The road to hell, as we all know, is paved with good intentions. It is also lined with reams of paper policies which inhibit action, increase bureaucracy and achieve contradictory results. The ones who generally benefit are the high priests of the bureaucratic order: lawyers, consultants, academics and NGOs. So no prizes for guessing who will mainly benefit from Labour’s promise to achieve the dream of every far-left activist since Proudhon: make economic inequality illegal.
The Labour manifesto commits Keir Starmer to implement the ‘socio-economic duty’ (SED) of the 2010 Equality Act, which potentially criminalises ‘inequalities that result from differences in occupation, education, place of residence or social class’. This extraordinary law was shelved by the Tory-Liberal Democrat government after 2010 in the grounds that socialism should not be made legally enforceable. Now, like the Terminator, the SED is back.
Why has the Scottish government not been taken to task?
The New Statesman’s George Eaton says the socio-economic duty will create a ‘legal obstacle to austerity’.
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