…into the buffers
Do you think people are now crying out for a common sense party?
Or do you think the majority just doesn’t engage with politics?
Ditto👍
This bloke is beyond disgusting, with his BS animated hand movements, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and if I ever did have the glorious opportunity to throw him it would be into the bottom of a fithly repugnant ditch, exactly where the twat belongs..
Fuck these so called politicians.
How many more decades can they take us for fools with this level of piss take…its truly off the fucking scale.
He was one of the worst of the lockdown fanatics. Unrepentant. Never forgive, never forget.
It’s just so inconvenient when you haven’t got the CBDCs in place yet, and you are facing a global debt crisis.
Erm, wasn’t this obvious from the very first letter (from “Boris Johnson”) that the Government sent out to every household in 2020? The letter explained (or perhaps hid) how on average we were all being lent £10,000 to stay at home, hide behind the sofa, rather than work, with the Government making up for lost pay. The implication was that we would repay it in taxes over the next decade or so. I suspect that the figure ballooned, HS2-style, to £20,000, before interest, so it became necessary to print more money than was originally planned.
“Chancellor Admits Mass Money Printing During Lockdown is Behind Inflation”
Inflation is just the start!
Late this year and early into next year the real consequences will bite! The biggest recession in Western history caused by kicking the can so far down the road over the last 14 years that they thought it would never be found! Well it has! In the gutter by the side of the road, and found a lot earlier than they thought! now the back peddling begins in ernest, fossil fuels, hydrogen fuel cells, vaccines,windmills,space travel, net zero and evs are choices born of luxury and abundance!
when nothing is available, anything is better than nothing!
I’m sure that back in 2020 Jeremy C**t was regularly on TV calling for longer harsher lockdowns. Did he give a toss back then about the cost and the long term monetary consequences of printing hundreds of billions of pounds?
Disgusting little hypocrite, I wouldn’t p**s on him if he was on fire.
Yes, plenty of proof all over the shop that he’s a complete tyrannical and duplicitous twat. None of them get to wriggle off the hook and attempt to reverse ferret. He’s on my ‘Head on a spike’ list.
”In February 2021, as his colleague Mark Harper was leading the Covid Recovery Group in demanding the removal of pandemic restrictions, Hunt was insisting that they stay until cases were below 1,000 a day. In October, Hunt welcomed a report by a joint parliamentary committee into Covid on which he sat as one of two chairs. The report itself said that the delay to impose a first lockdown last spring was ‘one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.’
Asked on Good Morning Britain about whether the UK should have locked down sooner he replied: ‘That’s what we conclude in the report, that we should have gone earlier.’ And then, in December that same year, the onetime health minister also voted with the government on ‘Plan B’ and was not one of the 128 MPs who defied Boris Johnson’s ‘vaccine passport’ scheme.
Jeremy Hunt may now argue that he would have done things ‘differently’ as PM during the pandemic. But it’s probably better to judge what he actually did do at the time, given his support for restrictions throughout Covid. Talk about revealed preferences…”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jeremy-hunt-s-lockdown-yarns/
Let’s not forget it was Chunt who, when Health Secretary, pushed the findings of Exercise Cygnet in 2016 under the carpet. The findings that said the country was woefully unprepared for a future pandemic.
Agreed!!
Hunt:”we collectively underestimated the effect of money printing”…
Is this man for real?
I definitely don’t belong to this ‘collective’.
How to wreck the economy in five easy steps:
1) Foment panic over a flu-like virus and shut down the economy for a prolonged period of time, mangling global supply chains and suppressing supply of goods and services.
2) Print unprecedented amounts of money to attempt to paper over the problems caused by step #1. Keep doing so even well after belatedly reopening. Then act shocked!, I tell ya, shocked!, when the persistent supply/demand mismatch ends up causing inflation.
3) Introduce a gene therapy drug so toxic that it kills and/or disables an unprecedented number of people, causing a massive labor shortage when forced upon the masses.
4) Foment a war between one of the worlds largest oil and gas producers on the one side, and one of the world’s largest agricultural powerhouses on the other. Then impose sanctions on the oil and gas producer while propping up the other side. All while banning or restricting domestic drilling and fracking.
5) A month later, start belatedly hiking interest rates, and rapidly so, combined with Quantiative Tightening to suck money out of the economy. Keep rates high long after inflation plummets and act shocked!, I tell ya, shocked!, when that ends up causing a recession (at best).
Then gaslight everyone about it.
(In a Steve Urkel voice) “Did I do that?”
Meanwhile, Sweden’s government debt/GDP ratio is lower than before the “pandemic”, aka it has already paid back any extra debt taken on/money printed for that and more.
He still hasn’t said it was money printing during lockdown though, he said it was “quantitative easing”. How many people will make the link?
The only thing anybody needs to know about Hunt and most of the Conservative party (though thankfully not my MP) was that they voted for mandatory jabs for carehome workers. This is not humane or even human. It what the N@zis did.
As for boom and bust or ‘fleecing the flock’ as the central bankers refer to it, this has been going on for centuries. Covid was merely the next transfer of wealth. After the money makers began to suffocate below their own pyramid laundering scheme, they had to kick the problem down the road £1TN magic money way before the pandemic – and then bring in Covid and lockdown to hide their fraudulent scheme.
We don’t need politicians, the Bank of England (or any private/central banks) or currencies over which we have no control. We the people produce the £2.5TN/year of value. They just steal it. Either they get out of our way, or they’ll be removed.
Awwwwww….. The Treasury, Banks, Chancellors, MPs, Academia … didn’t know that PRINTING Money causes problems!?? who are they ?? GCSE Students??
The Damn Well Knew . The backpeddaling Weasels. They have destroyed our economy & walking around Free & Richer
And yet the printing presses are still rolling.
“WE collectively under-estimated that…..”
No, not WE you Bonus Hole. YOU, the Government and the Bank of England did. And that might be because YOU never carried out a Cost/Benefit analysis before deciding to wreck the economy.