Surely the prize for the daftest excuse for a government policy has to be the idea that equality laws are a ‘burden’ and the best way of working towards equality is to, err, abolish equality laws.
It’s like tackling smoking by scrapping the ban on lighting up in public places or promoting sensible drinking by wiping the burden of tax off alcohol.
The government is about to receive a report from a taskforce they set up to review an equality law called the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) which is believed to recommend it is scrapped.
As the power is only three years old, having only been introduced in 2010, David Cameron’s urge to kill it puts him right up there with King Herod.
The whole notion of equality being a burden is a peculiar strain of madness infecting Tories and is premised on a tabloid myth that doing something, anything, about equality involves having a three foot high pile of forms towering over an officials’ desk.
The government’s Red Tape Challenge is based on the idea that promoting or monitoring equalities is a burden that holds organisations back from getting on with their core business.
The trouble is if their core business involves perpetuating unfair outcomes – from black staff concentrated at lower grades, disproportionality in disciplinary procedures and redundancies and unequal service delivery – then certainly scrapping equalities laws ensures that nothing whatsoever will hold them back.
Central to the myth of the bureaucracy burden of doing equality is another, wider, myth: Political Correctness Gone Mad. PCGM is the lovechild of Richard Littlejohn and Peter Hitchens. And what an ugly, objectionable little runt it is.
PCGM is most often heard in pubs and like the Gremlins become louder and more aggressive when beer is split on it. Quite a contrast to the cute and lovable PSED, which is more like Mogwai.
Tabloid editors, privately educated toffs in the main, believe bar-room wisdom is what endears their miserable rag to the plebs and thus the editors give PCGM Gremlins a free pass to churn out copy about barmy council schemes catering for some ‘minority’ or other.
The predecessor to PCGM was Loony Labour, and Right-wing obsession about LL drove the government of Margaret Thatcher to do and say just about everything that has given their party such a bad odour amongst BAME communities, gay and lesbians and single mothers.
Frothing about LL reached its’ crescendo when Thatcher’s ministers attacked the Gingerbread group at their party conference. How the delegates roared with laughter. Gingerbread, how loony does that sound? Only it turned out to be a highly respected organisation for single mothers.
LL was killed off by Tony Blair, the first of many kills. But as Thatcher’s children entered power in 2010 it was inevitable that PCGM would make a comeback along with other favorite hits from the 80’s like a recession, homelessness, unemployment and the Pet Shop Boys.
The Red Tape Challenge seems harmless enough on the face of it but slashing equalities laws on the pretext that they are burdensome bureaucracy is, as Neil Tennant might put it, a sin.
This is the strange logic that underpinned a government move earlier this year to scrap a ‘mission statement’ pledging to work towards the elimination of discrimination.
Ministers also claimed that axing Section 3 of the Equality Act 2010 was a “tidying up exercise”, a line that I’m surprised has not yet been borrowed by Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
The Red Tape Challenge is a byword for a dogma-driven partisan assault on equalities legislation, presumably on grounds it was introduced by another party, LL and their evil twin PCGM.
It is just three months since the Government were forced into a u-turn over plans to scrap Section 3 of the Equality Act 2010 after the Lords threw it out twice.
Essentially S.3, known as the ‘general duty’, is a mission statement to work towards the elimination of discrimination. It is a ‘duty’ that does not require a single piece of paper or solitary tick-box but instead is a message to public sector leaders to treat equality as a political priority.
The attempt to axe S.3 and the review of PSED is all about stripping away Britain’s equalities framework. A framework that allows British politicians can say we have better equalities laws than most of the rest of the world.
But who cares about equalities laws when Britain has pieces of rock scattered around the globe to defend. We’re far too busy ruling the waves to be bothered with all this namby-pamby, yellow-bellied, pinko equalities fandango.
Tory dislike of our equalities laws is similar to their pathological hatred of the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Human Rights. And they will defend to the death the sovereign right of the British Isles to be as unequal and inhumane as we so desire.
Just three short months after ministers were forced into a u-turn over S.3 they will shortly receive a taskforce reviewing the PSED which is due to recommend, at the very least, the watering down of PSED.
Hardly a surprise as the taskforce is Tory-dominated and chaired by a former Tory MP. Yet from what I hear the taskforce has been starkly split on the issue with some members wanting to protect the duty.
At a time when the more anally-retentive Tories are talking about bringing back Section 28, a ban on ‘promoting’ homosexuality in schools, it is no surprise they would like to see the end of a power that could potentially play an instrumental part in challenging such a backward move.
Today Robin Lynn writes in Lib Dem Voice about the threat to PSED. If ministers seek to water down or abolish PSED it would be yet another attempt to dismantle a equalities framework that was constructed piece-by-piece over four decades.
I don’t know why Cameron doesn’t go the whole hog and scrap the Minimum Wage, reintroduce the Poll Tax and have an affair with Edwina Currie. I imagine she’s still up for it.
One reason for holding onto equalities laws is that they have their roots in the struggles fought and won by generations past. Both Section 3 (the ‘general duty’) and PSED have their roots in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 that was the result of the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence.
How ironic that this year, the 20th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s death, a report will recommend the dismantling of a key plank of Stephen’s legacy.
Theresa May says that she does not intend to abolish the whole Equality Act, rather the government is engaged in hacking lumps out of it.
It has echoes of the decision of government not to abolish the Commission for Equality and Human Rights but instead metaphorically move it from a flat to a bedsit and move it from work to benefits.
By cutting funding by over 70% and disabling its’ powers the CEHR is being almost abolished by stealth, hollowed-out, neutered and chained down. The lights are on but there’s virtually no-one at home to uphold and defend equalities laws, which is what the organisation is there to do.
PSED is a tool with great potential to advance equalities across the board, the only problem with it is that it has not been promoted and rolled-out. Far from being a red-tape burden, most of Britain’s 40,000 public authorities are not using it at all.
The obvious thing to do with PSED is to use it, monitor whether it is effective or to what extent it is a ‘burden’ and amend its’ use accordingly. But the fact is that we have not nearly reached a position to brand it a burden.
The very idea underpinning the Equality Act 2010 was to simplify previous equalities legislation. The Government only started reviewing PSED after the Education Secretary was found to have failed to consider the duty in scrapping the Building schools for the Future programme.
In other words, an example of how PSED has drawn to ministers’ attention why they must consider the equalities impact of their decisions has become the potential death-knell of this duty. This is not so much about red tape as red faces.
Let’s stop this crazy time-machine back to the 80s. Save the PSED, scrap PCGM!
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
