Innocent smoothies guilty of pushing radical gender ideology

One of the UK’s most famous smoothie brands has come under intense pressure for sharing LGBT activist rhetoric from disgraced ‘trans children’ charity Mermaids on its Twitter account.

Innocent tried to teach its followers “what’s okay to say” about radical gender ideology. Those who responded said it was pushing ideas that harm children and criticised it for promoting a charity that has been under investigation over safeguarding concerns. Innocent has now removed the offending tweets.

At the same time, activist groups including Mermaids are demanding a new law outlawing ‘casual conversation’ that doesn't affirm someone's gender identity. They claim this is ‘conversion therapy’. No one should be backing this sort of flawed thinking.

Backlash from LGBT groups

Many brands seem prone to making PR mistakes at this time of year. All too often their communications teams misguidedly think LGBT Pride would be a great bandwagon to jump on. It tends to backfire.

The most common mistake is thinking that Pride is a neutral, non-political movement. But large brands are seeking commercial advantage by backing a movement highly sympathetic to collapsing capitalism, ‘the establishment’ and big business. The values of the two sides are in fierce contradiction.

This has led to attempts to de-commercialise Pride, such as Peter Tatchell’s ‘Reclaim Pride’ events in London, which bans sponsorship in an attempt to get back to political protest.

More broadly, however, groups like Stonewall are intent on forging even stronger links with commercial interests. Activists have encouraged companies not only to rebrand with Pride colours and attend their marches, but also demand that they donate huge sums of money into campaign coffers.

The result is that dubious political lobby groups are being heavily funded by large corporations. It means businesses like Tesco are helping fund the ludicrous campaign to criminalise ordinary Christians and loving parents under a broad ‘conversion therapy’ ban. Others, like woke high street cosmetics brand Lush, have been more explicit in their political support. It is a dangerous mistake.

Backlash from concerned parents

That wasn’t what happened to Innocent though. They received a different backlash, this time from those concerned about radical gender ideology, rather than those promoting it.

Innocent decided to invite the appalling Mermaids group in to tell their employees “what’s okay to say”.

The “workshop around language” taught Innocent’s workers about disputed concepts including ‘deadnaming’, ‘misgendering’ and ‘gender diversity’. Then Innocent decided to teach the rest of the world about it too.

It was an ill-advised move. Innocent said it wanted to help “people feel like they can be their true selves”. But they invited a group devoted to preventing parents helping their children feel comfortable in their own skin. The group is campaigning for a new law which puts its own gender ideology on the statute book. It is seeking not just to teach us how to talk, but to criminalise those whose speech fails to line up with its extreme ideology.

After offering a lesson to the general public, Innocent received their own. Clearly the PR plan hadn’t gone quite as planned, as hundreds of negative comments called the company out for promoting ideas which are clearly harmful to children.

People don’t like to be told what they can and cannot say. They particularly don’t like being told what they can and cannot say to their own children.

Innocent felt forced to take down its series of tweets. It said the comments other Twitter users made “weren’t in line with our values”.

Backlash over a ‘conversion therapy’ ban

It should be obvious that businesses ought not to back Pride campaigners and LGBT activists. And many companies and public bodies have been making an effort to dissociate from Stonewall and Mermaids in the last two years.

The UK Government has itself said Stonewall’s approach is wrong. But its proposed ‘conversion therapy’ ban appears intended only to win these activists around.

It must understand that the groups making these demands will never be appeased. What they are asking for in a ban is deeply repressive. It would destroy freedom of speech and the rights of Christians across the UK. These are fundamental human rights guaranteed by the European Convention. Whatever they do, the Government will have to disappoint the activists.

A new proposal for a ‘conversion therapy’ law will face an even fiercer backlash than Innocent if it cuts across casual conversations and religious freedom. The Government says this won’t be the case, but its previous proposals have failed to alleviate concerns.