Chapter 10) From sport to social engineering - a study in institutional capture
The Five Stages of Diversity and Inclusion's entrenchment in British Horseracing.
It’s time for a recap. Chapter 1 of this substack started events in 2017 when British Horseracing’s diversity policy was adopted. Chapter 9 took us to the end of 2020.
The stages of diversity; first, installation
Prior to the diversity policy, horseracing was a free association of men and women; the role of horseracing organisations was to manage people in racing, and advertising and broadcasting was the link to the rest of society. In 2017, free association was replaced with diversity and inclusion, a mission of making horseracing representative of society.
The BHA claimed a business case and said, “study after study has shown that organisations take better decisions and perform better with diverse teams”.1 This statement wasn’t backed up by the Government’s 2013 survey of 112 studies and articles, cited by the Diversity in Racing Steering Group; the Government survey said in relation to ethnicity:2
“… no studies were identified that attempt to capture the causal impact of ethnic diversity on business outcomes”. (p18)
Regarding LGBTQ and other categories, the survey said:
“There are very few workplace studies that attempt to quantify the impacts of diversity on business outcomes when considering disability, religion and sexual orientation ... There are studies of sexual orientation in the field of economics, but these do not investigate the business benefits of such diversity”. (p18/19)
The “study after study” claim was baseless, but it provided a pretext whereby the diversity policy could be extended from women’s representation (the subject of the Oxford Brookes 2017 survey; see Chapter 1) to ethnicity and LGBTQ.
The second stage; escalation, June 2020
The death of George Floyd facilitated the second phase in mid-2020, seen in the change in the language:
In 2017-2019, diversity was “an exciting opportunity for the sport”;3 making sure “fans of all communities feel welcome”;4 and a desire to “thrive and grow as a sport”.5
From 2020, the discourse involved words like “racism”, “systemic racism”, “unconscious bias”, “lived experience”, “white privilege”, and the ubiquitous “barriers”.
The BHA’s CEO and Chair had imported into horseracing Critical Theory (Chapter 5), also known as “anti-racism”, which works in the following way. Diversity advocates look for white people doing something, such as having a bet, draw an imaginary circle around them, look inside the circle they’ve just drawn, and declare racism because there aren’t black people in the same circle. Thus, having a bet becomes a racism event that perpetuates “white privilege”. What is the white privilege? It’s whatever white people are doing, in this case, having a bet. It’s as simple as that - white people doing things is racism.
What if white people didn’t have a bet? Would anti-racism require black people have a bet by themselves? No, because anti-racism isn’t concerned with what black people do or don’t do, only that they act as a foil and so a means of defining white people or institutions as racist.
In this framework, “anti-racism” replaces anti-discrimination. Previously, wrongdoing was regarded as unfair treatment or intent; now, demographic imbalance within a chosen scene is regarded as the wrongdoing. This shift was illustrated in the Diversity in Racing Steering Group’s 2020 Annual Update:6
“In striving for inclusion, we must stamp out all discriminatory behaviour”.
“Inequalities and injustices can be tackled efficiently only once they become statistically visible”.
“… develop activity to raise awareness and understanding of the imbalance, barriers and issues faced by ethnic minority people”.
Note the word association: absence of “inclusion” is taken to imply discriminatory behaviour; “imbalance” is associated with barriers; and “inequality” is associated with injustice. No actual discrimination need exist for these words to be applied. This thinking denies differences in participation can occur naturally across diverse groups, and creates a rationale for artificial or coercive measures to eliminate differences, now referred to as “inequality”, “injustice”, and “racism”. This puts British horseracing in the crosshairs, because its existence, or any part thereof, can now be defined as “racism” at the drop of a hat.
The third stage; systemisation (the Board gets on board), November 2020
Whereas prior to 2020, diversity appeared to be the hobby horse of the chief executive and chairwoman, in November of that year, the policy was formalised by the BHA Board and chief executives of seven racing bodies,7 announced as the “unified diversity commitment”.
That announcement was in response to hostile public reaction to the unsupported but televised claims by TV presenter Rishi Persad (Chapter 8) that horseracing had been discriminating against people of colour, and his criticisms of the sport for not supporting Black Lives Matter. Furious objections on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter were described as “bile and bigotry” by Lee Mottershead at the Racing Post.
Nine days later, the “unified commitment” to diversity was announced,8 yet there is no indication that horseracing’s leaders asked questions such as:
According to the Racing Post, the public response to Mr Persad was bigoted. Shouldn’t we verify that claim?
or:
Mr Persad claimed that horseracing excludes people of colour. Shouldn’t we investigate this accusation before tacitly accepting it?
or:
We’re considering a unified commitment to diversity and inclusion for the entire industry; shouldn’t we conduct surveys of staff, participants, and the race-going public, before purporting to act on their behalf?
Why this apparent lack of due diligence? The online reaction to Mr Persad represented a spontaneous mini-insurgency, not only against his remarks, but against the wider events of 2020. Statues had been vandalised, British history rewritten, white people portrayed as “racists”; now, these narratives were gaining footholds in horseracing. Given the strength of the reaction, one might have expected horseracing’s leadership to pause their diversity and inclusion drive, to reconsider, to consult; instead, they brought forward the “unified commitment” without delay.9
The issue here need not be the leadership’s lack of familiarity with diversity and its origins or drivers (such as Critical Theory, post-War liberalism, and social contagion), or even why they endorsed it (e.g. pressure from the BHA’s CEO and Chair; a genuine belief in diversity’s perceived case; panic at the prospect of more “racism” accusations). Rather, the issue is that, in the light of known opposition, they chose to systemise diversity in such a way that ensured future opposition could not be entertained. In this one regard, if no other, one is entitled to assume the nine Board members and seven CEOs knew what they were doing.
The fourth stage; a founding myth for horseracing’s diversity?
The founding myth of Britain’s multiculturalism is that West Indians came after the Second World War at the request of the government to rebuild Britain. This story is false; the British government made no such request and didn’t know about the Windrush and other such ships until after they had docked. But the legend is spread via Black History Month, and few institutions question it.
Diversity in racing’s own founding myth started with the claim that “study after study” had shown that organisations perform better with diverse teams, and the Diversity in Racing Steering Group’s 2020 Annual Update foreshadowed, possibly, a development of this; referring to Covid, it said:
Diversity and inclusion is referenced as a key contributor to sustainable prosperity in racing’s Recovery Plan … Being diverse and inclusive … is an absolute necessity to ensure the future recovery and success of British racing.
This idea was incorporated into the aforementioned “unified commitment” and so lays the groundwork for a future narrative that, prior to 2020, horseracing was “exclusionary” with “barriers” but, following Covid, diversity saved horseracing. People today can see through the claim easily enough, but the purpose of such stories is to capture the minds of people 20 or 40 years from now, thus providing diversity with its own foundational myth. Time will tell.
The fifth stage; part of the horseracing landscape
Nick Rust left the BHA at the end of 2020, and received an OBE for “services to the sport of horse racing”; according to chairwoman Annamarie Phelps, “The award also reflects the leadership Nick has shown in areas such as diversity and inclusion”.
New chief executive Julie Harrington took over in January 2021 and said early on: “Another big area is around how inclusive racing is as a sport and how do we make it more diverse, both the BHA as an employer, but also across the entirety of racing”. Thus, a diversity policy, started out of the blue by her predecessor, was not questioned or reviewed, but simply reiterated; “diversity and inclusion” had become part of the institutional landscape.
Yet the key policy decisions in May 2017, June 2020, and November 2020 were announced without prior warning; there had been no consultations, debates, surveys, or research. Activist groups like the Diversity in Racing Steering Group, Racing With Pride, and Women in Racing had no formal power but, combined with the BHA’s salaried Head of Diversity and Inclusion, acted as a vanguard for policies while providing ‘go to’ groups for senior leaders to consult - in preference to alternative opinion which, post-November 2020, had been sidelined.
And relationships within the industry had changed; people who had joined horseracing bodies such as the BHA were now part of a political and ideological movement which framed group differences in participation as “exclusion” and “barriers” to be dismantled. This changed the BHA’s relationship to horseracing; and the aim of making horseracing demographically and culturally “representative” in turn changed the industry’s relationship to society at large.
The “unified commitment” said:
… ensuring a better understanding of the attitudes and perceptions towards British racing from underrepresented groups, ethnically and culturally diverse communities and the barriers to getting them involved in the sport.
The words “underrepresented” and “barriers” are there for a reason; without them, seeking audiences and participants by group identity loses its justification. The notion that horseracing must reflect society also overlooks the fact that horseracing isn’t society, nor is it the only sport or entertainment. People express preferences across a vast array of pursuits: sports and games, theatre and cinema, arts and crafts, music and dance, festivals and exhibitions, community and church, and much more. Why, then, should horseracing internalise a representation of people, when people are represented in their choices across society’s activities as a whole? This question has never been satisfactorily addressed.
Which leaves us with a conundrum; what are the reasons for the diversity policy, if not the business and moral cases claimed? Well, there are business and moral motivations - of sorts - only not the ones described when the diversity policy was first announced. These will be identified and examined in due course.
Forthcoming: the sixth stage; propagation
Before then, we must add a sixth stage to the above five: the consolidation and propagation of diversity-and-inclusion across British horseracing. This has taken many forms - a new calendar, social media campaigns, webinars and hired consultants, all alongside a sustained push to embed “anti-racism”. Upcoming chapters will explore this rollout.
The Business Case for Equality and Diversity: a survey of the academic literature, January 2013, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills A possible explanation for the BHA’s failure to understand the survey was that it was written in a diversity-friendly manner, probably to support the government’s own position on diversity.
British Horseracing Authority, Racecourse Association, Racehorse Owners Association, National Trainers Federation, Professional Jockeys Association, National Association of Racing Staff, and Thoroughbred Breeders Association.
“Brought forward” because, when announcing the “unified commitment” on 20 November, the BHA Board referenced a recent agreement on 10 November 2020 by the Members Committee regarding a “collective statement” — the day before the television broadcast. While coincidences can happen, the two events appear linked because:
The Diversity in Racing Steering Group (DiRSG) was involved in the collective statement; and
of the men involved in the broadcast, Rishi Persad was a DiRSG member, and Josh Apiafi had been a member during the previous two years.
As noted in Chapter 8, the broadcast painted the industry as beyond the pale; Sky Sports Racing exaggerated by saying it provided “shocking experiences”; and Josh Apiafi, interviewing Mr Persad, failed to ensure accuracy or balance. One interpretation of events is that DiRSG, having feet in both camps (the broadcast and commitment process), knew the televised broadside was forthcoming and encouraged or steered the Members Committee toward agreement on the collective statement in time for the broadcast (this would explain the 10 November date); thus, they would be ready to move on the interview’s publicity. In the event, the “unified commitment” followed both Mr Persad’s complaints and the reaction to them, and Racing Post writer Lee Mottershead, yet another DiRSG member, framed the matter in a way favourable to Mr Persad.
This interpretation fits the facts and circumstances; if correct, it indicates how a diversity group with members and contacts in the media could construct an assault on the industry and, seemingly, use their inside position to take advantage.