KEIR Starmer is facing calls from a “conservative” faction of his party to “rout out DEI” to win over Reform UK voters.
Blue Labour, a small pressure group within the Labour Party, also demanded the UK Government “drastically reduce immigration” which it claimed was a “a cause of social fragmentation”.
In an article on its website, the group said: “We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities.
“We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.”
DEI, short for “diversity, equality and inclusion”, is a key target of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Hiring practices have long been informed by DEI principles, with employers hoping to combat racism and other forms of bigotry by actively seeking to include, hire and promote people from ethnic minority backgrounds as well as other minorities.
But it is at the centre of a transatlantic political storm, with US president Donald Trump (above) pressuring American businesses to drop DEI hiring practices.
In March, Trump banned the Foreign Service from basing employment decisions “on an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin”.
Blue Labour describes itself as seeking to uphold a tradition of “conservative socialism” and was founded in 2009 by the academic Maurice Glasman, now a Labour peer.
It includes MPs Dan Carden, Jonathan Brash, Jonathan Hinder and David Smith.
While the group’s ideas appear to be gaining some traction in No 10, official government policy remains at odds with its recent call to ditch DEI.
Equalities Minister Seema Malhotra (below) is guiding plans through parliament to have firms which employ more than 250 people to publish data on ethnicity and disability pay gaps, similar to the requirement to reveal gender pay gaps.
Elsewhere in the article, Blue Labour also demands lower levels of immigration, saying: “Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy.
“We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.”
Starmer was recently accused of echoing the virulently anti-immigration MP Enoch Powell when he spoke of Britain becoming a “land of strangers” because of high levels of immigration.
