The (in)justice of the Equality Act

The Equality Act is generally understood as the law which protects us from discrimination on grounds of race, sex and religion. This is, in general, a grave misunderstanding. A new report from the Prosperity Institute, “Some More Equal Than Others”, shows that the Act has been designed to transform British society by the means of what is now known as “lawfare”. In order to do this, it reconstitutes the general public into a list of particular groups and their associated identities.

This segmentation of the citizenry has come about not as a result of popular pressure or grassroots campaigning, but under the influence of the Equal Rights Trust — a clique of academics and international human rights lawyers seeking to supplant formal equality with their idea of “transformative equality”. By such means, the 60-year-old tradition of anti-discrimination legislation in Britain has been transformed into a legal minefield which undermines the basis for informal social bonds as people come to face each other with suspicion rather than trust.

Legislation and Democracy

Earlier anti-discrimination law was enacted in a context of wider political engagement and consensus, as suggested by levels of voter turnout. In 1964, the year before the first Race Relations Act was introduced, the turnout at the general election was around 75 per cent. By 2001 the turnout had dropped to 60 per cent, where it remained in the 2024 general election. Of course, voting is only one proxy for the democratic health of a nation. But as long ago as 2009, a British Social Attitudes paper confirmed what was already a widespread feeling of distrust and disengagement: 40 per cent of the public surveyed reported that they never trust the government. Since then, the level of trust between Britain’s politicians and the people has only moved in one predictable general direction. 

During the postwar period of Commonwealth immigration, voter turnout was regularly in the high seventies, peaking at 83 per cent in 1951. Voters tended to feel that the politicians they had elected were accountable to them. Politicians, meanwhile, benefited from the general sense of purpose with which the public was imbued. In this, the consensus society, there was general acceptance of a moderate amount of immigrant labour. In this context, outbreaks of violence against ethnic minorities, such as the Notting Hill riots, were generally regarded as aberrations, and laws were introduced to prevent what were assumed to be aberrant instances of unequal treatment in housing and employment. Hence the Race Relations Act 1965.

From a national to a multicultural state

During the 1960s, while immigration numbers remained relatively low and largely from Britain’s former colonies, social solidarity and trust remained firm. The extra-governmental bodies established to oversee the implementation of the Race Relations Acts (the second Act was passed in 1968), such as the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission, were generally accepted as operating within a society with relatively strong political engagement and a cultural consensus.

In 1997, the Labour government under Tony Blair was elected on a 71.4 per cent turnout — a late 20th century high which has not been repeated since. New Labour entered government having terminated its old relationship with the working class, a rupture evident in the party’s controversial re-branding. The previous corporatist relationships between unions, business and government had already been destroyed under successive Conservative governments. Thus, New Labour came into office with power over the country but no obvious source of authority among its people. While Blair and his lieutenants made strenuous efforts to re-connect Westminster with a wider body politic, the new forms of mediation all turned out to be as short-lived as “Creative Britain”.

Economically, Britain became increasingly reliant on financial services and immigrant labour entering the (non-financial) services sector. When the former was hit by the credit crunch and subsequent recession, one consequence was a greater anxiety about immigration which had been increasing since 2004 and the expansion of the EU. Politically, there was nothing available that seemed capable of bringing coherence to British society.

Faced with the dissipation of their authority ,and the growing fragmentation of society, Britain’s politicians, Labour and Tory alike, opted to make a virtue out of this regressive spiral. Westminster began to outsource its moral, and political, authority to a range of different social groups which identified themselves as such, and on whose behalf the state would from now on act as Guardian-in-Chief. This is how multiculturalism emerged as the elite-sponsored ideology necessitated by the failings of national government.

Multiculturalism — as distinct from people from many cultural backgrounds getting along with each other — introduced the idea that equality means more than formal political rights, or even economic parity. Equality now entailed cultural recognition for minorities, whose culture was to be seen as de facto vulnerable to the norms of the majority culture. This majority culture was thereby held to be toxic, if not predatory.

Multiculturalism may enshrine a highly ossified view of culture, but politically, it affords the government and the state a new role: that of managing different groups rather than leading with a national project to which groups may or may not assent. Here, a ruling class which cannot face another round of rejection has engineered the divisive conditions which all but prevent the possibility of social solidarity.

The Equality Act is the coup de grace of multiculturalism. Its function has little to do with understanding or prohibiting discrimination. Indeed, as the Prosperity Institute report argues, it justifies discrimination. Its primary function is to ratify multicultural politics in law. Furthermore, the Equality Act dictates that all public institutions are obliged to comply with its segregationist requirements.  

The ethos underpinning the Equality Act is at odds with Britain’s traditional, deeply held beliefs about innate equality, freedom and the law.  Under its terms we no longer stand as individual citizens who are equal to each other — morally under God’s law and politically under common law. Instead we become bearers of group-assigned protected characteristics which are the central sources of authority under this new legal regime.

Under the Equality Act the cultural characteristics of various groups are elevated into the protected characteristics which are the means by which the citizen-subject enjoys any legal status at all. The irrational consequences of this logic can be seen in the case of Essop v the Home Office. Part of the definition of indirect discrimination is that a provision, criterion or practice (PCP) introduced by the employer “has an effect that particularly disadvantages people with a protected characteristic”. This may sound reasonable, but, in practice, from the words of the Supreme Court in this case, it was irrelevant that some people with the PCs of age and race were unaffected by the PCP. What mattered was that a 2010 report had “established that black and minority ethnic candidates, and older candidates, had lower pass rates [in a particular test] than white and younger candidates.” The Essop case established that no reason is required from the claimant regarding why a particular PCP put them at a disadvantage: the disadvantage alone is sufficient; and the disadvantage need have nothing to do with actual employees or concrete events, but can be established by statistical data alone. 

The inadequacy of the white anti-racism narrative

While it is true that the majority of people who stand to lose out through the logic and operations of the Equality Act are white, to see the Act as the source of anti-white discrimination ignores these deeper political, legal and cultural developments. Putting any group into a box is a situation management technique that undermines the basis for a larger solidarity, without which our politics will remain inadequate to the problems we face. Responses based on claims of “anti-white racism” are consistent with the dangerously flawed logic of multiculturalism. They encourage seeing the problem as being immigrants themselves, or the intrinsic incompatibility of white and black people. Such conclusions make sense at a superficial level, and, to an extent, are understandable in the context of decades-long political and cultural disenfranchisement, but they cannot take us forward.  

Across parties, our political leadership, disconnected from their public, and unable to imagine and present a compelling statement of nation and attendant practical policies, is let off the hook. The fundamental principle of inequality, and subsequent unequal treatment of some, has been placed at the heart of the Equality Act. This is its core, not “anti-white discrimination”.