There is a dangerous fiction taking hold in British politics, and it is being sold hardest to those who have the least. Across the airwaves, in manifestos, and through social media channels, the far right and populist radical right are pushing a single, seductive message: that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives are themselves a source of discrimination, that white working-class people are the new victims of systemic prejudice, and that the only way to restore fairness is to tear up the protections that guard against racial injustice. It is a lie so brazen it would be laughable were it not so cruel. Cruel because it is aimed precisely at communities that have been battered by forty years of deindustrialisation, austerity, and regional neglect. Cruel because it offers them not solutions, but scapegoats. And cruel because, if successful, it will destroy the very mechanisms that allow working-class people of every ethnicity to challenge the real power structures that have kept them down.
The agenda is no longer hidden. Reform UK has pledged to replace the Equality Act 2010, claiming that diversity and inclusion rules have lowered standards and damaged productivity. Senior Conservative figures now speak openly of scrapping the Public Sector Equality Duty, arguing it fuels a culture of identity politics and exposes public decisions to legal challenge. The rhetoric is relentless: white men are losing jobs because of their race; minorities are receiving preferential treatment; the system is rigged against the indigenous population. These claims are presented as brave truths, spoken against a supposedly censorious liberal establishment. But they are not truths. They are fabrications, carefully constructed to transform legitimate economic grievance into manufactured racial resentment, and to redirect anger away from the failures of economic policy toward the bodies and lives of minorities, migrants, and anyone who can be framed as an outsider.
To understand why this narrative is a fraud, one need only look at why racial equalities legislation exists in the first place. The Race Relations Act 1976, the Macpherson reforms, and the Equality Act 2010 did not fall from the sky. They were born from the struggles of anti-racist movements, trade unions, and community organisers who understood that without legal recourse, the powerful would simply continue to exclude the marginalised. These laws exist because racial discrimination was, and remains, a measurable reality in British life. The far right is careful to avoid attacking equalities protections around age, disability, or sex; instead, they single out diversity, inclusion and equity as somehow illegitimate, as if fighting racial injustice were a luxury rather than a necessity. They pretend these protections are about immigrants, minorities, and EU regulation, anything but the simple truth that race still structures life chances in profound and measurable ways.
The evidence of persistent racial inequality is overwhelming, and it is gathered not by activists but by the state’s own institutions. In 2025, unemployment among people from minority ethnic backgrounds stood at 8.8 percent, more than double the 4.3 percent rate for white people. Black male graduates earn 17 percent less than their white counterparts with identical qualifications, a gap that translates to over seven thousand pounds annually. In the criminal justice system, Black people are stopped and searched at a rate nearly four times higher than white people, and when they reach court, they are significantly more likely to receive immediate custodial sentences for the same offences. In health, Black women face maternal mortality rates 2.3 times higher than white women. In housing, Black households are four times more likely to face homelessness. These are not opinions. These are official statistics, and they describe a society in which race still structures access to opportunity, safety, and dignity in ways that no amount of far-right rhetoric can erase.
The far right’s most manipulative claim is that white working-class boys and men are the hidden victims of diversity and inclusion initiatives. It is true that disadvantaged white British pupils have poor educational outcomes; only 36 percent reach expected standards in GCSE English and maths. It is true that many white working-class communities in post-industrial towns and rural areas have been devastated by economic change, left with crumbling infrastructure, precarious employment, and collapsing social institutions. But these are class and geography problems, not race problems. Research shows that white working-class underachievement is driven by family instability, geographic concentration in left-behind areas, and decades of underinvestment. The far right does not mention this because their goal is not to help white working-class communities; their goal is to use their genuine pain as a weapon against racial minorities and the protections that guard against discrimination. They want to dismantle diversity, inclusion and equity not because these harm white workers, but because they threaten the racial hierarchy that the far right wishes to preserve.
This is the con at the heart of the populist radical right project. Instead of addressing the structural causes of working-class immiseration, they offer racial grievance as a substitute for economic justice. They tell unemployed men in former mining towns that their enemy is the migrant worker, not the deindustrialisation that destroyed their industry. They tell struggling families in coastal towns that their enemy is diversity legislation, not the austerity that closed their libraries, youth clubs, and Sure Start centres. They tell voters in the north that their enemy is inclusion policy, not the broken promises of levelling up that have left their railways unbuilt and their wages stagnant. It is a magician’s trick: watch the hand that points at minorities, and you will miss the hand that picks your pocket. The real transfer of wealth over the last forty years has been upward, from workers to shareholders, from regions to the City of London, from public goods to private profit, and from local tax bases into the hands of global corporate actors.
The economic context makes this distraction all the more obscene. The United Kingdom has the second highest level of regional GDP disparity in Europe. London’s economic output per head exceeds sixty thousand pounds; the North East manages less than half that. Since deindustrialisation began in earnest, these divides have become chasms. Northern manufacturing-dependent areas have been stripped of their economic base, their skilled employment, and their community infrastructure. Deregulation allowed corporations to extract wealth without obligation. Financialisation transformed the economy from one that made things to one that moved money, concentrating prosperity in the south-east. Corporate tax avoidance has hollowed out the public purse, leaving local authorities unable to maintain basic services. And Brexit, sold as liberation for left-behind regions, has only compounded the damage. The same politicians who championed deregulation and wealth extraction now tell those same communities that their problems stem not from these policies, but from diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives aimed at racial justice. It is a breathtaking act of political cynicism: create the economic damage through deregulation and financialisation, then blame the victims of racial inequality for the pain you caused.
For working-class communities, the success of this agenda would be catastrophic. Dismantling diversity, inclusion and equity protections would not put a single pound into a struggling family’s pocket. It would not reopen a closed factory or rebuild a demolished council estate. It would not reverse the deregulation that allowed corporations to abandon towns, or the financialisation that turned housing into speculative assets, or the tax avoidance that starves local government of revenue. It would, however, remove the legal and institutional mechanisms that allow working-class people of all ethnicities to challenge discrimination, demand fair treatment, and hold power to account. It would make it easier for employers to discriminate without consequence, for public institutions to ignore racial disparities, and for the powerful to consolidate their advantages. It would destroy the solidarity that is the only force capable of resisting the corporate extraction of wealth from local communities. The far right promises liberation and delivers subjugation.
The path forward requires honesty that our current political culture struggles to provide. White working-class disadvantage and ethnic minority disadvantage are not competing grievances; they are symptoms of the same disease. The deindustrialisation that destroyed mining and manufacturing communities did not distinguish between white and Black workers. The deregulation that allowed corporations to extract wealth without obligation did not spare white towns. The financialisation that turned housing into assets and wages into debt affected working-class people regardless of ethnicity. The corporate tax avoidance that starves local authorities of the funds to maintain schools, hospitals, and public spaces harms everyone. The solution is not to tear down protections for minorities but to recognise that the same forces immiserating white working-class communities are deepened by racial injustice, and that solidarity across racial lines is the only force capable of demanding the wealth redistribution, inward investment, and regulatory reform that these communities actually need.
The weaponisation of racial inequality is a tactic as old as empire itself: divide the poor along racial lines, and the powerful keep their power. The far right understands this perfectly. They do not attack age discrimination laws or disability protections because those do not serve their purpose. They attack diversity, inclusion and equity because these are the mechanisms through which working-class people of colour can name their oppression and demand redress, and because by framing these as privileges for minorities, they can pit white workers against Black and Asian workers rather than uniting them against the corporate extraction, deregulation, and wealth concentration that have devastated them all. It is time we stopped falling for it. The enemy is not the migrant, the minority, or the equality initiative. The enemy is the system that extracts wealth from all of us and then tells us to blame each other for the poverty it leaves behind.