Diversity’s value more than just progressive viewpoints

“Representation matters,” right? In politics, business and everywhere else in society. And “diversity is our strength,” as the well-worn phrase goes.

But do they really matter — in and of themselves, and not just when they lead to an outcome that you like?

The question arises because women and minorities are taking leading roles in a couple of countries, and the reaction has been anything but positive.

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni is set to become the country’s first female prime minister. Predictably, though, any good feeling about that is drowned out by the awkward fact that her party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), is not only anti-liberal and anti-immigrant but promotes traditional social views that run counter to just about everything modern feminists stand for.

So leave Italy aside for a moment and focus instead on Britain, where the PM’s job is now also filled by a woman, Liz Truss, the third Conservative woman to lead the country.

More importantly, Truss’s cabinet is chock full of diverse members, to the point where none of what the British call the four “great offices of state” (PM, chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary and home secretary) is occupied by a white male.

The parents of the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, came from Ghana. The mother of the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, is from Sierra Leone. And the home secretary, Suella Braverman, is the daughter of immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius.

This is pretty astonishing, and even the left-leaning Guardian newspaper editorialized that it would be “churlish” not to give the Conservatives some credit for their efforts on diversity.

But churlish doesn’t begin to describe the way that most of the British left, and particularly those who have campaigned most strenuously for diversity , have brushed off the significance of Truss’s cabinet appointments.

The Guardian’s own headline dismissed them as “diverse but dogmatic.” Others seized on the fact that while the new ministers may be from non-traditional backgrounds, they’ve come up the traditional route through private schools and elite universities.

But that’s not their real sin, in the eyes of diversity campaigners. The problem with these Conservatives is that they’re conservative. They don’t support progressive policies on issues like poor housing, inequalities in education, fraying health care, immigration and so on.

Chancellor Kwarteng is under particularly harsh attack for producing a fiscal plan that cuts taxes on the rich and ramps up spending to cushion Britons from energy costs. There’s plenty to criticize in his plan — markets are panicking, the Bank of England had to step in — but Kwarteng has had to deal with a lot more than that.

A Labour MP, Rupa Huq, said the chancellor is just “superficially” Black because of his elite background and policies. She later apologized and Labour leader Keir Starmer condemned the remark as racist, but it hangs in the air.

The logical conclusion of that kind of reasoning is that it matters not at all that women and ethnic minorities are represented at the highest levels of political power if they don’t support policies I like.

We’ve been here before. As Britain’s first female PM, Margaret Thatcher famously named only one other woman to her cabinet in 11 years. She didn’t care about “representation,” only policy. The self-styled progressives who scoff at diversity if it doesn’t lead to policies they approve of are taking essentially the same view. But surely representation does matter, and diversity is a strength. Even if it involves people you don’t agree with.