MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Equality laws? More like a licence to bash the middle classes
It is still less than a year since millions of voters decided that they would give Labour a chance. Many voted for Sir Keir Starmer 's party. Others decided to lend their formerly Tory votes to Nigel Farage, which in many seats helped to ensure a Labour victory. The party was pleased to pocket this happy-go-lucky surge, and we duly got a Labour Government with a very large majority.
They turned out to be exactly what Labour governments always are, only with extras lurking in the small print. The taxing and the spending are already hurrying towards crisis point, and there are serious questions about the basic competence of the Cabinet.
But, as The Mail on Sunday warned last week, this Government also has a hard dogmatic purpose to change this country at its core, which it said little about during the election campaign. That is why it emerges piece by piece now.
Today we reveal several parts of this multi-pronged attack on the Britain that many people foolishly thought was secure when they decided to give Sir Keir a chance last July. The most startling is the detonation of an egalitarian time-bomb, left waiting to explode by Gordon Brown's government of 2010.
This is activation of the 'socio-economic' clause in the Equality Act of 2010, a charter intended to impose equality on all. Its wording requires public bodies to 'consider actively how their decisions might help to reduce the inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage'. What does this verbiage mean? It is a licence to discriminate against the middle class.
When it was proposed in 2009, the veteran radical commentator Polly Toynbee rejoiced, saying: 'The Government will create a new over-arching law creating a duty on the whole public sector to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. This will stand as the main frame from which all other equality legislation flows.' She described it as 'simple, fundamental and profound'.
Alas for Ms Toynbee, the Tory-Liberal coalition of 2010 ensured it was not put into effect in England (though Scotland began to enforce it in 2018 and Wales in 2021 and some local authorities in England have been applying it as far as they can).
The main losers are likely to be the independent middle class, especially those who have used private education, seen by equality campaigners as a clear mark of unfair privilege.
Meanwhile, two other worrying measures are also on their way. Laws now before the House of Lords will make it easier for local authorities to force academy schools to accept violent or disruptive pupils, a key aspect of their independence. And Deputy Premier Angela Rayner is pushing for a new 'strikers' charter', lowering the number of people needed to establish a trade union in a workplace.
The implications of this for industrial peace are very serious. It may not take us all the way back to the strike waves of the 1980s but it will make it harder to be a small business on a tight margin. Together with new protections against dismissal and enhanced sick pay, these provisions are likely to make such small businesses more reluctant to hire new staff, so increasing the dire effect on employment of Labour's National Insurance rises.
This is only the beginning. Labour has declared a class war and intends to fight it. Those opposed to this failed and unpleasant dogma need to work hard to ensure that it is exposed now and thoroughly defeated at the next election.
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