All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others — particularly, it seems, when it is their job to promote equality itself.
The quango responsible for this task, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is in meltdown after a mass exodus of senior figures complaining about the leadership of its chief executive, Trevor Phillips.
Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader and Minister for Women and Equality, has irritated her male parliamentary colleagues by declaring that “men cannot be left to run things on their own”. At the weekend she said that one of her party’s top two posts should always be held by a woman. Yesterday she appeared to blame male bankers for the global financial crisis, suggesting that we might not be in so much trouble had there been a company called Lehman Sisters instead of Lehman Brothers.
It’s no coincidence that both these controversies have erupted at the same time. They are symbolic of a wider battle over the future of the Labour Party.
There is clearly mayhem at the EHRC — a leviathan of an organisation that was created out of distinct groups that campaigned on race, gender, disability, age and sexual orientation. Six of the 17 original commissioners have resigned. The National Audit Office has refused to sign off the accounts.
There have been calls for Mr Phillips to resign. Perhaps he has been rather too keen on self-promotion, and reluctant to discuss his pronouncements in advance. The real problem, however, is not the management style of the chief executive but lack of clarity about what the commission is for.
You have to ask whether it is really necessary to spend £70 million a year on a body to promote equality and human rights when attitudes are already changing fast. There is a black US President, a female deputy Labour leader, a gay real Deputy Prime Minister, a blind former Home Secretary and an octogenarian Queen. Who is better at speaking up against ageism — an Equality Commission or Anna Ford? What has done more to promote racial tolerance — a quango or Slumdog Millionaire? Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a gloriously camp celebration of cross-dressing, is playing at London’s biggest theatre. Of course, there are still issues that need to be addressed but they would almost certainly be better highlighted by individual pressure groups than by a gigantic and unmanageable state-funded body.
Perhaps as a result of the ambiguity about its role, there is profound disagreement within the commission about what is the correct strategy for trying to achieve greater equality. The clash is between traditional campaigners who think that their job is to stand up to the Establishment on behalf of the oppressed group they represent, and modernisers — led by Mr Phillips — who think that it is time to take a more positive approach. The first group wants the State to enforce a level playing field, with quotas for representation and fines for bodies that fail to achieve equality. They do not understand how their chief executive, Britain’s most prominent black campaigner, could say that multiculturalism has gone too far, claim that institutional racism is a meaningless phrase or oppose all-black shortlists for political parties. As one insider puts it: “The real battle is over world view, not leadership. It’s about whether you should be inculcating a sense of permanent victimhood or encouraging people to have aspiration instead.”
A parallel row is going on in Government. Although Ms Harman approved Mr Phillips’ reappointment because she wanted a big figure to head the commission, she is politically more on the side of the traditionalists. She has fought a fierce battle with Lord Mandelson over the Equality Bill now going through Parliament, which will introduce gender pay audits, allow businesses to discriminate in favour of women and create a legal duty on public authorities to narrow the class divide. “It’s political correctness gone mad,” Ms Harman has been heard to joke.
The First Secretary just thinks that it’s mad and tried to tone down aspects that he thought would put too great a burden on business.
“It’s so Guardianista,” says one minister close to Lord Mandelson. “You’ve got to admire Harriet’s Killer Driller drive. She’s full of determination but on this she’s wrong. No 10 intervened on her side but I’m not sure Gordon really thought it through. He just said, ‘Give her what she wants’ to get rid of her. It was a bit like Tony Blair with John Prescott and regional assemblies. The determined deputy can badger the leader into submission.”
Lord Mandelson is not the only one with concerns. John Denham, the Communities Secretary, also said recently that Labour should stop pushing “egalitarianism as the ideal”. The truth is that senior Labour figures disagree fundamentally about the role of the State in promoting fairness, the basic mission of any centre-left party.
You see it in schools policy, where there is tension between those who want to encourage excellence and those who prefer to combat elitism. It applies to welfare, with questions about whether the benefits system should redistribute wealth or act as a safety net. There are implications in the debate about how much the Government should intervene on City bonuses. Even internships exemplify the divide: one week they are a middle-class ploy, the next they are exploitation of the young.
Although all Labour politicians say that they want to govern “for the many, not the few”, they mean different things by the phrase. Tony Blair thought “the many” lived in Middle England, Gordon Brown is convinced “the many” are the poor. The next leadership contest will be, among other things, about how to promote equality. Victimhood or aspiration — which is it going to be?
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Rachel Sylvester is a weekly columnist and political interviewer for The Times. Before that, she wrote about politics for The Daily Telegraph. She was also political editor of The Independent on Sunday.
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