By Professor Dibyesh Anand, Chair of the London Higher EDI Network
When the UK’s reckoning on anti-racism was reignited by the Black Lives Matter movement and outrage at George Floyd’s murder in the US in 2020, it should not surprise us that the backlash against DEI under Trump is now having a chilling effect here too. In 2026, equality, diversity, and inclusion are under harder pressure than at any point in recent years. The financial squeeze on universities is severe; government policies are often obstructive; and there is a culture war within and beyond the sector in which commitment to plurality is represented as “woke” and somehow anti-merit, anti-freedom, and anti-British.
The battle for EDI is a battle for recognition of diverse merit, for freedom for all to have a fair chance to flourish, and for an inclusive vision of Britishness.
I write from a particular vantage point. I co-chair London Higher’s EDI Network, my own University of Westminster’s EDI Committee, sit on Research England’s EDI Expert Advisory Group, and was a founding chair of Westminster’s BME Staff Network almost a decade ago. I also co-chair the UUK and Advance HE DVC Network; this is not strictly EDI, but the same questions of leadership and culture recur from a different angle. From that vantage, networks look less like a soft layer of higher education and more like what holds the work together when other things give way. Networks are more than lobby groups or cosy, safe spaces; they are critical friends of the institution, helping translate its values into culture.
Inside any single institution, the most important conversations about racism, precarity, and the gap between what we say and what we do are constrained by hierarchy and by the fact that staff cannot speak as freely to their employer as to their peers. Institutional EDI forums make space for honest dialogue alongside formal governance. Pan-institutional networks remove the boss-to-employee dynamic altogether: a practitioner at one university can be candid with a peer at another in ways that are rarely possible within a single payroll. Across forty-plus London Higher members, what emerges is not just solidarity but pattern recognition: what works where, what is being tried differently, what compromises have been made and why.
That collaboration is increasingly recognised beyond London. For example, the Global Majority Mentoring Programme has been borrowed elsewhere. Our University’s Westminster Conversations now involve collaboration with outside organisations. National recognition is not the prize at the end. It is the moment colleagues elsewhere adopt what London has made standard.
London is often described as one prosperous place; it is not. The progression-to-HE gap between Tower Hamlets and Westminster, or between Newham and Kensington, is sharp and persistent. Awarding gaps for Black and minoritised students remain stubborn. Graduate outcomes for first-generation, disabled, and racially minoritised students are uneven. No single university can shift these patterns alone. This is where networks earn their keep: pooling data, comparing what works, coordinating with employers, NHS Trusts, the GLA, and civic partners.
As universities in London, we are not simply located in London. We are London. We are employers, civic actors, anchor institutions, cultural assets in every borough, and global ambassadors for our city and country. London competes with other major cities for global talent. A London where universities collaborate on EDI is a fairer, more confident, and more attractive London.
I would not be honouring the trust placed in me if I did not also name the risks networks face. They can centre the comfortable in the name of “safe space”. They can become spaces for senior people to perform listening rather than act on what they have heard, or, to be honest, about the constraints that sometimes mean “wait” or “no”. Networks can flatten meaningful differences between communities into a homogeneous “minoritised” voice that helps no one. The standard I try to hold our fora to is consistency. Lived experience matters, but our work cannot be reduced to only that. The moment we exceptionalise any community or cause — treating one as uniquely deserving, another as inconvenient — we have stopped doing EDI and started doing reductionist politics dressed in its language. That is what gives our EDI work credibility, however slow.
This is why networks matter now. They convert isolated practice into shared standards, shared standards into sectoral memory, and sectoral memory into the kind of resilience that survives one financial crisis, one political cycle, one hostile leader. London’s universities are larger, more diverse, and more interconnected than any other regional cluster in British higher education. The choice is whether to use that scale as evidence that inclusion is achievable and sustainable or to retreat into self-protection while the city pays the price. We should, I think, choose the first.
