With Sir Keir Starmer creeping closer to No. 10 every day, attention is rightly being paid to the radicalism of Labour’s agenda. Many have pointed to the awful prospect of its Race Equality Act, which would entail vast social engineering by state bureaucrats in pursuit of racial ‘equity’. Labour backs a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that arguably equates criticism of Islam with racism – amounting to something like a blasphemy law. Meanwhile, its chilling plans for a ‘trans-inclusive’ ban on conversion therapy could criminalise clinicians not taking an ‘affirmative’ approach to patients who present with gender dysphoria. In other words, Labour could make it illegal not to set vulnerable young patients on a path towards experimental drugs and irreversible surgery.
These plans are concerning enough, but there are also elements of Labour’s equalities agenda that have so far been largely overlooked. When the policy programme for its October conference pledged to ‘make equality central to policymaking’, this was no exaggeration. Few have yet realised the scale of the equalities revolution Keir Starmer has in the pipeline.
Most notably, Labour is set to revive the ‘socio-economic duty’ (SED) in section one of the 2010 Equality Act. Dreamt up in the dying days of the Brown government, the SED was scrapped at the start of the coalition in 2010 by the then Home Secretary Theresa May, who described it as among the ‘worst aspects of pointless political correctness and social engineering’. It has since been adopted by the devolved governments in Scotland in 2018, and in Wales in 2021, giving us an idea of what it would look like UK-wide.
Many will think that the British state is already overburdened by equalities bureaucracy with the nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act, but the socio-economic duty (the Fairer Scotland Duty in Scotland) is a whole new ball game. The SED potentially adds several new social categories for the state to take an interest in. In Scotland, this has been interpreted to include: low income, low wealth, material deprivation, area deprivation, socio-economic background, and material deprivation, with ‘communities of place’ and ‘communities of interest’ thrown in as well.
Under the socio-economic duty, any major decision taken by the public sector must ‘actively consider how they could reduce inequalities of outcome in any strategic decision they make’.
The scope is vast. The SED applies to basically every part of the public sector you can think of: budgeting, town planning, city investment plans, procurement, recruitment, housing. Officials are even expected to consider socio-economic disadvantage when taking ‘decisions about the shape, size and location of the [public body’s] estate’. (You have to wonder how that would have affected the ghastly eyesore that is the Scottish parliament in Holyrood.) Seemingly every public servant in Scotland is subject to the SED, whether they are ministers, local authorities, or even food standards boards. This would be the same across the UK if it is brought in nationally.
It’s not as if all this paper-pushing has made Scotland and Wales any better governed or indeed any fairer. The socioeconomic duty hasn’t, for instance, stopped Mark Drakeford imposing punitive green targets on Welsh farmers, threatening thousands of rural jobs. Nor has it deterred the SNP’s regressive minimum-pricing scheme for alcohol, a policy that has had no effect on the heaviest drinkers but which clobbers the poor. Indeed, a 2021 report into the SED rollout in Scotland by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – a Blairite quango which is hardly an enemy of the equalities state – couldn’t point to anything tangible in its favour.
Officials who responded to the ECHR survey agreed that socio-economic inequalities were now being ‘taken into consideration for strategic decision-making’ because of the SED, which was something they ‘largely welcomed’. But despite this, four years into its rollout, they also felt ‘that the extent to which the SED would result in changes to people’s lives remained to be seen’. In other words, the initiative did nothing to improve people’s lives but did give bureaucrats more boxes to tick.
Even avid proponents admit that it will ‘not in itself lead to better policy-making’. For the SED to really come into its own, says charity Poverty2Solutions, officials must be obliged to jump through a further hoop: developing policies ‘in partnership with people who have lived experience of socio-economic disadvantage’.
It isn’t only through the SED that Labour will put Britain’s equalities bureaucracy into overdrive. Some of its proposals are just bizarre. Apparently, Labour’s answer to Britain’s productivity problems is to compel companies with more than 250 employees to produce ‘menopause action plans’ and to make sure that ‘health and safety reflects the diversity of the workforce’. The party’s plan to ensure that ‘non-binary and gender diverse people’ are ‘treated with respect and dignity in society’ offers no specifics, but it isn’t hard to imagine hectoring information campaigns about the importance of ‘they / them’ pronouns. Or it becoming a hate crime to mock someone who identifies as a cat. An international LGBT+ envoy will spread the gospel worldwide.
Labour will also widen the scope for political parties to pursue affirmative action. Rather ironically, this comes after Labour was forced in 2022 to end 30 years of all-women shortlists for the coming election – much to the chagrin of party activists – after realising that with more than half of Labour MPs now women, the policy would contravene its own Equality Act.
Among these head-scratching trivialities sit policies that betray a fervent left-wing radicalism. Alongside its Race Equality Act, the party wants a gender pay gap review which will ‘eliminate inequalities in earnings’ between men and women. Needless to say, this outcome will never be achieved in a free society given the constraints of human biology – though doubtless this will not stop a Labour government from trying. No less removed from reality is its adoption of the ‘social model’ of disability. This element of ‘disability theory’ holds that there is no such thing as disability per se, but rather that it is socially constructed: someone is only ‘disabled’ due to economic, social, cultural, physical and attitudinal barriers, which must be removed. This deeply radical idea implies far more than making reasonable adjustments for disabled people. It means that if, say, a blind person has a more difficult time in the world, this is not only the fault of society but also the job of the state to correct.
The sheer scope of Labour’s equalities agenda disproves the common canard that Starmer is simply a safe pair of hands technocrat. If a Labour government is returned this year with a thumping majority, it will be able to reorient every organ of the British state towards flattening out inequalities. This is a recipe for a hugely expanded state – and a much less free society.
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