Sometimes Inequality is Best

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
- Aristotle

Forget about what the Government has failed to do; I’m worried about what it has done. Recently, unnoticed amid the fuss over MPs‘ expenses, Harriet Harman introduced her equality bill. Terrifying in its scope, the bill imposes a single new equality duty on every public body in the country (there are 43,000 of them, apparently), requiring them to target services at the disadvantaged, and to have due regard to equality when buying goods and services.

So every decision must be gauged for its impact on reducing inequalities in race, sex, age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, sexual orientation and religion. Oh, and in income, too.

The worst sin one can commit under the bill is what it calls “intersectional multiple discrimination” – discriminating against two or more such characteristics simultaneously.

This law isn’t about fairness; it’s about creating a vast bureaucracy of ideological coercion, promoting grievance, imposing cost and attacking business, charities, schools.

It’s a charter for ministers to penalise any institution whose social make-up they dislike.