There’s always something that seems clinically compelling about a claim that we need yet more equality laws. Mary Prior KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association and a proud working-class Potteries girl, has demanded that regional accents and social deprivation should be legally protected characteristics. At first sight it’s difficult to argue with the icy logic. If it’s unfair to do someone down because they’re female, or Catholic, or black, it can’t be all right for a lah-di-dah appointments committee in SW1 to prefer Serena to Sharon, or Simon from Surbiton over Steve from Sunderland. Or can it?
Some will gravitate to certain jobs, some to others. So what?
It’s actually much less obvious than it seems that discrimination must be banned if it can’t be rigidly justified in the kind of clinical argument that used to be held in university tutors’ rooms. Put bluntly, once we start looking at matters from the point of view of the man on the Clapham overground, or the woman standing at the SW1 water-cooler, it becomes clearer and clearer that prejudices have their place and that letting them operate might even have its upsides.
On a practical level, this seems obvious. For one thing, always remember that equality has to cut both ways. Patrician employers showing partiality for well-spoken southerners over down to earth but grating Liverpudlians are easy to attack. But what about the genial Yorkshireman in London telling an applicant from Harrogate that it’s good to hear a Yorkshire accent down south? Do we really want to ban all such references on the basis that that might open the way to the company being sued by a south Londoner who also applied for the same job?
There’s a related point, too. Offices work better if there is a wide-ranging and fairly uninhibited conversational buzz around the coffee machine. The trouble is that every extension of the list of protected characteristics risks undermining this. Already, conversation about such matters as race or religion have to be carefully stilted, and that’s before you start with the legal minefield represented by acts alleged to amount to sexual harassment. Adding social status and regional accents to the already-long list of legally protected characteristics is likely to do little more than make office conversation even more awkward and encourage the promotion of the grievances of the over-sensitive.
We must also not forget that extensions of discrimination law can be costly. Equality law is a major contributor to ballooning HR bureaucracies, existing not so much to promote a business as to create paper-trails with a view to preventing it getting sued. HR already consumes too much of Britons’ efforts: we do not want to have it consume more.
The more extensions we add to the maze of well-intentioned equality law, the more we will incentivise appointments that are safe rather than inspired. Suppose an experienced committee has a strong instinct that Simon would be more useful around the office than Steve from Sunderland, but is told by HR that it will be difficult to persuade Steve that his Geordie accent was not an issue. Do we want to incentivise the appointment of the duller but safer applicant?
Of course, you could say – and perhaps Mary Prior might – that economic practicalities should not deflect us from doing what is morally required. But even the moral case itself is by no means as clear-cut as it looks.
Unless you take the dour hard-line view that no employer should ever be allowed to take into account matters not strictly relevant to an employee’s ability to do the job – a sort of universal prohibition on discrimination on any ground whatever – it sounds all very well to insist that someone with, say, a Glasgow accent should have any kind of moral claim to be allowed to work in a patrician London office on an equal basis, with someone equipped with what used to be referred to as cut-glass BBC. But this prompts a simple question: why?
The answer is, to say the least, far from clear. Some might say that it is self-evident that institutions should reflect the societies they serve, and thus somehow include a proportionate number of working-class people, northerners, or whatever. But is it so obvious at all? One would have thought that the object of, say, a profession or trade was to provide a service, rather than to act as some sort of proportional simulacrum of society as a whole: if society being as messy and organic as it normally is, some will gravitate to certain jobs, some to others. So what?
The English legal profession has always been a little too dedicated to dry logic for most people’s taste. It’s not surprising that this oh-so-worthy idea for yet more equality-based restrictions on what we are allowed to do and say appeals to it. But, for the rest of us, who are happy to let society run organically rather than on the basis of abstract ideas, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see why we should be happy with the status quo.
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