Gerald Warner: Equality witch-hunt will burn prosperity at the stake

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

THE two most weasel words distorting public policy today are "equality" and "fairness". These are the fetishist mantras of the Frankfurt School Marxism that currently dominates Western societies. They have grown like malignant tumours within the body politic so that now it is becoming disabled.

This was demonstrated last week by the filing of a legal challenge to the Budget on the grounds it would disadvantage women more than men and so was "unfair".

The complainants are the feminist pressure group, the Fawcett Society. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also waded in, interrogating the Treasury on whether the Budget is unfavourable not only to women, but to the disabled, ethnic minorities, et al. "It's not fair!" The self-pitying whine of Kevin the teenager, recently regarded as a well-targeted joke, is now the statutory veto invoked to paralyse government. The instrument of this interdiction is the Equality Act 2010, the demented legislation that is the legacy of Harriet Harridan, left behind by her as a time-bomb to destroy the fiscal independence of any successor government.

It has now emerged that Theresa May, who is not only Home Secretary but also Minister for Women and Equality, wrote to the Chancellor a fortnight before his budget, warning him of this bear-trap. That provokes two questions. Firstly, why does a Tory government have a Minister for Equality? Because it is not a Tory government, is the evident answer. Secondly, why did ministers not move immediately to repeal this infantile but destructive statute? The answer is as before: because this is not a Tory government and because ministers are afraid of provoking a temper tantrum by their Liberal Democrat accomplices if they move against the Act.

So, the latest achievement of the coalition is to perpetuate a Marxist-inspired law which acts as a straitjacket on any government attempting to address the reduction of the deficit. The already virtually insuperable task facing the Chancellor was to confect a Budget that would reduce government expenditure, reassure the markets and gain grudging acceptance from the public. If, in addition to that challenge, he and his successors are obliged to conduct an exercise in balancing every cut so that no element in society suffers a discernibly greater disadvantage from it than any other then it will never again be possible to present a Budget in Britain. The tide of political correctness has now inundated the basic machinery of government, extending even to fiscal policy, and is lapping around the Chancellor's chin.

The claims of the complainants are not even founded in fact. The fiscal witch-hunt was instigated by a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, commissioned by the leftist pressure group End Child Poverty. As a measure of social justice it was useless, since it focused on benefits, to the exclusion of the bigger picture.All such attempts to measure "fairness" are illusory. They are as misleading as the ritual claim that the gap between the rich and poor is widening. One would hope so: any other outcome would signal an absence of growth. The priority is to ensure the conditions of those at the bottom of the heap are improving, instead of indulging in envy of those who are doing disproportionately better but whose wealth creation trickles down to benefit the poorest. Recent governments have preferred to impose a trickle-up effect - to the state - in punitive taxation.

The fundamental criticism should be levelled at the ludicrous cult of "equality" and "fairness". Analysis shows the four nations which made the greatest progress in equality in recent decades were France, Spain, Ireland and Greece, three of which are the basket-case states currently threatening the stability of the European economy. Much more equality and we shall all attain the ultimate levelling down of total bankruptcy, the financial equivalent of the collapse we have already seen the comprehensive, prizes-for-all system inflict on our schools.

Equality is one component of the French Revolutionary triad "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and it is that catastrophic event that imposed this delusion on the liberal mind. The components are incompatible, as Governor Morris, the American envoy to Paris, pointed out at the time to one of the revolutionary leaders: "I am against your democracy, Monsieur de Lafayette, because I am for freedom." As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, author of the deeply insightful Liberty Or Equality, maintained, democracy is basically totalitarian and all democracies eventually degenerate into dictatorships. That is the transition we are beginning to experience.

The spirit of egalitarianism is destructive of humanity. It contradicts objective reality and attempts to square this circle entail futile social engineering, often accompanied by mass murder and brutality. The human spirit is not to be stifled by prescriptive levelling down. What we need is more inequality, not less.