Equality of opportunity, and other bedtime stories

Should we ban bedtime stories? This was the question posed a couple of years ago by a philosopher at the University of Warwick. It seemed to strike most people as a self-evidently absurd suggestion — but as I pointed out, that man actually had a much clearer and more rigorous grasp on the idea of “equality of opportunity” than his critics.

Trying to guarantee equality of opportunity actually requires vastly more interference in private life than equality of outcome

Right-wingers tend to latch on to “equality of opportunity” as a glib alternative to the more classically left-wing equality of outcome. But the two share the same fundamental problem: that if you allow the State’s mission to be reducing inequality above all else, there is no limit to the scope or volume of state action the crusade against inequality can generate. Indeed, trying to guarantee equality of opportunity actually requires vastly more interference in private life than equality of outcome.

This danger is made quite clear in Bridget Phillipson’s latest proposal for universal early-years education, which is to say providing free childcare for people who aren’t in work: 

In a speech in Oxford, Phillipson will argue that there is a compelling social and economic case for a “universal early years” offer that would help to close the attainment gap and prevent “another million children ending up Neet [not in work, education or training]”.

Most of the initial responses to this story have focused on the fiscal absurdity of it. And this is a very fair point: successive governments have already regulated childcare into the luxury-good price bracket, made informal care arrangements illegal, and then spent very large sums of money providing working parents with inadequate levels of childcare. Rachel Reeves is already operating at the very limit of what the public finances allow. 

In such circumstances, expanding the free childcare entitlement to people who don’t work is just childish decadence, the unserious proposal of someone who thinks that nice things must always pay for themselves. European countries which have universal early-years levy much higher taxes on middle-earners; it would be amusing, at least, to see this Government try that.

But Phillipson’s attitude is also profoundly revealing about the real attitude underlying the modern British approach to childcare (which has been, at least to date, very much an area of “uniparty” consensus: the strong view that people should not, if at all possible, raise their own children.

The two parties differ in their reasoning, of course. For the Conservatives, this posture arose from a combination of weird “Tory Stakhanovism” — working parents and an employed childminder are better for GDP than a stay-at-home parent — and the middle-class feminism of career women who think any woman choosing to stay at home is letting the side down and won’t allow her to do so if they can help it. For Labour, it’s simply yet another step on the road to the New Jerusalem of an equal Britain.

And the internal logic stacks up, to an extent. As our Warwick philosopher noted, one of the single biggest factors that determines how a child performs in later life is their home environment. Some parents read to their children, make them do their homework, and provide copious access to extracurricular activities, others don’t (or in the third instance, can’t). Beneath even that, some children grow up in a stable and loving home, and others don’t. 

The problem is that once you get beyond actual neglect and abuse, the very wide spectrum of parenting falls under “family life”, and one can control for it only to the extent that one predates on family life. If you allow people to raise their own children according to their own lights, different households will produce different outcomes. Whatever delta in such outcomes the State is prepared to tolerate is a good proxy for the extent to which the State is prepared to tolerate ‘parenting’. 

In Britain’s present circumstances, the immediate problem with this insane perfectionism is that it makes things very expensive when that is the very last thing we need. A determined government could fix the childcare crisis overnight, without spending money, through such measures as relaxing carer-to-child ratios, legalising informal care arrangements, and abolishing the requirement for childminders to deliver an early-years curriculum. We have a school starting age, after all, and it worked fine for previous generations.

Alternatively, ministers could follow their own logic to its proper conclusion and lower the school starting age to whenever they think the “early years” learning should begin. This would create a new national default and abolish stay-at-home parenting for all but those determined to home-school, but it would at least mean the government was responsible for providing adequate supply.

Our current muddle is, as so often, a result of trying to pursue a policy dishonestly and without facing up to the consequences. Ministers of both parties have for some years believed that it is essential that children are not left to “play with toys” (genuine quotation from a Tory minister I was debating this with), but don’t want to acknowledge their ambition to annex childhood and certainly not the fiscal implications of it.

Therefore they adopt the classic Modern British fudge of creating a regime of entitlements and obligations for other people and then letting the second-order consequences pile up, because nobody wants to be the one who “lowered standards”. ​

You might think that making it very expensive to have children, when your country has a declining birthrate and a welfare ponzi scheme entirely dependent on not letting the population pyramid get too top-heavy, would be an extremely bad idea. But of course, from the perspective of the government, there is no pressing need for children when immigration is available. From the Treasury’s perspective, it will never make sense to waste 18 years and considerable expense gestating a taxpayer when you can just import one.

Of course, those immigrants will be the product of childhoods outside the reach of the British State; most of them will not have received an early-years curriculum of any sort. To anyone taking a joined-up view of raising the next generation, there is no logic to claiming sky-high standards are essential in Britain and then bringing in masses of people raised outside them.

But again, joined-up policy is never the point. The point is simply that a succession of ministers can say that they always worked towards “higher standards”. If the second-order consequences of that decision would make them look bad or foolish, well, there is no need to model them.

All that is pretty bleak. Yet I think the bleakest aspect of Phillipson’s proposal is what it tells us about the scale of the problem that is fixing Britain. Much analysis, including fine, focuses on the problems arising from a) the fact that we’re a poor country and b) that the voters don’t realise it. The implication of that is that prosperity, by way of real economic growth, would make everything better.

And it could, certainly, and perhaps achieving it will require a revolution in attitudes that makes the following concern redundant. But at present, it seems clear that British politics would prove in those circumstances whatever the opposite of self-correcting is: were we a richer country, we would simply have more resources to plough into impossible grail quests such as abolishing inequality — and we would. 

That might simply choke off growth again, but for anyone concerned with individual liberty the alternative, a world in which Labour has always the means to take ever-larger measures to slay ever-smaller dragons, is almost worse. If those in charge of the State recognise no limit save their own means (and barely that), then for anyone who believes in a limited state prosperity becomes a two-edged sword. If the country is going to elect people like Phillipson, I’m certainly glad there are things they can’t afford.