It is sweet and fitting to die for… diversity

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Really? It might have applied to Horace and to Romans, although even then I’m not entirely sure. But by the time Wilfred Owen wrote his immortal poem on the same subject there was no doubt that there was nothing sweet about dying for one’s country. In the shadow of the slaughter of the First World War, can anybody be surprised that the Oxford Union passed the equally immortal motion “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”.

It has often been argued that Adolf Hitler was emboldened by the Oxford debate to assume that Great Britain and with it the entire British Empire had no stomach for a fight and that his expansionist policies would not be challenged. I doubt whether Hitler had ever heard of the Oxford Union and take this to be a bit of a myth. Does it really matter, 91 years later?  Did America lose the war in Vietnam in Hue and Da Nang or at Kent State in Ohio?  
 
These are big questions and one day in the future the question will be asked whether Russia won the war against Ukraine in the fields and villages of the Donbas or on the lawns and in the halls of our universities where privileged middle class kids have wrapped themselves in keffiyehs and are calling for… other than the end of the West I’m not quite sure what. In all likelihood neither are they.

In his recent address to the Manhattan Institute – yes, the right wing think tank – Douglas Murray spoke of the very scant numbers of Americans or Brits who seem to be prepared to fight for their country when, as British Prime Minster Rishi Sunak recently pointed out, geopolitical risk is at its highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. If I were sitting in Moscow or Beijing, would I be worried?
 
Then up pops Ken Griffin at the Qatar Economic Forum. Qatar, if you didn’t already know, is where Hamas’ political leadership is living in great comfort while the Palestinian people are caught in the destruction caused by Hamas’ actions. Griffin criticised President Joe Biden for incoherent environmental policies. Griffin, always the pragmatist, is of course right although Biden is trapped between a rock and a hard place. If China can produce EVs and solar panels at a fraction of the price of Western companies, would it not be incumbent on Biden who talks tough on the subject of carbon net zero to encourage the provision of a cheap and plentiful supply of both to the American consumer?  The new round of tariffs raised by the Biden administration on Chinese imports – now north of 100 per cent – are, according to Griffin, schizophrenic.   
 
The same opinion, however, is not held by Indian investor Deepak Shenoy who has patted Biden on the back and suggested that by closing out Chinese competition, the home turf becomes more fertile and as domestic manufacturing begins to grow, it will generate the competition which will in time bring prices down. Shenow may have a point although labour costs in India and in America differ by too much for a meaningful comparison to be made.
 
As children, when we went crying to mummy with the appeal “That’s not fair!”, she would usually and quite rightly retort: “Life isn’t fair”. However, today’s social and political mantra is that we want to try to legislate it to be fair. What is more powerful and successful, homogeneity or diversity? I know what the Russians and the Chinese would have to say on that. I have yet to find a Chinese corporate entity that has gone out scouting for European or African heritage board directors in order to bring diversity into its decision making process.

And I think it is fair to say – someone has to have the courage to say it – that the diversity experiment, when it has been explicitly been prioritised over talent (and sometimes, in the best scenarios, both have gone together) has so far brought little to the party. It should be irrelevant whether the most competent individual is white, black, brown, or green, but the up-front and wholesale dismissal of the better part of 40 per cent of the talent pool for being white and male is surely tantamount to corporate suicide or, if decreed by regulatory guidelines, euthanasia.
 
We British have something of an obsession with Sir David Attenborough, the BBC nature programme maker turned can-do-no-wrong national treasure. It might have been the Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh or maybe Reaction’s Iain Martin, I really can’t remember, who suggested that even with Attenborough as leader the Tories would be set for a drubbing in the coming elections. If it were Attenborough, whether Sir David or St David is moot, he would surely have to be the first one to contest the argument that nature should be interfered with. After many years during which questioning the benefits of mandatory diversity has been punishable by either being burnt at the stake, hung drawn and quartered or being damned as unsuitable for high office, I am for the first time beginning to find pushback. There are some rumblings that firms are becoming disrupted by cultural differences and by the failure of some board members to instinctively grasp things that are unsaid rather than just those that are.
 
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not insisting that diversity is of itself wrong although when process risks trumping outcome, we must have the right to express that view without being shouted down. Life isn’t fair.

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