If our culture wars are to reach a nadir, it may be this single, absurd moment: a white female influencer is moving to sue a positive action charity over anti-white discrimination.

This is the basis on which the GB News commentator Sophie Corcoran is bringing a legal case against the 10,000 Interns Foundation, which helps to organise internship opportunities for young black people and other ethnic minorities. Corcoran says that she applied for a programme run by the foundation and the Bar Council, as she had been “exploring a legal career”, only to be rejected. The legal action claims that Corcoran faced a loss of employment opportunity, as well as discrimination in violation of the Equality Act.

It is curious that Corcoran is advancing this case on the basis of the Equality Act. Indeed, it is this very piece of legislation that underpins schemes promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). It is also legislation that swaths of the right want to do away with. As the Bar Council responded after the Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe denounced the scheme last October, the programme counts as “lawful positive action under sections 158 and 159 of the Equality Act based on evidence of under-representation in relation to access to the profession”.

It seems improbable that the Bar Council, of all professional bodies, is willingly engaging with an unlawful enterprise. But this legal action is less about one individual’s claim of anti-white discrimination, and more about the deployment of “lawfare” as a strategy to dismantle DEI infrastructure. There is little evidence that Corcoran has ever been interested in being a barrister, but her op-ed in the Daily Express, announcing her “legal campaign to end damaging DEI policies”, perhaps gives some indication of her motive, which is surely not securing a £14.80-an-hour internship.

The blueprint for such a lawsuit has, of course, been developed in the United States. Following the supreme court’s overturning of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions in 2023 and accelerated by Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders in 2025, an entire industry of anti-DEI litigation has taken shape, with conservative activists and legal groups seeking test cases to challenge corporate diversity schemes, scholarships and hiring initiatives. These have targeted companies from Starbucks to American Airlines. Just last week, the New York Times has been sued for alleged discrimination against a white male editor, who claims that he failed to gain promotion due to the newspaper’s aspirations to increase diversity.

Such lawfare has proved to be a prolific and successful model in the US, with companies shuttering DEI initiatives either in response or pre-emptively. In fact, it has been so successful that law firms are running out of clients: Dan Lennington of the conservative firm Law & Liberty told the Washington Post last October that “My target list has gone pretty much to zero now … There’s no Amazon Black business accelerator, there’s no huge FedEx supplier diversity programs, no Microsoft or Apple Black founders programme. Those are all gone.”

The action against the 10,000 Interns Foundation is the perfect British summation of an era in which a legal frontier is adopted in our culture wars. Its success also relies on building an ideological consensus that such inequalities do not exist. Indeed, Corcoran herself states on X that she is “not against widening opportunities for those from disadvantaged backgrounds”, but that “being black” or indeed “being a woman” does not count as a disadvantage.

That idea becomes even more seductive in a youth unemployment crisis, where more will be tempted to question why affirmative action should be engaged with when everyone is struggling to get a job. Never mind, of course, findings from University College London last year that black and Asian graduate applicants are 45% and 29% respectively less likely to receive entry-level employment offers than white applicants, or that ethnic minority barristers were found to have faced significant systemic obstacles that hindered their progression. Rebecca Ajulu-Bushell, the chief executive of 10,000 Interns, tells me that the organisation “collects social mobility data” from applicants, and that on their programme they “think about geography, gender balance, different universities, all of these things have social mobility implications”. In the case of representation or advantage, particularly in elite professions, the picture is invariably more complicated than a simple matter of race v class.

Corcoran appears to be crowdfunding her lawsuit, but it is not unthinkable that either this campaign, or similar future actions, might receive significant financial backing, allowing them to become more stubborn and aggressive. The fact is that 10,000 Interns is not the only charity of its kind: there is a broad sector of DEI initiatives, whether to promote women entering Stem professions, help disabled people into jobs, or aid those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage, including white working-class people. All this is enabled by equality legislation. And despite Corcoran’s mobilisation of the Equality Act for her own agenda, it is evident that such a move is in service of a broader aim for the right: the tearing up of equality law. Indeed, one of Reform UK’s flagship policies is to repeal the Equality Act “on day one”.

The potential danger of all this goes far beyond scuppering initiatives for getting black kids into good jobs. If we look at the web of essential health provision and welfare and social care provided by charities, or funded by arm’s length state-franchised organisations such as the national lottery, many of these spaces receive funds on the basis of various Equality Act protections. That could mean anything from sexual health services to domestic violence shelters, homeless charities or mental health services designed for specific communities. Removing or weakening such equality frameworks through attacks doesn’t just affect schemes or programmes but also enforcement rights – from tribunals to public sector equality duties. An analysis has found that if an elected Reform government repealed the Equality Act, this could threaten maternity leave and job security for half a million pregnant women.

What will be the outcome of this legal action? In a way, it doesn’t matter for the claimant. To entangle this organisation in proceedings that deplete it of time, energy and resources is a victory in itself. When the Equality Act brought together various antidiscrimination laws in 2010, it was created in abstract, unsuited for a changed society in which it could be used for political gain by actors who want to deny or redefine the existence of discrimination. And so, organisations will be disrupted or destroyed along the way, but in the end the act itself may have its day in court. That could leave millions of us more exposed than ever.

• Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian
  

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.