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’. That seems to have been the objective of the former Labour equalities secretary, Harriet Harman, who was responsible for the SED and said it would lead to a ‘new social order’.
The idea is to force public bodies to become engines of equity with council bureaucrats ruthlessly expunging differentials in wealth and income. Opponents of this judicial dimension to social engineering say it will lead to socio-economic ethnic cleansing as council officials withdraw services from middle class (Tory voting) areas and direct them into poorer (Labour voting) areas. It will also lead to increases in council tax.
Presumably those same council officials will address the socio-economic inequity of their own gold-plated defined-benefit pension, which are now all but extinct in the private sector. Strangely, this hasn’t happened in Scotland, where the SNP government introduced the SED in 2018, though of course being the SNP, it called it the ‘Fairer Scotland Duty’ (FSD).
But public-sector pensions aside, has the rest of Scotland become fairer as a result of five years of implementation of the socio-economic duty? No it has not. Poverty in Scotland remains as high as ever, with a quarter of Scottish children still in poverty according to the Scottish government’s own figures. Income inequality has, if anything, actually risen.
Despite Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to reduce the educational attainment gap between richer and poorer areas – surely a central objective of SED – this has also remained stubbornly high as Scotland’s overall educational performance has nose-dived.
Nor has austerity been abolished in Scotland. Far from it. The Scottish government recently slashed the budget for affordable homes. This has been attacked by everyone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations as damaging the economic wellbeing of the less-well-off at a time when rents are rising faster than ever. Indeed, the lack of affordable housing has caused the Scottish government to declare a ‘housing emergency’. Presumably it should now be taking itself to court. Where is Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project when you need it?
As for fairness in health, here the socio-economic duty has been even more blatantly breached. There has been an 80 per cent increase in the number of patients going private since Scotland became ‘fairer’ in 2018, according to the BMA. This means that people with the cash can jump Scotland’s ever-growing NHS waiting list, currently around 800,000. This doesn’t exactly reek of fairness.
It is hard to find a recent policy on the environment that does not potentially contradict the socio-economic duty. The SNP has been extending low emission zones across cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow. This means that people who cannot afford new cars are excluded from driving in Scottish cities. Nor is the Scottish government’s plan to scrap a million gas boilers and replace them with expensive heat pumps obviously FSD complaint.
So why has the Scottish government not been taken to task for comprehensive failure in its duties? Well, partly because no one has thought of testing the FSD in court. But it is also because, in reality, this paper policy largely amounts to a box-ticking exercise by council bureaucrats and civil servants. The FSD has boosted the incomes of lawyers who have been quick to offer their services to councils to help them tick the right boxes at the right time.
The Scottish version of the SED calls on public bodies to ‘actively consider how they can reduce inequalities of outcome caused by socio-economic disadvantage’. That can of course cover a multitude of sins. You could say that the stated objective of all government is to reduce socio-economic disadvantage. I mean, has any government ever said: ‘We support socio-economic disadvantage and will work tirelessly to increase it.’ Of course not.
So, if the Scottish experience is anything to go by, the SED, as is invariably the case with bureaucratic initiatives, will be honoured more in the breach than the observance. Every council in Scotland has had to hire specialists in equality laws to conduct pointless consultations on the socio-economic impact of play parks and cycle lanes. It will be a formidable job creation program for shiny bottoms.
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