Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways.
Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of the state compared with pre-pandemic, what few people realise is the extent to which the private sector has been incubating its own Blob for years.
To illustrate how Blob PLC can achieve its ends and – crucially – why people have gone along with it, we must follow its successful campaign to make British business bow to the diversity gods, and how it started at the very top – with the boards.
The trouble began with Lord Davies, affectionately known in his banking career as ‘Merv the Swerve’ after the Welsh rugby no. 8 of the same name, ennobled by Gordon Brown and made a minister for business. In 2011, Vince Cable, business secretary in the coalition, published a report from Lord Davies called Women on Boards. It asserted: ‘Research has shown that strong stock market growth among European companies is most likely to occur where there is a higher proportion of women in senior management teams.’
The basis of this claim was a 2007 report by an American organisation called Catalyst, set up to ‘expand opportunities for women and business’. Not an entirely disinterested party, then. These reports, amplified later by two McKinsey studies, became the go-to texts which formed the foundation myth of Blob PLC’s diversity dogmatism.
As Alex Edmans and Ross Clark have written in this magazine, drawing on research by John Hand and Jeremiah Green in the US S&P 500 index, there is actually no evidence of a link between more diversity in a company and better stock performance.
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