In a Treasury Select Committee hearing yesterday, the Chief Executive of Aviva, Amanda Blank, claimed there is a no non-diverse hire at Aviva without it being signed off by me and the Chief People Officer.
These remarks were made after she told the committee that sexual harassment is worse in financial services than any other industry.
Miss Blank herself suffered some abuse at the FTSE 100 meeting last year, but can it possibly be right to discriminate against white men, her customers, to remedy this?
It's outright public discrimination, but it's merely the latest unveiled symptom of the much broader illness caused by the march through the institutions promulgated by the Equality Act 2010.
Jacob Rees-Mogg says it's time to reform the Equality Act
GB News
As Conservatives, we see people as individuals, but the modern collectivist left sees people in terms of their groups and tribes, and this divergence represents a deeply troubling rift between the two visions of equality and society.
The collectivist believes equality is measured by outcomes, and it's about levelling down.
It is misogynist if you have too many women, but it is never misandrist if you have too many women anyway.
Or if it has a larger number of white people, it could be described as institutionally racist. But the individualist believes that equality is measured by meritocracy.
Judging people purely based on their capabilities is the only way to achieve the fairness of equality before the law, and the collectivist vision is a fallacy.
There are all sorts of disparities in society and it is wrong to assume they are caused by discrimination. For example, the highest earning groups in the UK are British Chinese and British Indians. To suggest that these groups earn more by discriminating against these who earn less would be absurd.
But the erroneous collectivist vision is winning and that's why we see the likes of the Financial Conduct Authority bringing quotas to businesses.
Quotas are outrageous, they're discrimination, and a quick look on its website reveals it rather sinisterly calls for, comply or explain rules, which entails boards must have 40% women. At least one senior board position must be held by a woman, at least one member of the board must be from an ethnic minority.
But surely firms should have the best, and if that means 100% women and 100% ethnic minorities, so be it, should not be discriminatory.
And so it's no wonder firms with this sort of nonsense coming from the FCA, like Aviva, are engaging in this kind of rhetoric, encouraged by the regulator, paid for by you, which is demanding that it does this.
It all stems back to the Equality Act of 2010, which ought to be renamed the Inequality Act, puts a legal duty on firms to promote inequality and to discriminate. But capitalism is the way to overcome personal prejudice, misogyny, racism or anything else.
Capitalism is colour blind, its concern is the bottom line, and the job of chief executives is to achieve profits for their shareholders. It serves a firm's interests not to discriminate based on any characteristic other than capability.
It's been shown by the African American economist Thomas Sowell that even in the most racist society throughout history, such apartheid South Africa firms would break the lawn higher from groups discriminated against when it made business sense to do so.
We cannot manufacture equal outcomes via tokenism, but rather achieve true equality by treating people as individuals.
Aviva and its chief executive, Amanda Blank, ought to know this, as should the FCA as well as the public sector. Indeed, the law ought to reflect this clearly. It's time to reform the Equality Act.
But also, you can act if you're a white male and you've got an insurance with Aviva. They don't like you. They don't want you. The chief executive doesn't approve of you. So why buy your insurance product from a company that is hostile?