In recent years, many Western countries have introduced legal duties to promote equal outcomes or “equity,” under the auspices of anti-discrimination and human rights law. For example, Canada has an Employment Equity Act, which aims to implement “the principle that employment equity means more than treating persons in the same way but also requires special measures and the accommodation of differences.”
Although these laws are often justified as measures to equalize opportunities, the legal framework implementing equality rights explicitly measures disparities in outcome. After all, achievement gaps are easy to measure, while it would be very difficult to track something so amorphous as “opportunity.” In the Canadian example, the aim is “to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities.” This is tracked by keeping records of employment rates based on race.
Despite these legislative schemes being criticized for their inordinate costs and their role in driving destructive identity politics, it has now been reported that the United Kingdom is planning an “equality law revamp that ‘will impose socialism’ on Britain.”
The duty to promote equal outcomes was first enacted by the Equality Act 2010, which provides that public bodies must take steps to reduce inequalities of outcome.
Public sector duty regarding socio-economic inequalities
(1) An authority to which this section applies must, when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise its functions, have due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage.
This provision has been described as “a relic disinterred from the dying days of the Brown administration” in 2010. It lay dormant during the subsequent years of conservative government, and Keir Starmer’s administration is finally making plans to revive it.
“Following a call for evidence in 2025 on equality law, we are now working towards commencement of the duty,” they said. “This will include drafting statutory guidance to clarify how the duty can be applied effectively.”
The “call for evidence” in 2025 sought an analysis of how this provision had operated in Scotland and Wales, where it was implemented under the authority of the left-leaning devolved governments. The results are as would be expected—a costly failure.
The effect has not been a transformation in social outcomes, but vastly more paperwork and time-consuming meetings. Councils and health boards devote endless dreary hours at the taxpayers’ expense to drafting impact assessments and considerations of inequality in decisions ranging from procurement to town planning. Britain’s productivity growth remains in dead parrot territory, and the last thing we need is a new cottage industry of inequality auditors.
Predictably, that is being taken to mean that public bodies just need more funding to ensure that they can synchronize their efforts to equalize outcomes more effectively. The socialist policies failed because they did not do it hard enough, so they just need to enforce it harder. The government agencies now say they want “greater training, guidance and resources, better access to good practice, knowledge sharing networks with other duty-bearers and collecting reliable data on socio-economic disadvantage.” With more help from the Treasury, they will surely be able to equalize everyone’s socio-economic outcomes.
What do they mean by socio-economic equality? The Office For Equality and Opportunity is primarily concerned with equalizing pay between members of different racial groups, equalizing pay for ethnic minorities, and “establishing an Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit, with the involvement of trade unions.” It will surprise no one to hear that the trade unions want more money and resources to help them force employers to equalize pay.
Public bodies include government agencies, local authorities, publicly-funded institutions such as hospitals and law enforcement, and private sector or civil society agencies that work “in partnership” with these public bodies. Essentially, they will be seeking to enforce equal outcomes in health, education, criminal justice, and employment including equalizing wages. It is undoubtedly a socialist platform that places the duty to improve people’s material conditions on the government, enforced under a duty to equalize material outcomes.
The government department overseeing this equalization is styled as the Office for Equality and Opportunity. Notice that the government did not name their equalizing agency the “Office for Equal Outcomes and Socialism,” as that would make their “war on the middle class” too obvious. Rather, they chose the Orwellian designation “Equality and Opportunity.” Not even the Fabians running the government want to openly describe their policies as socialist—in their campaign manifesto they called it “breaking down barriers to opportunity.” Yet it just so happens, purely coincidentally of course, that their path to promoting opportunity lies through equalizing outcomes—through a socialist agenda.
The arguments against socialism are well known and need not be reiterated here. Nor is it surprising to learn that, despite previous failed attempts to promote socialist policies, the current government expresses full confidence that their policies will work this time.
A deeper question is why governments are able repeatedly to gain support for socialist reforms despite their record of failure. It surely is not because there is any compelling evidence that socialism works. Some of the reasons why people are beguiled by socialism are discussed by Thomas Sowell in his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, where he argues that people will rally behind what they view as a good cause, even when faced with incontrovertible evidence that it has never worked and cannot work. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, in his book Socialism,
Socialism is the watchword and the catchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses approve of it, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter ‘The Epoch of Socialism’.
A more prosaic explanation, which directly explains the revamped socio-economic duty in the UK, is that an equality label goes a long way. For, as long as governments do not explicitly label their policies “socialism,” but instead label them “equality,” they will always be able to get voters to back their schemes. As the Telegraph commentary observes, no politician wants to be the Mr. Scrooge arguing against such a worthy goal as equality.
It’s one of those benign-sounding, suitably vague concepts that cannot be questioned without screeching accusations of wanting to bring back the workhouse and send boys up chimneys.
This is why Murray Rothbard called the notion of equality a siren song—it is a concept that beguiles people, including those who should know better. Rothbard argued that,
The call of “equality” is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human.
It is ironic that the term “equality” brings its favorable connotation to us from a past usage that was radically different. For the concept of “equality” achieved its widespread popularity during the classical liberal movements of the 18th century, when it meant, not uniformity of status or income, but freedom for each and every man, without exception. In short, “equality” in those days meant the liberation and individualist concept of full liberty for all persons.
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