TRIGGERnometry - Exposing The British DEI Industry - Mercy Muroki

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

We use Monetary Metals to buy gold and earn interest on it! Find out more https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Mercy Muroki is a social policy researcher, commentator and columnist. She was a member of the UK government's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. In 2023 she became a policy adviser for then Minister for Women and Equalities Kemi Badenoch where she worked on issues such as DEI in the workplace, immigration, social cohesion, trans guidance in schools and more. SPONSOR: https://GETSUPERBEETS.COM Use Promo Code: TRIG to get a free 30-day supply + 15% off your first order Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we have in the UK twice as many diversity officers per head of population than any other country. They're more or less virtue signalling. They don't really know whether it works. And many of them find little to no effect, basically, didn't achieve its intended aims. And some of them even find that the opposite effect happens. So there's backlash. And the problem is those people are kind of dismissed as racist when actually their concerns are legitimate. somewhere along the line we kind of lost common sense. Mercy, good to have you back on the show. It's been a while since we had you on.

In that time, you've been a news presenter. You've worked for Camille Badenock. You've done a bunch of different things. And one of the things you've been writing a lot about recently is something we often talk about in an American context, but actually the figures came out that I think we have in the UK twice as many diversity officers per head of population than any other country.

Yes. And we don't really talk about DEI so much in the British context. You've been there. You've been working on this stuff. What can you tell us about the diversity industry in the UK? Yeah, so I've been working. Thank you for having me back, by the way. It's been a couple of years.

I've been working on diversity and inclusion stuff for Kemi Badenok, who's the Minister for Women and Equality. She's a very popular politician in the UK. And she's very much sceptical about the diversity and inclusion industry. as I am, I shouldn't be, in theory, skeptical, because I'm diversity bingo, you know, I'm women, immigrant, ethnic minority, whatever, working class background, you name it. So... That one doesn't count, but anyway.

So it's in my interest to, you know, be in favour of diversity. It's a very lucrative industry. People are getting paid tens and tens of thousands of pounds to be diversity and inclusion consultants. And in fact, I think there was some research done by an organisation called Conservative Way Forward that found just under half a billion pounds is spent in the UK on diversity and inclusion roles within the public sector alone. When you start talking about the private sector, you're talking about billions and billions of pounds. In America, it's, you know, tens of billions of dollars probably being spent on this stuff. So what I was doing with Kemi,

for ChemE, was we appointed a panel, basically, to look into the data and what it says and about whether things that the diversity and inclusion industry say are effective, like diversity training, like unconscious bias training and all those things, what the actual evidence says, the peer-reviewed academic research. And just to figure out the extent of the industry, basically, and what needs to be done to actually make sure organizations are doing things. things properly. So that report was published a few weeks, a few weeks ago now in late March. And what it found was that, one, the diversity and inclusion industry is a very, well, let's put it this way, organizations who are using diversity and inclusion interventions,

they're more or less virtually signaling. They don't really know whether it works. They don't evaluate what they implement to check if it's value for money, to check if it's even had the impact. A large proportion of organisations say they're doing diversity and inclusion in a reactive way, so in reaction to events rather than because they have any sort of data to prove it works. And you mentioned that LinkedIn data as well from 2020, actually, it was. And so this was analysis by LinkedIn on sort of the roles on their platform, which is obviously a very big platform. And they found that the UK has twice as many diversity and inclusion roles per 10,000 employees than any other country.

And it had doubled, I think, in the five years previous. So it's a growth industry. Yes. And it's lucrative. It really is. I mean, we all know people who are, let's be honest, not the brightest. people ever, but they've made themselves a huge career and as diversity and inclusion consultants selling snake oil, basically. That's not to say that there aren't things that, you know,

we all want equality, of course. We all want people to be treated fairly, actually. We want people to be treated fairly. I think we had different definitions sometimes of what equality means and what it entails. But I think fundamentally we want people to be treated fairly. And I think everybody, regardless of political persuasion, can agree that if there are actual barriers that are stopping certain groups and they're genuinely, they're not a result of meritocracy or not a result of differences in career choice, for example, then that's fair. That's fair. You know, you don't have to have X percent of black people in an organisation for that to be fair. What's fair is that everybody's given the same opportunities. But what is, you know, what is, you know,

the problem is, is that organisations are resorting to these really crude, ineffective, kind of pointless measures. And often, actually, it ends up backfiring. So there's been lots of academic studies done on this that found, and lots of long-term studies looking at the impact of diversity and inclusion training, especially in America. And many of them find little to no effect basically, didn't achieve its intended aims. And some of them even find that the opposite effects happen. So there's backlash against it. And we've seen the backlash as well. But it ends up making people who already work in a place feel excluded or certain people won't actually apply based on how a company's framing its sort of job applications and its job

descriptions. So sometimes it has the opposite effect and that is objectively a bad thing. You know, then you're actually excluding people from applying for certain jobs. And there has been some evidence that it also makes some people more racist as well, which is like they're tired of being told that they're racist and they're like, well, F these people. Yeah. And that's actually a phenomenon that is we see in society in general, like with, you know, people are fed up, generally speaking, of having various ideologies round down their throat.

And so what we're seeing is a backlash against that. And often people start off with good intentions like with immigration, which I'm sure we can touch on later. You know, most people aren't racist. That might come as a huge shock to some people,

especially people on the left. But the vast majority of people aren't racist. They don't have anything against immigrants. But then when you're having all these things about diversity and inclusion, shove down your, though when it looks to you, like you as a native, are a second-class citizen because, you know, certain people are being favoured ahead of you when you're being positively discriminated against, which happens increasingly so now, then you are going to start saying,

hang on, I don't want these people coming here and undercutting me. And I actually think that's quite a human response. And the problem is those people are kind of dismissed as racist when actually their concerns are legitimate. But, you know, obviously that's not to say there aren't outright racist that exist in society. But I just don't think we should dismiss people's concerns when they do have concerns about diversity and inclusion or things like immigration.

You know, we talk about these DEI officers and then I try and read what they actually do and I still don't understand it. Yeah. So what do these people actually do? How do they justify a wage? That's something I'd love to know, basically. And I don't think it's justified, quite frankly.

I mean, I think the average figure, if I recall correctly from the Conservative Wayforward Report, which is obviously, you know, from a conservative-leaning organisation, so you have to take it with a pinch of salt, I suppose. But it was about £40,000 was the average sort of wage for a DEI person in the public sector. I've seen some go up to £70,000. For those students who don't live in the UK, that's more than double average wages, basically, or median salaries. So these people are getting a heck of a lot of money. Now, you have some doctors who don't even earn that in the UK.

So how you're justifying paying somebody just because, and often, let's be honest, you know, they're not hiring white male diversity and inclusion officers. They're hiring people pretty much on the basis that they are. diverse candidates and they tick some right boxes, not because they actually have any real sort of expertise on anything diversity-related. Yeah, I suppose if you had a DEI officer and it came out and looked and sounded like me, it might not, you know, it might sound a bit weird. But so what do they actually do? What are their task? Is it that they then look at the workforce and go, right, you need to have more black people, more Asians. Is that how it

kind of works, do they give training to people? Yeah. I mean, I wish it was that methodical because I feel like if they're looking at a workforce and saying this is where, you know, based on the data you have, this is where we feel you have gaps and, you know, if they were taking a kind of scientific approach, I'd almost be in favour of that. I'd be like, great, use the data to figure out what's going on. But that's not what's happening. And we know that because of surveys from businesses. We know that from the academic literature, that organizations really don't know what they're doing. They're just kind of going along with it.

So honestly, I don't know what they do. And I think what they do is they create work for themselves, basically. They say you have a problem, often a problem that probably doesn't exist within that organisation. But for instance, you know, if you have a disparity between workers of a certain group compared to a different group, they might say, oh, well, you, that means, necessarily that there's some discrimination at play. So let's see how we can, you know, increase that. But, you know, nobody, I think one in three doctors in the UK is Indian or something,

you know, nobody says, oh, that's really unfair. Where are all the white doctors? Because we know that's ridiculous. Like Indians disproportionately go into the medical field. That's reflected in who ends up being a doctor. Yeah, we don't seem to do it the other way around. You know, nobody says, oh, where are all the male midwives sort of? thing, but we seem to be obsessed with sort of, why don't you have enough black people in this industry? Why don't you have enough women? Well, sometimes these things are just a natural kind of organic product of people's career choices and just the industries that lend themselves to the different genders and different cultures like men are going to go into construction

more than women. That's perfectly reasonable and perfectly fine. Have we got to this point where you say when men are more likely to go into construction and suddenly that becomes a contentious statement. I don't. I think somewhere along the line, we, and I'd love to identify when it was, I'm not exactly sure,

but somewhere along the line, we kind of lost common sense. We lost the ability to reason and we lost the ability to point out that this thing is a biological reality here. I can show you. Or, you know, this thing is a product of X, Y, and Z. And we've, the scientific, I think, you know, the left has obviously dominated much of this stuff and the narratives and the discourses on a lot of this stuff.

And some of the, we know it's fields like sociology, for example, and social sciences are very left-leaning. And we know that people teaching those are very left-leaning. And I think the scientific method, when you look at, you know, the scientific method and who's actually, caring about using the scientific method to get to some kind of truth, it doesn't tend to be people working in the social sciences. And I say that as somebody who actually took social sciences. So I'm not surprised. And actually, when you look at the political split between different fields, different academic fields, you'll find that the fields that don't require too much science

tend to be very left wing. The people working in life, those fields tend to be very left wing, where fields that do very much require science and truth, they don't have as much of a left wing bias. And so I think some of this stuff comes from academia,

some of this stuff comes from us importing America's very many racial problems that don't apply here. And I think we're exposing people from just not being very smart as well, because I just don't, get how you can have any sort of reason and come to some of the conclusions that so many people

do in many of these identity politics conversations, not least the trans one. Well, obviously, culturally all of that makes sense, but I'm a little bit worried that you say you don't quite know because you're working for the minister whose job was to deal with this stuff, right? And this is the question I was going to ask you anyway, because Kemi, this is no slight on her or on you. She hasn't been in that role for the entire time the conservative government has been in charge of this country. But there has been a conservative government in charge of this country for 14 years. So you'd sort of hope that they would have got to the bottom of it by now, do you know what I mean? And maybe even start to sort it out.

So are we going to see some kind of rollback? And I don't mean, you know, it is like me and France is talking about this on trigonometry. I mean, actually people in government going, we can see that part of this is because the Equality's Act. is the way that it is. And part of this is because of this, and here's what the action plan is. No offense, in the six months that we have left. Yeah.

So there were polls out recently that showed that the Conservatives could go down to 80 seats. One poll had it, 80 seats or 90s. As high as that. Well, I mean, and in context, I can't remember how many seats they have now, but they have around an 80 seat, maybe a bit below that now, majority. you need, you know, we have the Parliament of 650 seats, so, you know, do the math, 80 seats is not great. I don't think there's any time left, to be honest, to make the fundamental cultural changes in this area that we need to see. There's not time massively to change legislation that needs to be changed.

And I completely agree about there has been a lot of waste of time. And I do find some people do kind of corner me and try to blame me for all the ills of the conservatives because I have been an outspoken kind of advocate of many of their policies. But I was 15 when they were, David Cameron was elected. So you know, you can't blame me for everything. I was but a child when they were elected. But I do completely agree that they should have done a lot more on the social front. And I think sadly now it will be left to labour to enact some of the things that they want to enact.

And I'm not particularly excited about what they have in mind. No, nor am I. I guess the question would be had Kemi had more time now left, what are some of the things that you might think about doing in order to say, look, we're all for, as you say, people being treated fairly. In fact, it's one of the core principles of our society and a principle around which it's based. But some of these completely unscientific, untested and where they are tested, unproven methods are being introduced at great expense, both in the public and the private sphere. Here's what we're going to do about it. What is that? What would she do about it?

Well, so when it comes to some of the trans stuff and some of the positive discrimination stuff, I think, changing the Equality Act would have been necessary. And, you know, that's obviously something that's been rumbling on in the background and those conversations and that work to see what needs to be changed. There's been various consultations and things like that. But when you're talking about, you know, a piece of legislation, you know, Equality Act was enacted in 2010. It brought together lots of all the different pieces of Equality's legislation.

It needs primary legislation. change, so you actually need to kind of go through the whole legislative machine to even change any part of it. That would have helped because what we've found is a lot of organizations in trying to sort of increase proportions of different groups, they end up positively discriminating, for example. So, and even our own Royal Air Force was recently found by an inquiry to positively discriminate against white men. Unlike in America, positive discrimination is unlawful in this country. You cannot positively discriminate against anybody. But the Equality Act has something called positive action provisions in it, which is a kind of positive discrimination light version.

But because organisations don't know what they're doing and they're getting really bad advice from various lobby groups, they end up accidentally positively discriminating. There's also the issue of free speech. And what needs to happen with free speech is employers don't understand their duty to actually protect freedom of belief. And we've seen a number of cases where employers have been found to be in breach of the Equality Act by not protecting freedom of belief, which is a protected characteristic under Equality Act. and then they have to pay out and we've seen that with trans so people who have gender critical views

they've received payouts from employers more recently for the first time in the UK we saw a man took his employer to court because he had views that were critical against BLM and a judge ruled that actually that did count as a belief that is protected under the Equality Act

it has to meet certain criteria to qualify as a belief and it did so again employers don't really understand what protecting your employee's beliefs mean. So that could use clarifying as well. Under the Equality Act, there's something called the public sector equality duty. And part of that means any public body has a duty to ensure good relations

between different groups in the community, basically. A lot of organisations, public bodies, are doing the exact opposite by sort of, employing diversity and inclusion and cultural spokespeople who are actually advising them things that are divisive and that aren't fostering good relations between communities. So that could use clarifying as well. So there's lots of stuff that could have happened that should have happened before, but I think the political turmoil has really not helped. I mean, we've gone through God knows how many prime ministers. I think are we on the fourth, fifth prime minister in

whatever, seven years, who knows. And then obviously there was Brexit, there was the pandemic, you know, there was a war, and there's so much going on that it took up so much political time to actually change some of the problems we're facing in Britain. And it's disappointing, I just say that it's. Yeah, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, that is very fair to say.

The one thing when it comes with the DEI stuff, you know, I just don't understand why they don't talk, about how people who come from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds find it tougher to get into certain industries. I think most people would actually be a little bit more sympathetic if people came forward and go, look, if you grew up in a part of Middlesbrough, you might be super talented,

but for whatever reason, if you come from a deprived socioeconomic background, you know, if you grow up one parent family, you might not have the opportunity to go into this type of career. And we need to open these types of careers up to these types of people because actually what we're doing is we're wasting talent. I'm far more sympathetic to that argument than the other stuff. Why don't these people focus on that?

I have a suspicion. And some organisations are, so to their credit the BBC, they've now started having a target. I'm not a massive fan of targets, but they do now have a target for the number of people, from working class backgrounds that they want to employ, which is a step in the right direction. I suspect the reason people don't want to talk about class

is because we all know, once you start talking about class, you realise that actually white working class people have it the worst, for the most part. They have it the worst when it comes to educational outcomes. And once you're screwed in education, you're pretty much screwed everywhere else. So when you look at how immigrants are doing, even working class immigrants, they're doing really well for themselves.

They do far better than white working class people. So I think a lot of people on the left, they want to ignore the elephant in the room because it means admitting actually perhaps race isn't the be all and a, I can never say that, be all and end all. You just said it. The be all and end all. And then they have to start asking themselves difficult questions. like, okay, well, if it's not race, what exactly is going on here?

And then you have to kind of get into cultural capital and culture and all those sorts of things. And it's much more complicated to do that than to just say, oh, well, it's race is the problem. You know, racism is the problem. I think we definitely should be talking about why working class people don't do as well. And a lot of it has to do with culture, which is the same. reason I say that Caribbean young people do really badly compared in school and just on a range of measures compared to black African people and students. You know, teachers aren't choosing to kind of be racist to the Caribbean kids and not racist to the African kids. That would, of course,

be ridiculous to suggest that that's what's happening. What's happening is that Caribbean people who are often, you know, second, third, fourth generation migrants, I have a completely different culture to people who are new African immigrants like myself. There's a completely different culture. The norms are different. You know, so the, we need to talk about culture, and that includes white working class culture as well, and how that impacts how people are not received in society, but how they're probably discriminated against and how they underperform and how the expectations aren't very high for that group either. You know, there's also a part of me that thinks this, which is a lot of these middle class,

let's just call them progressives, wouldn't like the white working class because they're not going to agree with what they think. You're not going to get someone from I don't know, Grimsby banging on about white privilege. Yeah. Or someone from Cornwall, which hasn't had industry, a town which has had all the mines shut down, hasn't had a lot of jobs there for generations. They're not going to be on board with this stuff.

And automatically, you're going to bring somebody into your particular industry or corporation that you're going to have fundamental disagreements with. And as human beings, we kind of like to surround ourselves with people who agree with us, don't we? Yeah, and there's a lot of recruiting. So one of the causes of why traditionally workplaces have been homogenous, which is where the diversity and inclusion thing stepped in because they said, you know, hang on a second, we need a bit of diversity in here, a bit of heterogene, is because people recruit in their own image just naturally. People surround themselves and people that agree with them, you know, people like to be affirmed, to have their

identity affirmed by the people around them. And so there is some of that, you know, even accent discrimination is a real thing. People, there are polls done on this and surveys done on this on how intelligent you perceive somebody to be based on what their accent is. So if you are from the north, sadly, you're not seen as intelligent as somebody who has a received pronunciation accent who's from the South, things like that play into it as well. And as you say, a lot of white working class people, they're not bought into all of this stuff. They don't, they don't care about, you know, all this liberal stuff essentially. And that's why I think liberals have a condescending attitude, or let me say, white metropolitan middle class liberals, have a

condescending attitude towards white working class people. And they dismiss the as racist as xenophobes because it's easy to do that because they actually, I think, deep down, see themselves as culturally inferior. They see themselves as highbrow. And they see white working class culture as lowbrow. And so I don't even think they care, to be honest. Well, this is what I was going to ask you,

because it strikes me that I think maybe one of the reasons is that they're not willing to look at how to actually help people is that's not the objective. The objective is to go along with the narrative that you've talked about, which is this is about racism, this is about sexism, because these are the virtuous things to currently be concerned with, rather than going, who are the people that are actually struggling in education, who we can help? Because there'll be times when you can't help people who are struggling, because they're struggling because they don't have the right culture or they don't have the right values or they

don't have the right intelligence or whatever. There's all sorts of possibilities. Well, I'm curious as well. I think this whole idea of diversity is a broader conversation as well, because you're just talking about how well people recruit people who agree with them. I look at us, right? We have about 10, 12 people working for us. And there's various range of opinions. I don't think we have any people with like blue hair and nose piercems working here. But I do wonder, to what extent, the idea that you must have lots and lots of people who have completely different opinions within an organization is necessarily. true. Like, I don't think having two people who are in here all the time telling Francis and I

how we're completely wrong is the way to take what we do forward. Do you know what I mean? Like, we do need people who are broadly aligned with the mission of what we're trying to create. So even on that metric, introducing things artificially, I don't know how much that makes sense. Now, if there was somebody who was black who wanted to come in and had those same values as us and wanted to create the same thing, but they didn't get an interview because they were black, that's a very different conversation. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, I completely see what you're saying. And that's where one thing, this report, the report that was commissioned by, can be the Minister for Women and Equality's that was produced by the independent panel. One thing pointed out is that it's all

about context, the context of an organisation. There's no one size fits all because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make, quite frankly, if there's a sandwich factory, who cares what, you know, How is how diverse the sandwich factory is going to improve any, anything to do with the company's productivity or its mission or anything like that? There are cases like public services where there will need, who are actively dealing with and making decisions that impact significantly the lives of a whole range of different sorts of people, where the case for having people within that organisations who's had different experiences, you are from different backgrounds. The case for that is obviously quite strong there.

So this report said it's about context. The diversity and inclusion thing should be in aid of improving your organisation's goals and it should actually be productive, a productive thing, not just sort of I've plucked out some targets out of thin air and they're going to have no impact whatsoever. Well, that's right. And one of the things I was talking to somebody other day who made, I think, a very good point, which is there is this myth now that diversity automatically improves performance. And the way they've done that is basically all the really successful companies have been guilted into creating more diversity. So then you go, do successful companies have diversity? Yes, therefore diversity means you're going to have a

successful company. And I just think we have to get away from this idea that a government Mandarin is going to come in, look at a private business and know how to improve it. These people haven't built anything in their lives. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more, to be honest. And I think, again, this report wasn't saying that government should come in and do anything. And actually, it was saying the quite opposite. Businesses should be empowering themselves to figure out what's best for me. And actually, they should just have the facts and the data. And they should be abiding by their legal obligations at the very, very minimum. But there's also a risk, I think, of just completely, as much, you know, obviously people who advocate for all this diversity,

diversity and inclusion stuff, they think it has been ignored. The diversity and inclusion thing has been ignored for a long time. But there's a massive risk of also overdoing it. And that's where I think we are at the moment. And I think if you arm organisations with the tools to, and the knowledge of what exactly are you trying to achieve, how can you figure out what your company needs, then that's a good thing. And actually just give people who run organisations, you know, cut them some slack and say, it's okay to not, you know, want to have X number of people, these random quotas. It's okay not to do that. And you can justify why you don't want to do that when you actually think properly about what your organisation is trying to achieve and what role

diversity and inclusion would have in that. So yeah, I think some, it's morally, to some extent, the moral case for diversity and inclusion insofar as it is saying we don't want discrimination. This is what I was going to say to right. Do you think this is, we have to abandon the framework entirely and go, we don't care about diversity. We care about making sure there's no discrimination. If there's no discrimination, the outcome is the outcome. We don't care. whether that's all black or white, not white, not black, whatever. Like, as long as people were treated fairly when they were recruited and during their employment, then the outcome is what the outcome is.

Well, see, I would agree with that, but with one caveat, which is that I do think there's some legitimacy in the argument that we, there are forms of discrimination that actually are very subtle but matter. Now, I'm not talking about microaggressions or things like that, which are clearly just ridiculous. And just, you know, only narcissists talk about that stuff. But, you know, I think it does kind of matter if somebody comes, has a working, an accent that's associated with working class, you know, working class communities. It does matter that that person is not going to get a job, even if they have the exact same qualifications or even better, just because they don't present themselves. in a particular way.

So I think in a sense, there is a role to support those people and try and give them the social and cultural capital that they need in order to thrive in the workplace. Give them a better accent. Not quite that. For those of you listening, the face she just pulled, it was incredible. Sorry, Mason. I had to do that.

I've been caught out. I think there's a role to empower people to recognize that actually all of us discriminate. All of us say, you know, probably won't hire that person because of X-wife. Well, not all of us, because not all of us run companies, but we all have it in us. So, you know, it's just discriminates subtly based on different social and cultural cues that somebody's giving. Francis, sorry, I know I've hooked the mic for a long time. I really disagree with this. Like there's not been a single person that we've hired where we've given a share about anything other than their potential performance. But that's not always the case.

And do you agree that that shouldn't ever be the case? That somebody. Yeah. So and I think that's where I'm saying where it's becomes evident that actually some people aren't getting jobs, not because they're not perfectly qualified. But for other subtler reasons, we should have, we should do something about that. I don't know what that looks like necessarily. But I think it's about, first of all, exposing those people to different environments when they're younger. So some people genuinely grew up in households where their parents didn't work and they've been on benefits all their lives.

They don't know how to feel out a job application. They don't know what to say in an interview. They don't even know how to greet somebody necessarily. And those things kind of matter. Those soft skills matter because, you know, it's a rough old world out there in the, in the, employment in the workplace and getting a job, even if you're really qualified, is increasingly difficult because everybody is qualified these days. And so we should help people have the soft skills to actually navigate the world. And I think those sorts of things do matter. So I'm not

dismissing every aspect of diversity and inclusion altogether, but I'm saying let's actually base it on some facts rather than random stuff plucked out of dinner. You know, I left teaching in 2020, so four years ago now, and looking at the corporate workplace, when we interact with people who send official emails, it seems like every corporation now has pronouns in the bio. And I think to myself, what is going on? And actually, what happens if you refuse to adhere? to that particular ideology?

Well, I have always said that if I'm ever asked to, because I know my auntie works in education, she's a professor in Canada, I mean, and she teaches education. So you can only imagine the kinds of stuff she has to put up with, basically. And she says when they have their meetings, they have to introduce themselves as, hi, I'm so-and-so, and my pronouns are X.

I've always said, if ever I'm in a situation where I'm expected to do that, I am not doing that at all. I am absolutely never being put in a situation where I feel, well, you can put me in that situation if you want, but I'm going to refuse to say my pronouns are she, her. Now, some people might say, why? What's the harm? It's, you know, it's only like, you know, making other people in the room feel comfortable. What harm does it do to you? Well, actually, the harm is you're compelling me to, one, pretend I subscribe to an ideology I don't subscribe to. And secondly, you're compelling me to say something I don't want to. And so that's the harm. And that's a pretty big harm, if you ask me. So I think, however, I will caveat at it

with this, which is, although I'm a black woman, I do have a lot of privilege. So I have the privilege of I'm a relatively middle-class woman, even though I came from my class background. I have social and cultural capital. And so even if I was cancelled, I think I'd still be sensible enough to find an okay job. You know, I won't ever be in a position where I've been sacked from my job and I've lost, I mean, God, let's hope I'm not, but where I've lost my entire livelihood because I think I'm a sensible person and I think I'm reasonable. And I think I'm reasonable. Whereas there are people who genuinely, if they don't say that in a meeting and they get sacked from, you know, wherever they work, that is incredibly damaging for them. That person ends up homeless potentially if they lose that job.

They're living, you know, paycheck to paycheck. And so people feel compelled to go along with all this stuff. And nobody wants to stick their head above the parapet anymore. That's the real shame of the world we've created. that nobody feels that they can truly stand up for what they believe in, and nobody feels that they can challenge the things that they don't believe in. And if that's not a slippery slope to a hellish world, then I really don't know what is.

So I would encourage everybody to actually, if you don't want to say something, don't say it. Don't be compelled to say something you don't want to say or to pretend you believe in something you don't believe, because it might start with a pronoun here and there, but it won't end with that, I can guarantee you that. And I don't want to live in a world where, you know, people, which, you know, you've spoken a lot about this,

where that kind of thing leads up to do with authoritarianism. I don't want to live in that world at all. Yeah, look, I quite agree with you. I mean, there's going to be a lot of people watching and listening to this mercy. He goes, look, maybe they're not going to fire me. Because then we can talk about constructive dismissal, etc, etc. But I could be denied opportunities in order to progress. And how do you really prove that?

So there's going to be a lot of people go, look, I'm just going to have to toe the line with this nonsense because I don't want to limit or hinder my progress in my career. Yep. And I think that's probably the more realistic situation people face, because often their managers will probably be of that, you know, the people who make decisions about whether they get promoted will probably be of that persuasion so they don't want to tell the line. And I think to those people I would say, well, you have to make the decision then whether you're going to be a coward or you're not going to be a coward. And if you, unfortunately, those are the only two options. We cannot sugar-cote it.

Either you're a coward or you're not. So if you choose to be a coward, then you have to live constantly with that decision. If you can look yourself in the mirror while pretending to live a life you know it's not true, then that's a decision for yourself to make, but I know I couldn't do that. I couldn't look myself in the mirror, knowing I'm going to work every day or wherever I'm going, pretending I subscribe to some ideology or pretending I believe in things I don't. I personally couldn't look myself in the mirror. And so my choice is to live with the consequences of that. Inevitably, the consequences might be negative sometimes. But it's a choice I think people have to make for themselves.

In a way, I agree, what do you do if you work in a very liberal industry like the arts or like publishing? Where even when you go to a coffee shop now, your cup is a rainbow cup. Everything is rainbow colored. I mean, even your cups gay, right? To the point. So I guess what these people would say? Do you think there's a reason people think we're right wing, mate? Probably.

Even my cup is gay. And there's nothing wrong with being a gay cup, but just, it's just all the cups. Anyway, that being the case. I'm sorry about your traumatic experience at Starbucks, mate. Yeah, or wherever it was. This is how I know I'm middle aged. Anyway, if you were in the art site publishing, there are people who are going to say, look, I worked 20 years in order to get to this level.

And if I don't adopt this ideology or, I don't say the things or the incantations they want me to say. That's my career over. On that subject of publishing, just an anecdote on this. I don't know if you've read my book, but when I was doing the audio recording of my book, I had the audio engineer who came in. I did it over two days. And then after the first day, they told me the same audio engineer wouldn't be coming back

because he's unwell. And I turned up to record the second part of the book with a different. an audio engineer with different sound guy. And when I went to the toilet, I bumped into the first one. He'd literally asked not to do my book. Wow. That's, and that's a lot of industries now. So if you're working in that kind of industry, I think Francis really has a point. I mean, I know you said it's illegal to discriminate against people positively in this way, all for gender critical beliefs or whatever. But a lot of people, as you said yourself, sometimes discrimination is so hard to see and so hard to prove. Yes. So, by the way, I totally agree.

with you. But I'm just, I think we're playing devil's advocate to this idea, which is for a lot of people, they're not going to necessarily start a podcast or whatever. It's the career they had and that's it. Yeah. And do you know what? I kind of respect that man, you know, because actually that's what you would hope somebody does who doesn't agree. Because if it was the other way around and if, I mean, it is a bit ridiculous. You're there to record somebody, you know, you know, reading an audit because my books is not exactly the National Socialist Manifesto, right? I'm sure I'm sure that's a case but I think it's that sounds completely like an incredulity. I'm sure that's okay. I mean I'm giving a politician's answer. I think he made a decision. He said, I really don't want

to be here. I feel like I'm complicit in something that I'm uncomfortable with, so I'm just not going to do it. Now he was a bit of a coward by saying he was ill, it clearly wasn't. But in a way, I kind of, I'm like, fair enough. Okay, let me give a counter example. What if one of these guys is recording this goes, you know what, I really don't like Mercy's opinions. I'm not recording it today. But that's their choice in that they've lost work.

And so that's a decision they've made. And now it's different if somebody else is making you lose your job. I think that's the difference. Because if you're somebody who's choosing, you know what, I don't agree with this. I'm going to take the L, as it were, as the kids say. and just sacrifice whatever this is and that's my choice. But where it's more sinister and where it's actually problematic is when somebody else is saying,

I don't agree with this person, so I'm going to get them sacked. Now that's, I think, where the real problem lies. You know, I'll be honest you, Mercy, I disagree with you. I'll give you an example. Everybody knows. My mother's from Venezuela, blah, blah, blah. Corbyn was a supporter of the regime,

A regime which saw members of my family locked up. Members of my family as well suffered horrendous crimes, which they're never going to get justice for. And when the comedy club that I worked in, when people came in to do a set, if they were avowedly left wing or Corbynites, I got them banned. No, I didn't get them bad.

But no, I killed them. I killed them. But no, I was just like, look, my opinions are my opinions. I may think this, these people are in, entitled to think this way, because last time I checked, and in probably a couple of years, it won't be the case, but we live in a liberal Western democracy. When did it become acceptable to not say live and let live? Do you see what I mean? Yeah, but I think if somebody's canceling

you because you're at comedy club and they don't agree with what, and to be honest, they shouldn't be going to a comedy club if they get offended with the things comedians say. because that's kind of the point of that. Then that's a problem. But I think people should be, part of living in a liberal democracy is also that you can choose not to turn up somewhere. You can choose to say,

I'm not going to go to this place. I don't like it. I wouldn't necessarily go to... Right, you to close your ears. I wouldn't necessarily go to a trans bar where people were shaking penises in my face or something, you know? And I can choose not to give that place my service. that place can exist as long as you know, leaving my kids alone,

but feel free to do your thing. But with my book, the example we're talking about is, I've come into a bar and they've refused to serve me because of what I'm saying. Well, that's very different. And that is actually illegal. Right, like the barman is in effect that said, I'm not serving this guy, get someone else.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. So what I mean? Yeah. But anyway, I think we've deviated from France's original question, which is what do you say to people who are working in an industry

where people are that sensitive about anyone having a different opinion and you're saying to them, don't be a coward, and then like I've got three kids to feed. Well... Or, for instance, I'm an actor. I've been an actor for 25 years.

I'm very successful as an actor. I know the moment I step out, I'm not going to get any roles. It's done. What do I do? Well, I don't think at that point one person can't do anything. I mean, we know people who they respectively had to give up their career in the arts

because they were in an industry where people around them didn't agree with them. But one person, that one person speaking out won't necessarily make a difference, but that's where it's about a collective, not everybody, it might surprise people to learn this, but there are huge amounts of people who are silent about this enough, but who do agree with, you know, what we're talking about and our position. There are loads of people, and they're too afraid to speak out about it. And I think we have actually, you know, people in our intellectual sphere,

so to speak, have started, you know, a bit of a wave, and they are getting recognition, and they are seen as valid contributors to the intellectual space. And it's kind of upshut everybody collectively, who has stuck their head above the parapet, to give other people the confidence to do that. And for example, if you look at somebody like Joe Rogan, I mean, recently the Spotify released their figures for,

and I mean, he's light years ahead of even the second most listened to podcast, let alone everybody else. Joe Rogan has been painted as this far-right anti-vaxa sort of toxic masculinity, you know, everything under the sun, everything they've thrown at him. In their world, the people who are criticising Joe Rogan for actually existed, Joe Rogan would not be the most listened to man on the planet. What that tells us is that there are so many people who actually do disagree with the sort of people who turn up and, you know, want to cancel people because they disagree with them.

And actually, I think those people are in the majority. I really, really do think those people are. are in the majority because not, I refuse to believe the majority of people have been captured by this ideology. And so I think it's really incumbent upon those people who, you know, do want to stick their head above the parapet to do that because people will follow. I think, and I think we are already seeing that. I think we're already seeing lots of ordinary people feel more confident about saying their views, gender critical views, for example, or speaking out against things they disagree with.

I think we're seeing a bit of a shift in that respect. And so all I would do is encourage people to be braver and to not be cowards. And that's how we, I think, change the culture. It's a good message to end on, Mercy. We're going to go to locals where we ask you questions from our supporters that they've already submitted. But before we do, we always end with the same question.

What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Mercy answers the final question, make sure that at the end of the interview, you click the link in the description and head on over to our locals to see this. Don't underestimate what's going to happen when Labour come into power. Now that you've left GB News, how do you feel about it? Do you miss it? Would you go back? What, if anything, do you think they need to do to increase viewership? So I wouldn't go back to GB News.

Well, I think the one thing is the decline. birth rates, we're not taking that seriously, declining, well, there's issues with fertility as well, which is a separate issue, but women aren't having enough babies. And of course, the liberals, the climate catastrophes will tell us, that's fantastic, you know, there's too many people on the planet. Okay, well, let's see how you feel about having an economy that's collapses in about 40 years because, you know, 50, 60% of people aren't working and they're claiming pensions and they need healthcare and there's nobody to actually, you know, maintain the economy. I think it's a tragedy, in my opinion, that women, I think the average age of

having a child now has gone above 30 for the first time ever in history. Lots of women want to have children and they say they want to have children but for a wide range of reasons which I'm sure you've discussed on your podcast with people more knowledgeable than me on it they just don't feel that they can and I think it's a problem that's going to hit us humongously in a couple of decades and I saw figures recently that I think it was by 2035 or something like that don't quote me on that. 91% of population worth will be immigration because so many few women will be having children that the country cannot, it would literally not be self-sustaining, cannot self-sustain itself.

And I think that's very much true of many Western countries because women aren't having enough babies. And apparently that's a great thing, but it's very much not. There you go. Maybe men having babies is a good idea. Yeah. We've got a supplement. We've gone full circle.

Supplement the birth rate. Mercy, so great to have you back on the show. Join us over on locals where we continue the conversation with your questions. There has been a lot of talk recently of the tide turning against the DEI industry. Are the activists really in retreat or are they just biding their time waiting for a Labour government?