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After a decade of useless conservative speeches on “equality,” it is rare to find one worth listening to. In her role as Minister for Equality, Liz Truss announced yesterday that it is time for a counterrevolution: stop seeing everything through the prism of race, sexuality or gender and start seeing inequality in all its dimensions. So, also looking north versus south, rich versus poor, city versus country. This is important because if conservatives get it right, it could join a new modernization agenda to guide them through the remnants of Covid and the lockdown.
The plan has been in the works for a few months and begins with an analysis of where the Conservatives have gone wrong. David Cameron had nothing to say about equality – worse, he told his party not to oppose Harriet Harman’s Equality Act and adopted his wholesale agenda. Theresa May was no better, exaggerating stop-and-search police abuses and even invited David Lammy, one of the Labor Party’s most energetic culture warriors, to lead a review of racial injustice in court. He found no evidence of discrimination, but he still pretended otherwise.
The Tory way, it seemed, was to try to beat Labor at its own game. Cameron once announced that it was a scandal how young black men in Britain are more likely to be in prison than in a good university. The problem was, his statistic was nonsense: Whites are the demographic least likely to go to college. All of this puzzled his new MPs, many of whom were inducted into Cameron’s A-list, but were deeply uncomfortable with what they viewed as patronizing and symbolic language. “Our entire equality agenda was driven by a sense of guilt from the old conservatives,” a Conservative MP tells me. “They would tell non-white MPs what to say, rather than asking for their opinion. The conversation is finally changing. “
It began to change when Boris Johnson was elected and brought in Munira Mirza as his chief of policy. His views on all this were outlined in a Viewer cover story attacking May’s equality agenda. It is possible to recognize that racism still exists, he said, “without turning its waning influence into the pretext of a false moral crusade.” She defended a rival approach, which now seems quite advanced. Ms. Truss’s speech is the latest in a carefully planned conservative counterattack.
Kemi Badenoch, Truss’s deputy on the equality report, went viral on YouTube after a speech declaring that “critical race theory” was the new conservative enemy. This marked, in effect, the Tories joining a battle from which they had been fleeing for 10 years. He also denounced the rise of “unconscious bias training,” in which employees are encouraged to think of ways they could be intolerant without knowing it. Julia López, a minister in the Cabinet Office, announced this week that such “training” would end in the civil service. Not only is it useless, he said, but it reinforces harmful stereotypes.
This is the new conservative theme. Rejecting the old agenda of equality as the disease for which it claims to be the cure, promoting stereotypes, discrimination and division. It also means talking more affectionately about Britain. Rishi Sunak recently told me that he is in politics to pay back the country that gave his family every opportunity in life; a country, he says, that does not think of having a Hindu chancellor placing Diwali lights on the steps of Downing Street. From any source, it’s not hard to see Britain as one of the best places in the world to live, he argues, if you look at the facts.
In his speech, Truss said his new equality agenda would involve “facts, not fiction,” which likely means publishing studies to open a new conversation about race and culture. Why do people of Indian, Chinese and African origin tend to do better than whites in school and pay, while Bangladeshis and Caribbean people tend to do worse? The simplistic “BAME vs white” narrative has never stood up to scrutiny in Britain, but conservatives have always avoided applying that scrutiny. No more. Truss says he is creating a new counting unit, based in the north of England.
Which, of course, is your end point. Seeing equality the old-fashioned way, denouncing discrimination where it really exists, but broadening the debate to encompass the North-South divide, the white working class, and other groups left behind. This is important because Covid (and the lockdown) will simply have opened up the inequalities that had been closing for a decade. Studies already show that disadvantaged pupils in England are now 18 months behind their peers when they finish their GCSEs. Nearly a third of students applying to college say they had no contact with their school during the closure. Will they ever be given support to regain this lost ground?
The next wave of layoffs, which is already greater than in the last accident, will affect men more than women and the young more than the old. Then comes the likely increase in family breakdown (Citizens Advice has reported an increase in divorce inquiries) and the health effects of isolation, especially in the elderly. These are all issues that haven’t been properly measured, but if Ms. Truss’s new equality scrutiny unit can do the job, at least the ministers will know where the damage needs to be fixed. It would rejuvenate the idea of an equality agenda, giving it an urgent and deeply practical relevance.
Conservatives tend to hate speaking in that language. His “Equality Act” was the Academies Act, which did so much to liberalize schools and close achievement gaps. Welfare reform sparked a job boom that raised incomes for those at the bottom faster than anyone else over the past decade. But as far as I know, not a single Conservative minister has pointed this out. The party has always seemed blind – or, at worst, disinterested – in its own social justice achievements. Too many conservatives still see “progressive conservatism” as a contradiction in terms.
Truss called his speech the new “fight for justice,” something that will be needed more than ever after the recent devastation. The economy may recover quickly, but school dropouts will need the kind of help that won’t show up in GDP figures. Altogether, it’s the perfect time for conservatives to reclaim and revive the equality agenda – there’s too much work to do.
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