Comment: The extraordinary silliness of Theresa May

Wednesday, 17 November 2010 12:00 AM

Scrapping Harman's equality law was illiberal, illogical and mean. But it proves that the Tory project is profoundly ideological.

By Ian Dunt

I'm rather a fan of Theresa May nowadays. I'd never previously spent much time thinking of her, frankly. I occasionally noticed that she perpetually wore the same space-suit style blue dress. I also noticed that she was remarkably tall. That was about it. Then she became home secretary. A few phone calls to civil liberties people later, I was assured that no-one had any idea what her opinions were on anything that mattered. That was rather good news, as she proceeded to act as a transparent vessel for the Tory/Lib Dem cooperation territory that is civil liberties.

Despite Ed Miliband's victory as leader, Labour has not come close to demonstrating that it understands the scale of the damage its actions in government have done. Locking up immigrant children as if they were cattle, scrapping habeas corpus, banning protests in Westminster - their immorality and irresponsibility was monumental. Miliband is quite mistaken if he believes that the odd U-turn on ID cards does the job. The country deserves a big, genuine, craven apology. And it needs the coalition to finish with the British Bill of Rights before another government is formed, so that we know this can never happen again.

But we shouldn't allow our aforementioned concerns to distract us from giving May's insane, childlike speech the full attention it deserves. Rarely are we treated to such an epic manifesto of sloppy idiocy and demented thinking.

The new home secretary has decided to scrap parts of Harriet Harman's Equality Act which would have made public bodies prove they were trying to combat inequality. This would have forced education authorities to encourage poorer parents to apply for successful schools in their area, for instance, or pushed health bodies to dedicate some of their budget to areas with the worst health records. I've been very critical of Harman in the past, but this was exactly the kind of law we needed in a society where the gap between rich and poor is getting wider. The Tories held back on it. We watched, suspicious. Now, to the surprise of no-one, they have scrapped it.

May doesn't like the word equality. She thinks it has become "dirty" (I'm not making this up). She likes the word "fairness", she said, laughably. I'm sure she does. Fairness has no meaning. It is entirely subjective. Some people think it's fair to shoot black people on the basis of their race. Some people think it's fair to castrate rapists. Some people think it's fair to have an inheritance tax and some people think it isn't. Framing your argument around 'fairness' is one of the most brazen and cheap political tricks in the book. There's no-one on earth who disagrees with fairness, but we all have different ideas of what it is. Equality actually means something, something concrete and beyond argument.

"You can't solve a problem as complex as inequality in one legal clause," May went on. "The idea that they could was symptomatic of Labour's approach to Britain's problems." Yes, very good. But just because something doesn't complete the task by itself doesn't mean it is irrelevant. The home secretary is clearly unaware of the rather useful phrase 'necessary but insufficient'. I can't solve the problem of making a cup of tea by stirring alone, but without it, the project is in serious trouble.

Evidently May believes the policy should not be entertained because it fails to solve the problem in one go. Better to do nothing. Well, not quite nothing. May has lots to say about installing the 'architecture' in which to promote equality, through 'dialogue' and the like. Much hot air. No concrete policies there, let alone laws - like the useful one she was in the process of scrapping.

May is not getting rid of the law because she's genuinely silly. She's pretending to be silly. The law is going because it contradicts the Conservative agenda. That agenda is very simple: markets good, state bad. You can see it in Kenneth Clarke's demolition of legal aid on Monday, where he unilaterally deprived the poor of access to civil justice. You can see it in the consumer rights quangos which have been abolished. You can see it in Michael Gove's relentless, absurdist free schools programme, or the hatred of Ofcom, or the creation of a free market in higher education.

This suspicion of the state provided the co-operative space for the Lib Dems and Tories to work together during the coalition negotiations. By centring their campaigns on freedom from the state (civil liberties for the Lib Dems, free market for the Tories) they could present the public with the kind of unified message which suggested the coalition could endure. But while the state needed to be rapidly pulled back in political terms, the same process in the economic sphere tends to limit freedom, rather than promote it. Sure, some rich people are free to make much more money. But for most people, their vulnerability to market forces without state protection leaves them less free.
To create equality of opportunity we have to focus resources on the vulnerable and the marginalised. Society does not do it on its own. Left to their own devices government, local councils, businesses and public bodies all gravitate towards the rich and the wealthy, whose influence and power means that they make more noise when things don't go to plan.

Harman's work wasn't perfect, but from such an authoritarian and frustrating figure we did actually get some good little laws in the Equality Act. It's entirely unsurprising and depressing that May should have wasted no time in getting rid of them.

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