Not the General Election

Published 23 April 2001

Instead of the campaign you were expecting, the New Statesman and the Institute for Public Policy Research bring you something better: the debates that the politicians always fudge. This week - equality

For true freedom by Ruth Lister

The Conservatives presided over an increase in inequality, exceptional by both postwar historical and international standards. They will not, therefore, be attacking the present government for its failure to reverse that trend significantly. And while new Labour will go to the country having pledged to eliminate child poverty in a generation, the problem of poverty will be detached from the wider socio-economic inequalities that underpin it.

The right has never believed in equality, other than in the most minimal sense of equality before the law. It argues that equality undermines liberty. But this is to define liberty purely in the negative terms of "freedom from" rather than the positive terms of "freedom to". "Freedom to" requires resources. As the classic example goes, we are all free to dine at the Ritz, but we need money if we are to enjoy that freedom. Inequality, we were told in the 1980s, would act as a spur to enterprise, and the fruits would trickle down to the poor. Instead, the incomes of those at the bottom at best stagnated and, at worst, fell in real terms.

Equality has been a defining value of the left, and new Labour has tried to redefine its meaning. At the 1999 party conference, Tony Blair declared his belief in "true equality" as equal opportunity and equal worth: "Not equal incomes. Not uniform lifestyles or taste or culture." This familiar invocation of "straw egalitarians" is not helpful to the equality debate. In practice, most egalitarians argue for considerably greater equality than exists, rather than strict equality of outcome as such. Moreover, they argue, following R H Tawney, that inequalities, far from stimulating human diversity, actually prevent it from flourishing.

More recently, Blair has declared meritocracy as "the true radical second-term agenda", but has conceded that, on its own, meritocracy is "insufficient". It needs to be coupled with recognition both of "talent in all its forms" and of "the equal worth of all our citizens". This has been described as the "new egalitarianism". Yet it still denies the importance of substantive socio-economic equality. Neither genuine equality of opportunity nor meaningful recognition of equal worth is achievable in our savagely unequal society.

Meritocracy is ultimately self-defeating, if it just enables a few people to climb the ladders of an unequal society at the expense of others, and, once there, to ensure their children a privileged place. Poverty makes it difficult, if not impossible, for some children to grasp the opportunities that meritocracy opens up. In addition, the more success is equated with merit, the more the inequality and the privileges associated with it are legitimated, and the more poverty is stigmatised as a sign of failure.

If "recognition of talent in all its forms" is to have any real meaning, the implications are quite radical. It raises questions about reward structures, which allow (mostly male) "winners to take all" while, for instance, those in the (predominantly female) caring services receive only a pittance. The "new egalitarianism" has to be about more than slotting people into a jobs hierarchy that reflects market values and not the usefulness to society of different forms of work.

Likewise, extreme inequalities undermine equal worth in any sense beyond simple equality before the law. Equal worth should be about social relationships based on a mutual recognition of equality as human beings. The rich in their gated communities or exclusive houses are too far removed, geographically, socially and culturally, from the impoverished inhabitants of the inner city or outer estates to feel that the latter are their equals, or to recognise the bonds of common citizenship.

But equal worth is not to be confused with uniformity. As the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain argued, equality has to go hand in hand with respect for difference. Here, we encounter cross-cutting social divisions, such as those associated with gender, ethnicity and disability, which call for a politics of recognition as well as redistribution.

Redistribution has become the word new Labour dares not speak for fear of alienating Middle England. Yet according to the 1999/2000 British Social Attitudes Survey, four out of five people believe that there is too large a gap between those with high and low incomes. Three-quarters think it is definitely or probably the government's responsibility to reduce this gap (though explicit reference to "redistribution" gets less support). New Labour's "redistribution by stealth" fails to tap into this public unease.

It also fails to get across the idea that such wide inequalities as we have now are not inevitable, despite the constraints of economic globalisation.

An unequal society impoverishes us all, both individually and collectively. Indeed, according to some research, it is bad for our health. Ultimately, equality matters not just as a means to genuine liberty (as some liberals would argue) but in its own right, as the prerequisite for rich social relations based on mutual recognition of equal worth.

Ruth Lister is professor of social policy at Loughborough University

A question of envy by Anthony O'Hear

Egalitarianism has been the most corrosive, illiberal and murderous of modern beliefs. The French revolution told us all we needed to know about equality, the driving force behind its terror and anarchy.

But the same scenario repeated itself to incalculable human cost in the 20th century, in Russia, eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Cambodia and in other places taken over by thugs imbued with egalitarian rhetoric. These revolutions were fuelled by hatred of those regarded as privileged, who were humiliated and impoverished and slaughtered in their millions for no other reason. Commissars of equality were always on hand, anticipating their egalitarian masters' slightest wishes.

We have been spared the worst excesses of egalitarianism in this country, though we have had and continue to have our own tribunes of the people working up the same hatred of "elitism". Remember Anthony Crosland: "If it is the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland"; the Labour governments of 1974-79 squeaking the pips of the rich with confiscatory tax rates of 83 and 98 per cent; Alastair Campbell's "royal campaign" of November 1993, "to get Wills and Harry into state schools near to Mum and Dad" (bog-standard ones, presumably); Gordon Brown's manipulation of the Laura Spence affair; the Commons select committee on education's proposal that our top universities in effect sacrifice their academic standards to equality.

Then there is the endless refrain from professional campaigners on poverty that the differences between the very rich and the very poor are ever increasing. Never mind that, in absolute terms, everyone (including the poorest) is better off. Never mind that there is not a shred of evidence that wealth in itself harms those without it. What is objectionable is the mere fact of difference; so, if egalitarians have their way, goods of the kind all cannot have will be destroyed, in order to ensure that none will have them.

But inequalities of wealth or of other desirable attributes are not in themselves morally objectionable. People simply differ in ability, effort, taste, and yes, birth, wealth and good fortune. We all have to learn to accept this, as part of our moral development.

It does not harm me that Beethoven or Kant existed, infinitely superior to me though they were. Indeed, my life is greatly enhanced by their having been, as it is by the current existence - and greater wealth - of Daniel Barenboim and Maurizio Pollini. Nor does it harm me that Sir Elton John and the Duke of Westminster are hugely better off than me, even if the work of the one is embarrassingly vulgar, and the wealth of the other due to birth. To resent their good fortune would be to succumb to the nasty, small-minded vice of envy.

What matters to me is to lead a decent life myself, and to provide for and educate my children. It also matters that I live in a society which respects life, liberty and property, and which acknowledges that others have the right to pursue happiness. This last right involves helping the disabled and the poor. Real poverty is an evil; those afflicted should be helped. But the point of the help is not to make them equal to everyone else. It is to enable them do things for themselves, including, if they want, to ascend the social or material scale.

Egalitarianism conveys the message that everyone has the same rights to the same goods as everyone else, whatever they have or have not done. An often remarked consequence of this - the 98 per cent, or even the 40 per cent, tax phenomenon - is that it saps initiative. The rich and the able pull back or pull out. So all are made worse off as the economy stagnates - creating a climate of resentment where people are criticised or punished for excelling.

Egalitarianism also fosters the spirit of truculent irresponsibility which has taken root in swathes of our population. The feckless come to believe that the rest of us owe them a living. They and their children thus become locked into cycles of welfare dependency. This has the apparently paradoxical result that the lot of the supposed beneficiaries of egalitarianism is actually worsened. But the paradox is only apparent. Even the present Labour government now admits that comprehensive education does most harm to those from poor backgrounds immured in an education system concerned more with equality than with the pursuit of high standards.

Egalitarians are offended by the fact that in inegalitarian set-ups, some benefit from accidents of birth or luck or deplorable public taste. Yet, provided that effort is rewarded and merit recognised, does this matter? Far less harm is done to liberty, to family ties and to the fabric of society generally by allowing wealth to flourish, than by curbing its inconveniences in the name of equality.

For equality is unachievable without force and without continual state interference in people's lives and liberties. The ghastly regimes of the 20th century cannot be written off as the wrong sort of egalitarianism. They are its inevitable expression.

In public debate, egalitarianism occupies the moral high ground. Hardly anyone, beyond monks professing vows of poverty, applies egalitarianism in their own life, but there remains a deep and deeply hypocritical prejudice in its favour. The Conservative Party, like new Labour, doubtless prefers it not to be discussed. All the more reason to expose its bankruptcy, moral, human and political.

Anthony O'Hear is professor of philosophy at the University of Bradford

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