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                                                                              RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS     



ANALYSIS  
SOME MORE EQUAL

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED 
DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Diane Coyle
Producer:  Zareer Masani
Editor:  Nicola Meyrick


BBC 
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS

020 8752 7279




Broadcast Date:   02.09.04
Repeat Date:        05.09.04
Tape Number: 
Duration: 27’12” 


Taking part in order of appearance:

Fiona Cannon
Head of Equality and Diversity, Lloyds TSB

Garry Parker
Lobbyist & Managing Director of Garry Parker Ltd. 

Simon Minty
Director of Churchill and Friend Ltd & Member of 
Employers’ Forum on Disability

Helen McCarthy
Researcher at Demos & founder of network ‘Thinking 
Women’

Jonathan Wadsworth
Royal Holloway College 

Sushil Wadwhani
Economist and former member of the Bank of England’s 
Monetary Policy Committee

Ian Marshall
Head of Employment and Pensions at Martineau Johnson 
Solicitors, Birmingham

Sunder Katwala
General Secretary of the Fabian Society










COYLE:	Equality at work, the battle-cry of radical feminists 
and anti-racists in the 1970s, has become conventional 
wisdom today. So much so that we’re even being told it’s 
good for business. 

CANNON:	The benefits always offset any costs because our 
competitiveness is reliant on our ability to attract and retrain 
good quality staff.  And we know that talent doesn’t exist in 
just one part of the community - so, for example, we know 
that the UK Indian community has the highest level of 
educational attainment out of any group in the UK; the 
Chinese community, second highest level of educational 
attainment, and we want those people to come and work for 
us.

COYLE:	Fiona Cannon is head of equality and diversity for 
Lloyds TSB, one of Britain’s big high street banks. But is the 
business case for employing disabled people or promoting 
more women really as strong as for high-achieving Asians?  No 
one could disagree with genuine meritocracy in the 
workplace, but what happens when particular groups of 
people demand special help to overcome unfair barriers? 
Surely there’s a sulphurous whiff of political correctness in the 
idea that companies should be tackling serious social 
problems. And if the commercial benefits of equal opportunity 
are so obvious, shouldn’t the market be taking care of it? 

CANNON:	We have fourteen million customers in the UK and 
we need to be able to understand and meet their needs 
effectively.  Now we’re not going to be able to do that if our 
workforce doesn’t reflect the communities that we operate in 
first off.  So, for example, if we’ve got a branch in Leicester, 
we’re not going to be able to serve that community if 
everybody behind the branch is white.  And I guess also 
there’s the issue about brand reputation, particularly for a 
bank where you want to be seen as trustworthy.

COYLE:	You’ve made out a pretty strong business case, 
but do you think it’s different in financial services compared to 
say manufacturing?

CANNON:	Clearly there are different business drivers for us 
than there would be for manufacturing.  It is easier to make a 
very strong business case when you are in a retail sector 
because you’ve got customers and, therefore, you need the 
ability to serve those customers effectively and that, therefore, 
is a very strong business driver.

COYLE:	There are obvious benefits to attracting 
increasingly affluent ethnic minority customers, whose total 
purchasing power in the U.K. is now estimated at 50 billion 
pounds a year.  But the balance of added profits against 
costs may be much less compelling for some businesses. Garry 
Parker, a lobbyist for small and medium-sized enterprises, runs 
his own furniture-making business, with an overwhelmingly 
male workforce. 
 PARKER:	We’ve got one lady in the office.  We’ve had to 
put in an additional toilet and other facilities for her – it’s 
actually my wife – and, yes, there is an additional cost 
attached to employing women.  And then you have the issues 
with regard to particularly maternity leave, which is often a bit 
of a scarer for small businesses because if you have you know 
two or three out of say five or six employees that are female – 
if they all go on maternity leave at once, then that’s half your 
business lost in terms of turnover.

COYLE:	Sounds like you’ve been putting something in the 
water if they all go on maternity leave at once.  How 
significant are those sorts of costs that you were talking 
about?

PARKER:	Yes in terms of women, in particular, the costs are 
increasing.  You’re looking at having to replace somebody for 
a minimum of nine months, and if they take extended leave 
you’re looking at two to three years.  You have to keep the 
job open for them.  With regard to the ethnic minorities, 
there’s no additional cost attached to employing somebody 
there.  That’s obvious.  With regard to disabled staff, that is a 
big cost for small business if they have to adapt the methods 
of working, if they have to innovate in that area.  It’s a very 
hard one, but it’s a fact of reality that it is more expensive to 
employ less able-bodied people.

SEGUE

MINTY:	I would probably reverse it.  I’m 3’11” and 
because the world is not designed to incorporate us yet, it 
means we have to be creative by default.

COYLE:	Simon Minty, a member of the Employers’ Forum 
on Disability, runs a training consultancy specialising in 
disability and diversity. Half his 20-strong workforce, including 
both the directors, are disabled. 

MINTY:	It’s a bit like if you were in that world that’s 
designed for small people, if you’re average sized then you’ve 
got to change how you do things.  We have to do that as 
disabled people.  Those skills may be transferable.  If you have 
a diverse workforce, by default that must mean that you have 
different ideas, you have different ways of generating things.  
Those are very simple, but if you want to recruit someone 
would you prefer to have a choice of ten people or would 
you prefer to have a choice of seven?  If you’re not including 
disabled people in that, does that mean you’re getting less of 
a choice?

COYLE:	He agrees that it’s naïve to imagine there are no 
additional costs involved in employing disabled staff. Here the 
business case is the hardest to argue, which may explain why 
discrimination against disability is only now becoming an issue 
for employers, 30 years after sex discrimination was outlawed. 
There can be additional costs in either case, but the force of 
numbers makes it easier to tackle discrimination against 
women.  The past three decades have seen the feminization 
of the British labour market, with nearly half of all jobs now 
done by women. Average female pay is just four-fifths of 
men’s; but it was under two-thirds of the male average a 
generation ago.  So how far does the battle for women’s 
equality at work still need to go? Helen McCarthy is a 
researcher at the think tank Demos, and founder of a network 
called “Thinking Women”.

McCARTHY:	Twenty years ago it was easy to see that women 
were being directly discriminated against or there was overt 
sexism or chauvinism in the workplace.  I think today there’s 
less of a sense that women are deliberately held back but 
there are invisible processes at work within organizations.  So, 
for example, women often end up in parts of organizations 
where promotion to the very top leadership positions is less 
likely – so, for example, you find a lot of women in HR, but 
often when it comes to making board appointments, it’s seen 
as actually you need to have direct kind of financial hands on 
experience.  So often women will end up in parts of the 
business where actually they’re not doing themselves any 
favours in terms of getting on the right track.

COYLE:	Hardly any women make it into corporate 
boardrooms as a result. But these are subtle barriers 
compared to those faced by a previous generation. And 
women’s progress in the workplace is underpinned by the fact 
that young women have overtaken men in their educational 
achievements at almost every level. For ethnic minorities, the 
gains have been much patchier. Men of Indian, Chinese and 
African origin have caught up with the white majority on pay; 
but Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and black Caribbeans are still 
way behind the national average. Jonathan Wadsworth of 
Royal Holloway College is an expert on the performance of 
different groups in the labour market. 

WADSWORTH:	The Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities 
have done relatively poorly in terms of both employment and 
wages over the last ten, twenty years, and the Indian and to 
some extent the Black African communities have done 
relatively better compared with the majority population.  
Particularly amongst women, women from Indian and Afro 
Caribbean communities are doing relatively well in terms of 
pay and in fact there’s virtually very little difference in terms of 
pay between women from these communities and women 
from the majority community.  However, there are big 
differences in pay and employment for women in the 
Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities compared with the 
majority population.

COYLE:	To what extent does that reflect their different 
educational backgrounds?

WADSWORTH:	It’s certainly true that the educational 
attainment amongst the Indian, West Indian, African and 
indeed to some extent the Pakistani and Bangladeshi 
communities amongst the second generation has outpaced 
that of the majority population, so that there are now 
amongst these twenty and thirty year olds, there are more 
people from ethnic minority backgrounds who have a degree 
than people from the majority background.  And in part, that 
does help explain why the employment gaps and wage gaps 
have been narrowing over time for this group.  It’s less so 
amongst men, unfortunately.  So there’s a bit of a puzzle here 
because why should educational attainment matter for 
women but less so amongst ethnic minority men?

COYLE:	But does that not mean that if you’re looking at 
lower pay amongst Bangladeshi and Pakistani men that 
doesn’t seem to be related to their qualifications, that helps to 
identify that there is actually discrimination in the jobs market?

WADSWORTH:	Well economists sort of measure 
discrimination as a residual.  They try and account for all the 
potential attributes and characteristics that could explain 
differences in wages, and when they still can’t explain the 
difference, then that’s what economists tend to call 
discrimination.  It’s certainly true this residual is larger amongst 
Pakistani and Bangladeshi men.  Now if you want to call that 
discrimination, it certainly leaves grounds to suspect that 
there’s something potentially going on here.

COYLE:	Economists and statisticians are a bit 
uncomfortable with the value-laden term “discrimination”. 
Even so, the persistence of pay differentials, despite 
improvements in educational qualifications, suggests it’s an 
important factor – along with others such as class and culture. 
So why does discrimination survive in a free labour market? If 
one business is under-paying a group of workers, in theory 
another should be able to attract them away by offering a 
higher rate. Why isn’t this kind of competition working in 
practice? Sushil Wadhwani, who runs his own hedge fund in 
the City of London, is so far the only Asian to have served on 
the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.
 
WADHWANI:	Competitive forces work very slowly.  In the 
time that they take to work, the discrimination of itself causes 
damaging effects which then leads some of the discrimination 
to become almost self-perpetuating.  Well, we know that 
people who are unemployed for a long time become less 
employable over time.

COYLE:	What do you think it is that our employers are 
missing out on if they do discriminate against women or 
against members of ethnic minorities?

WADHWANI:	Well put quite simply – profits.  I mean if you 
take just a simple, artificial example.  Let’s assume there’s only 
one firm initially and it employs ten people in a particular 
town, five of whom are men and five are women, and it pays 
the women a pound an hour less.  In some sense it’s making 
an excess profit of five pounds.  You then get a second firm 
that gets attracted into this arena because of this excess profit 
and the second firm can offer to pay the women only 50p an 
hour less rather than a pound an hour less.  It would still clear a 
profit of £2.50 and it would draw all the women away from the 
first firm.  If markets worked appropriately, this process would 
continue until men and women were remunerated the same.  
Now the reason it takes much longer in the real world is there 
are significant barriers of entry and it takes a long time before 
these competitive forces exert their appropriate influence.
COYLE:	But meanwhile, surely, it’s quite sensible for a 
business to try to get away with paying some workers less than 
others?

WADHWANI:	In a very short run sense, if they’re 
evaluating it from a purely static perspective, there is some 
merit in that argument.  But it must still be true that if they offer 
a better deal to the disadvantaged groups, they may be able 
to attract them away from other firms and still get a good 
deal out of it in the sense that they still make an excess profit 
out of workers from that group.

COYLE:	So in the short-to-medium term, employers can 
save money by under-paying particular groups.  Different 
kinds of business may spot such profit opportunities in different 
kinds of workers; so how they discriminate will vary. For 
example, many big companies have been accused of age 
discrimination because they prefer to hire young hot-shots 
with decades of hard work left in them. But older employees 
may be cost-effective for a small business like Garry Parker’s – 
where maternity pay and disability seemed too high a 
financial burden. 

PARKER:	Oh, certainly and I think small businesses in 
particular are more likely to look in certain areas – for example 
at older people who have perhaps been discarded by big 
business.  Okay, you might find older people don’t have the 
drive and ambition and motivation of younger people, but 
they’re more likely to you know turn up on time, they’re not 
going to hopefully go out binge drinking on Thursday, Friday 
nights and not be fit for work the next day, their families may 
have grown up.  The cost advantage of employing older 
people is quite clear.  If they are past the statutory retirement 
age, there’s less of a burden in terms of pay as you earn and 
national insurance contributions and that’s an advantage 
particularly to the smaller business.  The thing with young 
people is you’ve got to train them up from scratch and that is 
a significant cost in itself.

COYLE:	The cost-benefit calculus is, ironically, just the 
opposite at Lloyds TSB. Like the other banks, it doesn’t hesitate 
to cut employment costs when it can. But as Fiona Cannon 
explains, it’s willing to incur the expense of investing in women 
and ethnic minorities. 

CANNON:	There are costs, of course there are costs, but you 
know a lot of it is around just doing things differently.  So, for 
example, if you’re recruiting and you’ve traditionally 
advertised in a certain number of publications, you know you 
might want to change some of those publications to reach a 
broader market of people.  Similarly, if you’re looking at 
graduate recruitment, if you’ve always gone to the same 
universities – for example where you know that there’s largely 
a white population of graduates – then you might want to 
look at going to some other universities that have a broader 
range of candidates there.  So that doesn’t necessarily mean 
there’s a cost; it’s just about a different way of allocating 
resources.  If we’re losing people because they don’t believe 
the organization is serious about diversity, then that’s a much 
bigger worry to us and completely offsets the cost of any work 
that we might do on women’s development or ethnic minority 
development, for example.  When we looked at our customer 
side of it, again there’s very few direct costs around that.  For 
example, one of our North London areas looked at changing 
the composition of its workforce so it reflected more closely 
the community, and in one year it had a huge growth in sales 
as a result of that work and went from being one of the lowest 
performing parts of the business to one of the top performing 
parts of the business.

COYLE:	This initiative saw the numbers of ethnic minority 
staff working for Lloyds TSB in areas like North London leap up 
from 18 per cent to almost half the workforce in the course of 
a few years, and their representation in management has also 
grown steadily.  The advantages of reflecting one’s customer-
base may also apply in global markets. The City of London has 
a dismal equal opportunities reputation: sexism, anti-Semitism 
and racism used to be rife in the Square Mile – and many 
would argue that hasn’t changed enough. But according to 
Sushil Wadhwani, the globalisation of financial markets has 
had an impact.

WADHWANI:	The city is immeasurably better than I 
remember it twenty years ago.  Actually it’s an instance of 
competition working.  Way back in the early 80s, one was 
routinely advised by career officers not to apply to the city if 
you belonged to an ethnic minority community, and to some 
extent even if you were a woman because you were assured 
that you had virtually no chance.  But I think it was the arrival 
of the foreign firms who came with better work practices 
generally, of which an aspect was less discrimination, that 
actually changed city attitudes.

SEGUE

McCARTHY:	You had business executives who were brokering 
deals all across the world and who had to understand how to 
engage with people from different cultures, and because you 
have more mobility of talent across the world you have to be 
able to attract it wherever it is.

COYLE:	Helen McCarthy of Demos.

McCARTHY:	In the City before the Big Bang, for example, you 
had a very, very strong gentlemanly ethic that was sort of 
based on codes of honour and my word is my promise and 
long, boozy lunches and those sorts of things.  And then 
suddenly you get a much more diverse workforce and that 
disrupts all those rules and codes, and then you have to start 
thinking actively about how you’re going to manage diversity.

COYLE:	The demise of the two bottles of claret lunch may 
be no bad thing for British business. But some aspects of 
change can seem a much more serious threat to employers, 
such as their increased vulnerability to discrimination claims.  
In the City, the amounts at stake can be enormous - like the 
eye-watering 7 million pounds in damages former senior 
manager Stephanie Villalba is claiming from the investment 
bank Merrill Lynch.  Ian Marshall, a leading employment 
lawyer in Birmingham, has a wealth of experience defending 
employers at tribunal cases. 
MARSHALL:	It’s a real fear, and it’s to some extent 
exaggerated, and the fear is really two-fold.  One is that in 
discrimination cases the amount of compensation that can 
be paid is not subject to any limit.  There’s no cap like there is 
in unfair dismissal cases.  And the second fear arises from the 
fact that you’re trying to work out what’s going on in 
somebody’s mind and various means are used to try and 
establish a rational or semi-objective way of working out what 
people are thinking when they might be discriminating.  But, 
ultimately, it’s a pretence in that you never can know 
precisely what somebody is thinking.

COYLE:	You get the impression from some tabloid 
newspapers, for example, that there has been a wave of 
tribunal chasing, but aren’t the figures actually quite small?  
There are not many cases and even fewer of those are 
actually won by the people bringing the complaints?

MARSHALL:	That’s correct.  And once inside the tribunal, 
employers are generally very happy to see how carefully and 
thoroughly tribunals evaluate all the evidence, and in the vast 
majority of cases they will see justice done.

COYLE:	Nevertheless, the fear factor he mentioned can 
be important, especially for smaller businesses.  Unlike most 
public sector bodies, private employers aren’t legally required 
to have an equal opportunities policy. They simply have to be 
able to show they’re not discriminating against particular 
individuals. Which does raise the wider question of how much 
impact the law has had in promoting equal opportunities. 
When it comes to race discrimination, says Jonathan 
Wadsworth, the statistics aren’t much help.

WADSWORTH:	We simply just don’t have the information 
on wages and employment of ethnic minorities in sufficient 
numbers to allow us, as economists/statisticians, to say 
unequivocally that the introduction of the Race Relations Act, 
which outlawed discrimination, made a difference.  Simply 
because they are such a relatively small minority, the numbers 
don’t allow us to do that.  Whereas if we looked at the gender 
pay gap, then it’s pretty clear that the Equal Pay Act had a 
big difference on equalizing women’s wages.

COYLE:	But looking at the ethnic minorities, even if you 
can’t be statistically pure about it, what’s your view about the 
impact of legislation?

WADSWORTH:	We can take the Equal Pay Act as 
evidence.  If the Equal Pay Act seemed to have a positive 
effect on narrowing wages, employment differentials, then I’d 
be pretty sure that outlawing discrimination amongst ethnic 
minorities would have a similar effect because legislation 
imposes costs on discriminatory employers.

COYLE:	So the law has at least set a benchmark and tilted 
the burden of costs against discrimination. Left to ourselves, 
we might all feel more comfortable employing people most 
like ourselves. Indeed, ethnic minority businesses are often said 
to be the most discriminatory in hiring within their own family or 
community groups.  But in this respect they’re no different 
from smaller businesses generally, according to entrepreneur 
Garry Parker. 

PARKER:	I come from Peterborough, which has a very 
interesting racial mix, and one always sees lots of Muslim 
Pakistani taxi-drivers but very few white ones at the railway 
station and the perception is amongst the whole community 
that there can be in certain areas a bit of a closed shop.  But 
what we can see is that when these businesses come to 
maturity, they open up to a wider network and bring people 
in, so you know it starts within the family and gradually builds 
outwards – extended family, friends, people from the culture 
that you know, and then when things get really good and you 
need extra people then you go further afield.  And I think 
that’s been exactly the same in other communities, the Jewish 
community.  You know Marks and Spencers forty years ago 
when my mother worked there, they had a preference for 
employing Jewish people.  Now it’s totally different. 

COYLE:	So as businesses grow, economic logic steers 
them towards greater diversity. Does this suggest that for the 
economy as a whole the natural processes of growth will 
steadily lead to more equal employment opportunities?  
Looking at the evidence so far, Jonathan Wadsworth isn’t 
entirely optimistic. 

WADSWORTH:	The fact there are many more children from 
the ethnic minority population with degrees augurs well for the 
future, but it’s not going to happen immediately because this 
generation are still in their twenties and still in their thirties so 
we can’t really expect them to be hitting the upper reaches 
of professional managerial jobs simply because that 
generation isn’t old enough to make a difference.  These 
things do take time.

COYLE:	But if you have to stick your neck out and make a 
forecast - given what’s happening in educational 
performance, would you expect to see the pay and 
employment differentials improve even further in future?

WADSWORTH:	By and large – yes, I would expect that to 
happen.  But having said that, it is working for certain 
individuals and certain communities; it’s not working for others.  
So that’s when you might think that some more action needs 
to be taken.

COYLE:	Do you think the fact that there are skill shortages 
in the economy anyway and growth has been so strong 
explains why the differentials in pay and employment 
prospects have narrowed?

WADSWORTH:	This is one of these yes and no answers.  I 
mean it’s certainly true that if you look at the latest economic 
recovery that the economic performance of say West Indian 
men, Pakistani men and Bangladeshi men has not really 
improved over the economic recovery.

COYLE:	The economists just can’t account for persistent 
discrimination against particular ethnic groups. It isn’t fully 
explained by a lack of skills, and in theory it shouldn’t be 
happening at all.  But the market left to its own devices 
doesn’t always produce the most efficient outcomes. And 
especially when it comes to discrimination against the 
disabled, a purely business case may not be enough.  Simon 
Minty.

MINTY:	Say we get to a point where we don’t have hard, 
firm, economic, tangible evidence that shows that the 
disabled person absolutely brings a pure economic benefit.  
Does that mean to say you shouldn’t do it?  Well I don’t think 
that’s the case.  If I worked for an organization, maybe 
because of certain physical limitations I’ve got I’m only going 
to do eighty, ninety percent of what someone else can do; 
but if someone did the ten percent that I can’t do, well I will 
bring other benefits and you might not be able to measure 
them in purely economic terms.  But you might be able to, I 
don’t know, in positioning or reputation, or something that’s 
happening more is corporate social responsibility.

COYLE:	The problem is that what’s good for the long-term 
future of a company might well be bad for existing staff, 
especially those privileged white males. It’s no surprise that 
some perceive action to correct decades of disadvantage as 
a kind of reverse discrimination inspired by political 
correctness. Numerical targets set by employers to recruit or 
promote underrepresented groups are one of the biggest 
sources of anxiety. There are echoes here of disputes in the 
United States, where public bodies have long had, not just 
targets, but binding quotas for employing blacks and women. 
But Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, 
sees no transatlantic lessons in this for Britain. 

KATWALA:	The British legislative approach has been about 
finding individual cases in which discrimination happen and 
trying to find a redress for those.  The American approach of 
affirmative action has been quite a different one.  That sort of 
political correctness debate was sort of imported from 
America.  And it was surprising it had so much resonance 
perhaps in Britain because there wasn’t an affirmative action 
programme of that kind in place.

COYLE:	Do you think emphasizing meritocracy and 
individual achievements will actually be more effective 
because it will make other groups feel less vulnerable to 
change?

KATWALA:	I think it’s important that it’s done in that way.  I 
think one of the great problems is if it’s a debate for six or 
seven percent of non-white people then everyone else just 
carries on so it doesn’t become an issue about what is the 
nature of the society that we want in terms of economic 
integration.  So I think the backlash effect can be quite strong 
if you don’t do it in that way.  I think there’s always a danger 
that less well off white people feel that more is being given to 
others than to them and there’s always got to be an 
awareness of getting the balance right so that that isn’t true or 
seen to be true.

COYLE:	To avoid a backlash, most British companies who 
believe in diversity promise something for everyone: the 
business profits from greater flexibility, while true meritocracy 
offers all staff, whatever their gender or ethnicity, a chance to 
fulfill their potential. That’s the theory at any rate, and Fiona 
Cannon insists it’s working for Lloyds TSB.

CANNON:	Five years ago our staff satisfaction rate on these 
issues was around about fifty-seven percent and currently it’s 
at seventy-seven percent.  And in fact if you are getting more 
women and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities through, 
you’re probably making things better for everybody because 
what that means is that you’ve got transparent recruitment 
processes and people are actually moving forward on merit, 
which is good for everyone.  One of our big successes, I think, 
has been around our flexible work package, which is called 
Work Options.  I mean originally we started to look at it as a 
way of helping women come back after maternity leave, but 
it became clear to us that we needed to broaden it out and 
so our Work Options package is available to anybody for any 
reason as long as they can make a business case.  And we 
now have twenty percent of all those new applications for 
Work Options are from men and people are using it for all sorts 
of reasons.  So they’re not just using it for childcare.  They’re 
using it to go off and be rugby referees, for example, or taking 
care of elderly parents, whatever it might be.  So I think it’s 
about opening up whatever policies you’ve got so that 
everybody can take part in it.

COYLE:	You don’t have to be very cynical to wonder 
whether the mantra of “something for everyone” has its limits.  
Of course many men will welcome flexible work patterns.  But 
there’s bound to be some pain along with the gain when it 
comes to harder choices about recruiting and promoting 
more women, ethnic minorities or disabled people. Business 
efforts to avert a backlash are being reinforced by current 
New Labour thinking.  A Government White Paper has 
announced plans to bring together in a single Commission the 
various quangos currently responsible for tackling 
discrimination on grounds of race, sex, disability and age.  It’s 
being presented as a win-win scenario for the wider 
population, with fairer opportunities creating a more 
productive economy. According to Sunder Katwala at the 
Fabian Society, there’s a lot to be said for avoiding blood-
and-thunder in making the case.

KATWALA:	It’s a classically New Labour approach that if you 
want to pursue goals of social justice, you will maximize the 
coalition of people in favour of them.  But I think if it’s done on 
grounds of economics alone, it won’t necessarily take off or 
widen as much, so I think there’s another message which is the 
social costs of not doing this really are quite high.  There’s a 
particular concern around British Muslim communities that the 
economic and social marginalisation feeds into political 
extremism as well.  And certainly in a sort of post-9/11 context 
it’s very important if you’re going to leave out whole 
communities from economic success and they’re not going to 
catch up through the market, for there to be a political 
passion about saying this is one of the most important issues for 
the next generation of people in Britain.

COYLE:	Political and commercial imperatives can 
coincide.  But contrary to the government’s gloss, the business 
case for diversity isn’t so overwhelming that market forces 
alone can achieve it, especially when it comes to hiring 
people from the less economically attractive groups. Equality 
of opportunity at work is a central issue – but the case for 
investing in it is at least as much political and moral as 
economic. 


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