BIG brands love a spot of moral theatre. June rolls in, logos sprout rainbows and CEOs spout ‘love is love’ clichés. Heart-warming, until you spot the same outfits going deathly quiet the instant principle threatens profit.
BMW splashed rainbow roundels everywhere for Pride, yet its Middle East social media feed kept the plain badge. Official line: ‘market-specific cultural aspects’. Translation: fly the flag where it’s fashionable, stuff it in a drawer where it might dent sales. BMW never spells out which ‘cultural aspects’ – everyone knows it’s the eight Middle Eastern countries where homosexuality is illegal and punishable by flogging, prison or death. One rainbow post risks dealership licences, import bans, or state boycotts worth hundreds of millions. So the logo stays blue and white, and the virtue stays in London.
Tesco bangs on about ‘ethical sourcing’ while 130 Thai workers take it to the High Court over 99-hour weeks and confiscated passports stitching F&F gear. Human rights end where the bargain rail begins.
Amazon decks out its corporate image with Pride flags and Glamazon merch, yet its UK warehouses called 1,441 ambulances in five years – chest pains, strokes, miscarriages, collapses. Diversity looks great on LinkedIn; less so when paramedics are wheeling workers out through the loading bay.
And spare a thought for the BBC, notorious for bombarding honest pensioners with menacing red-topped ‘FINAL DEMAND’ letters, yet peddles ‘impartiality’ like BMW peddles horsepower: full blast where its woke punters pay up, slyly doctored where they don’t. BBC director general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness resigned after bosses signed off a Panorama hatchet-job that spliced a Trump speech into a fake riot-incitement reel, snipping the ‘peacefully and patriotically’ line to keep progressive licence-fee payers happily outraged.
Same playbook, different year. In January BBC Arabic released a tear-jerker narrated by 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, deliberately concealing that his father has been Hamas’s deputy agriculture minister since 2021. Senior editors calculated that if they openly admitted handing a megaphone to a Hamas minister’s son it would spark instant fury from Jewish households, pro-Israel MPs, and Ofcom, risking boycotts, funding reviews, and a dip in the £174.50 cheque from every British home.
By burying the link they kept the pro-Palestinian base hooked on ‘authentic child testimony’ while preserving just enough deniability to stop centrist and Jewish licence-fee payers switching off or demanding rebates. The film racked up views and moral clout for weeks, maximising revenue from both camps, until journalist David Collier exposed it. Only then did the BBC pull it with a whimper about ‘due diligence’. Impartiality, like inclusion, is strictly optional when the spreadsheet demands you milk every demographic without losing a penny.
The rot isn’t confined to rainbows or doctored clips. Nike thunders about empowerment with Colin Kaepernick, yet yanked all Houston Rockets gear from Chinese stores after one pro-Hong Kong tweet. Apple hides the Taiwan flag emoji on China-region iPhones and cripples AirDrop to stop protests, while blasting BLM support back home.
Disney casts diverse leads in the West, then shrinks black actor John Boyega to postage-stamp size on Chinese Star Wars posters (he only clocked it via fan outrage and called it racist pandering) and films Mulan near Uyghur camps, thanking Xinjiang’s propaganda bureau in the credits, all while Western activists who swoon over Disney’s ‘inclusion’ stay conveniently silent on the market-specific edits. Nike and Apple again lecture about women’s rights in American ads, yet stay mute on Saudi laws treating women as property because Riyadh buys billions in trainers and iPhones without the lecture.
Why the selective morality? Global firms answer to shareholders, not saints. Marketing runs the numbers: full-throated alliances in London or LA, instant mute button in Beijing or Riyadh. Even at home the data show eye-rolling at endless virtue parades. Brands know it, algorithms know it, regional managers know it. So they A/B test everything: bold slogans in Brighton, craven silence in Chengdu.
No leaked memo screams ‘be hypocritical’. The proof is in the pixels: shrunken posters, hidden flags, pulled shoes, spliced speeches, buried Hamas links, all calibrated to the point where applause becomes lost revenue.
The result is industrial-grade cynicism. Thai workers pay with their health for £8 jeans. Warehouse staff collapse while diversity ads roll. Customers just wanting milk or a phone get wall-to-wall moral posturing in the West, ghostly silence everywhere else.
Profit is fine. But most of us would respect these giants more if they occasionally took a financial hit to stay honourable, same standards in Riyadh as Soho, Beijing as Berkeley. Until then, spare us the sermons. Rainbows, kneels, hashtags, tear-jerking docs: they’re not courage. They’re focus-grouped stickers slapped on products to shift units. Virtue is just another spreadsheet line.
This article appeared on Gavin Innes’s substack on November 10, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
