Nobody believed in woke, least of all the people selling it

Posted on: 2 September 2026

The most instructive document in the whole diversity retreat is not a corporate press release. It is a letter, sent on 11 March 2025 by Nikhil Rathi and Sam Woods to Dame Meg Hillier at the Treasury Committee, in which the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority confirmed that they would not be taking forward the diversity and inclusion rules they had consulted on since September 2023. The stated reasons were the range of feedback received, the risk of duplication with planned legislation and the wish to avoid additional burdens on firms at this time. All perfectly reasonable, each one available as an argument in September 2023, in January 2024 and on every day in between. What was not available until January 2025 was the knowledge that the American administration had just made the subject radioactive. Seven weeks separate the executive orders in Washington from the letters to Dame Meg. British financial regulation, it turns out, keeps roughly the same diary as an American retailer of livestock feed.

Which brings us to the diary itself, because the interesting question about the collapse of corporate diversity policy is not why it happened but when.

On 1 April 2023 Anheuser-Busch sent a personalised can of Bud Light to Dylan Mulvaney, who was then documenting her gender transition daily to several million followers. A few days earlier the brand's vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, in post since July 2022, had explained her brief on a podcast: the best-selling beer in America had been in decline for a long time, without young drinkers it had no future, and the answer was inclusivity in place of what she called fratty, out of touch humour. In the four weeks to 3 June, retail sales fell 24.6 per cent year on year, Modelo Especial took the top of the American beer market by value after Bud Light had held it since 2001, and group revenues in the United States dropped 10.5 per cent in the second quarter. By July 2024 Bud Light had slipped to third behind Michelob Ultra. It remains the best documented case in existence of consumers punishing a large brand and declining to come back.

Now the second date. Tractor Supply announced the elimination of its diversity roles and targets on 27 June 2024. John Deere followed in July, Harley-Davidson on 19 August, then Lowe's, Ford and Brown-Forman before the month was out, Molson Coors in September, Walmart in November, McDonald's, Target and Meta in January 2025. Fourteen months between the clearest consumer signal in twenty years and the first company to move, and then everything else arriving together inside a single half year. A firm reacting to its own numbers does not take fourteen months to read them, and more to the point it does not find itself reading them in the same week as a dozen competitors operating in unrelated markets. There is no reason on earth why the accounts of Tractor Supply and the accounts of Meta should recommend the same move in the same quarter. The simultaneity is the diagnosis. Whatever these boards were studying, it was not the profit and loss.

They were watching each other. In June 2024 Robby Starbuck, a music video director turned activist with roughly a million followers across X, Instagram and YouTube, began working through American companies one at a time, having his staff research each target for a few weeks before publishing a video listing its diversity commitments and inviting customers to make their feelings known. His first was Tractor Supply, a chain selling feed and fencing to rural America. The video drew 2.8 million views. Twenty-one days later the company cancelled its diversity roles, its emissions targets and its Pride sponsorships.

That interval deserves more attention than it has received. A programme built over four years, defended in annual reports, written into investor materials as a strategic commitment, dismantled in three weeks by one man with a social media account. Nobody defends anything they have actually invested in that badly. Anyone who has sat in enough boardrooms will have watched a company fight for eighteen months over a commitment worth a fraction of that one, and the difference is always the same: firms defend what somebody inside them wanted, and abandon what they adopted because everyone else had adopted it.

Then comes the acceleration, which is the clearest signature of the mechanism. Deere folded faster than Tractor Supply. Harley-Davidson, on 19 August, not only folded but disclosed that it had quietly closed its diversity function back in April, four months before Starbuck named it. Lowe's, Ford and Brown-Forman moved within a fortnight, some without waiting to be targeted at all. None of them was responding to Starbuck. They were responding to what they had watched happen to the companies ahead of them, which is a different and far cheaper exercise, since it requires no assessment of anything: you simply need to arrive after the first and before the last.

The obvious objection is that shareholders tell a different story, and on the face of it they do. At Costco's annual meeting on 23 January 2025, more than 98 per cent of shares voted against a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research asking the company to assess the risks of its diversity programmes. Apple recorded 97 per cent in February, Deere much the same. Owners apparently disagreeing with managers.

Except that this is a British subject and British readers know better than to read a proxy result as a preference. Both boards had recommended a vote against, which is what the large index managers deliver almost automatically. In 2025 the ten biggest American asset managers supported 12.4 per cent of shareholder proposals of any kind, down from 13.3 per cent the year before. So-called anti-ESG proposals average around 2 per cent support, but the resolutions pointing the other way, the ones asking companies to strengthen their diversity commitments, managed 14.8 per cent in the same season. This is not an electorate with a view. It is an electorate voting as instructed, and the proof arrived within weeks, when BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street each withdrew or narrowed their own internal diversity voting policies for the 2025 season without a single shareholder being consulted about anything. No conviction changed. The guidance changed, and the machine turned the other way with precisely the docility it had shown turning the first way.

Here is the part that should trouble anyone currently enjoying the retreat. The adoption of these programmes, across the summer of 2020 and into 2021, happened in exactly the same manner. Simultaneous, without internal assessment, with almost none of these companies having measured anything at all before announcing numerical targets on hiring and procurement. They watched each other then and they have watched each other since. The same architecture of imitation produced the wave and the ebb, which means that anyone reading the current retreat as a return to good sense is applauding the identical conformity they found intolerable six years ago, with the sign reversed.

Which is why asking when the woke moment ended is the wrong question. It assumes there was a conviction to end. In the rooms where these things were decided there was not one, and there never had been, so asking when these companies changed their minds credits them with a mind they did not have.

The British version of this comes with better manners and a formal name. Comply or explain has governed listed company conduct here for decades, and since April 2022 it has covered board composition targets on gender and ethnicity as well. It is a genuinely elegant piece of regulatory design, resting on the assumption that a company with good reasons will state them and be judged on them. What it has produced, in diversity as in almost everything else, is a market in which explaining is understood to be an admission of failure, so nobody explains and everybody complies, and no board is ever required to work out what it actually thinks. When the FCA and the PRA abandoned their proposals in March 2025 there was no meaningful fight, because there had never been a position to fight for.

The pressure will return on another subject, following the same pattern, and it will find the same rooms with the same habits. Whether anyone inside them can recognise it while it is happening, rather than fourteen months afterwards when somebody else has already decided, is the question I cannot answer.