Labour’s record in government may have been a litany of U-turns and broken promises, but there’s one cause on which the party hasn’t wavered. When the party pledged before the election to ‘make equality central to policymaking’ this, it turns out, was quite true. Businesses clobbered by energy bills and those wanting the small boats to stop may be whistling in the wind, but at least there is one constituency Keir Starmer’s Labour still thinks it can court: diversity managers.
After a months-long consultation, Labour is set to push ahead with plans to reintroduce the ‘socioeconomic duty’ in the Equality Act. Whether there’s a burning public demand for more equalities legislation is far from clear, but the idea, we are told, is to ‘level up opportunities for all’. The Tories say the duty, which they disapplied in government in 2010, will ‘impose socialism’ on Britain, and even that it will amount to a ‘war on the middle class’.
Why is Starmer adding a new hoop for central government to jump through, to go with all the others?
Under the socio-economic duty, which has been activated in Scotland, every single government decision will subject to an equalities assessment around social class. It applies to practically every part of the public sector and every official, and yet it’s far from clear this bonanza of box-ticking has made Scotland the slightest bit better governed. Indeed, government officials are already heavily constrained by existing rules like the ECHR, environmental regulations, the civil service code, and having to always think about the perils of judicial review and the ‘judge over your shoulder’. Keir Starmer himself, along with several of his acolytes, has complained of the sluggishness of Whitehall bureaucracy. So why is he adding a new hoop for central government to jump through, to go with all the others?
Worse, like the rest of the Equality Act, it seems likely it will actively foster discrimination against those unfavoured groups deemed to be more privileged. ‘Deprived’ families or areas could end up being prioritised over better off ones for taxpayer-funded services, like school places, police resources and even hospital and GP appointments. It looks like class war via legalism. Researcher Daniel Dieppe, author of the Civitasreport ‘On Equality and Equal Pay’, says: ‘Reducing inequalities through the intentional adverse treatment of certain “better off” groups will create more, not less, discrimination.’ What’s more, if it is anything like other parts of the Equality Act, ‘it will again be subject to perverse interpretation, to foment a culture of grievance and resentment’.
Labour isn’t only reviving old equalities laws – it’s creating new ones, too. The socio-economic duty comes in conjunction with plans to make ethnicity and disability pay-gap reporting mandatory for all businesses with 250 or more employees. The effect would be ‘piling even more red tape onto employers’, says shadow equalities minister Claire Coutinho – though one should note that it was ‘woke and proud’ Theresa May who first burdened British firms with gender pay-gap reporting as PM back in 2017.
These requirements already create a situation ‘whereby the government sets wages, rather than markets allowing people to be paid according to their skills and output’, says Fred de Fossard, of the Prosperity Institute. Adding in two new categories will ‘only make matters worse, increasing the likelihood of a litigious and low-trust culture in the workplace.’
Keir Starmer likes to claim that economic growth is his ‘defining mission’ – so why can’t his government leave the private sector alone? ‘This is another example of how the government wishes to impose dysfunctional and unproductive public sector working practices on the whole economy’, de Fossard adds, ‘which in turn will stifle job creation, damage the culture of a workplace, and harm economic growth and tax receipts in turn. The equal pay claims hammering large retail businesses are an indication of where policies like this lead.’
For all the talk of ‘working people’ and growing the economy, one is left with the conclusion that free markets and the price mechanism are simply another language to this Labour government. Ed Miliband’s zeal for net zero has seen him utterly fail in his pledge to reduce energy bills; Rachel Reeves’s tax hikes have pushed unemployment to a five-year high. Labour apparently thinks it can improve people’s lives by micro-managing the allocation of state resources. Well, here’s a thought. Why not focus on growing the pie, rather than squabbling over the size of the slices?
