Gerald Warner: Scourge of equality will throw Britain off the podium

Only genuine achievement counts: anyone caught cheating is disqualified. Below the champions the runners-up are graded in a strict hierarchy. It is real and it is esteemed because it is an authentic demonstration – apotheosis, even – of inequality.

Those commentators who have portrayed the events in the Olympic stadium as a two-week escapist distraction from the realities of the world outside have inverted the facts. The striving in the stadium is real; the artificial construct outside, a state-dominated society enslaved to the myth of “equality”, is a phantasm. So pervasive is that pernicious myth, it was lurking even on the periphery of the celebration of inequality that was the Olympics. The volunteers who came from across Britain to give their services were subjected to “equality” training. Their duties were to escort athletes who, within the hour, would be straining every sinew to beat by a nanosecond their closest rivals, in a merciless assertion of physical and psychological ascendancy – and they were first brainwashed in the dogma of equality.

Nothing could more graphically illustrate the insanity of the so-called equality agenda that is paralysing this country. To normal people the sporting triumphs of British athletes in the Olympic stadium were gratifying; to the abnormal people who rule us such elitism was disturbing. The politicians cannot say so, since their preoccupation is somehow to steal a modicum of credit from sportsmen to enhance their own sleazy, hypocritical, unwholesome ambitions. So the default position is to lament the fact that so many of Britain’s sporting achievers were privately educated. Whose fault is that? State schools have for decades discouraged or abolished competitive sports, as governments have sold off school sports grounds. If the playing fields of Eton are now the necessary recruiting ground for Olympic athletes, the blame lies with the Frankfurt Marxists who have banished sporting competitiveness from state education system.

Every year exams become more infantile, the pass rate soars to the proportions of a Ceausescu election victory in Communist Romania and despairing employers cannot find literate or numerate school-leavers – or even graduates. The Russell Group universities are now threatened with financial penalties if they do not admit more undergraduates from “poor backgrounds” – weasel terminology for inferior qualifications. A student from a “poor” background with three Bs at A-level is to be preferred to a more socially advantaged applicant with three As. Having attended a blackboard-jungle comprehensive with a dismal academic record is a recommendation for university admission. Rather than destroy the ideological purity of sink comprehensives by reforming them, the plan is to create sink universities for which they can serve as feeders. The consequences for Britain’s competitiveness and prosperity will be dramatic.

Egalitarianism, rooted in the delusions of the pseudo-Enlightenment and first given bloody expression in the French Revolution, is the deadly enemy of civilisation and freedom. The Austrian political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn analysed the phenomenon 60 years ago in his book Liberty Or Equality. He maintained that all democracies eventually produce tyranny – a transition we are experiencing today in Europe and North America – because they are rooted in manipulation of popular sentiment, the seedbed of totalitarianism.

The cult of equality is a mental illness, derived from the psychosis that is liberalism, reaching pandemic proportions in western society. Every corporation has an “equality” division; every area of life, now including marriage, is to be engineered in the interests of equality. When a Conservative-led government has an equalities minister, who can seriously claim we live in a post-Marxist era? Ever since the charlatan Rousseau penned his Big Lie – “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – narcissistic egalitarianism has caused the violent deaths of millions. The same hypocrite and founder of sentimental “child-centred” education abandoned his own children; but his deluded theories rule British classrooms today.

The one class exempted from the constraints of equality is the plutocracy: nobody tugs the forelock to billionaires with more servility than the apostles of enforced equality. Banks that are pillaging the world proudly flaunt equality and diversity codes. Human beings are not equal physically, intellectually, morally or in any other respect; on the contrary, they exhibit as many distinctions as there are individuals on the planet. To pretend otherwise is pushing water uphill. Do not be surprised, though, if the British team at the next Olympics is based on quotas, with inclusive representation of electronically tagged offenders and the clinically obese.