Pass this law against prejudice and privilege before election wipeout

By Laurie Penny / @PennyRed

The Equality Bill is one of the bravest things that the Labour Party has done in a good, long while. It doesn’t, of course, go far enough. Its provisions for positive action are watery at best, ensuring only that where two equally able candidates present at interview, an employer can hire the candidate from the underrepresented background: they don’t have to, but they can. There are question marks over the effectiveness of the provisions for new mothers. Labour is already vacillating over some of its plans for equal pay audits. But the legislation is a definite start. The measures the Bill is attempting to put into place for women, people from ethnic minorities, people with physical or mental disabilities, people who are not straight, people who are not rich, people who are elderly and women who are pregnant – in other words, for nearly everyone – express the very best of what neo-Labourite politics can be, and what it so often fails to be.

How unfortunate, then, that the Bill has been met with such weak-willed enthusiasm even from Labour supporters. Commentators are right to point out that the legislation is likely to do no favours for Labour at the next election, but really, if you’ve got a huge great dead horse, the least you can do is put the flogger down and possibly turn the pelt into a nice blanket for someone who needs it (sorry, PETA).

Opposition to the Bill has focused on notions of something that recalcitrants of all stripes like to call ‘political correctness’. MP Philip Davies warned that the Bill ‘is all about the politically correct extremism of the Leader of the House and her trendy, left-wing prejudices.” He later suggested that supporters of the Bill should go and read an odious right-wing hacksite called the ‘Campaign Against Political Correctness‘.

Now, let’s have a good, hard think about what politicians and commentators really mean when they say ‘politically correct’. ‘Politically correct’ has become a shorthand term for any attitude, piece of legislation or mode of behaviour which really frightens those in favour of an unequal status quo. It’s shorthand for the type of equality work which benefits people who aren’t already in positions of privilege. It’s a term invented and introduced by people in power, a term used almost exclusively by white men, a term that euphemises the distaste of the privileged for being reminded of their own privilege, and of its fragility.

‘Politically correct’ is a term that reeks of resentment, and funnily enough, in discussions of the Bill the phrase has often been followed by a suggestions that proposed legislation will ’cause resentment’. Just who resents equality legislation is never made entirely clear, although mutterings are being made about the ‘white working class’ – a group so vastly unaligned, amorphous and disempowered that it’s possible to call them up as exemplary holders of just about any opinion you care to name. In fact, a great many of the working class, both white and from ethnic minorities, stand to gain by the Equality Bill, which also contains provisions to mandate public bodies to provide services more sensitive to the needs of those on low incomes, such as regular general health-checks in areas of high deprivation. On Monday, Tim Boswell, Conservative MP for Daventry, put up the other feeble protest to claims for equality legislation of any kind:

“We have to understand that there is a very fine line to tread between the social progress most of us….would want and the risk of a backlash from grassroots opinion. It is not always racist to protest if people feel that they are being treated unfairly because of a body of law or how it is interpreted; if that happens, we could have social unrest, particularly at a time of economic difficulty.”

If the best attack you can come up with is that ‘some people might not like it,’ I’d like to be the first to respond with a big, fat ‘too freaking bad!’ Few if any people are likely to be treated ‘unfairly’ because of this Bill, which will simplify and streamline equality legislation and improve and modernise our productivity as a nation. Anyone making ominous mutterings about blood in the streets can slink right off: it is not the place of any political party to hold back the pace of social progress because it is frightened of social unrest, particularly when there’s been no hint of any such thing happening. If the people are about to riot, rest assured that you’ll be kept informed.

With scant hope of re-election, the pro-equality wing of the Labour Party must gather enough courage to speak truth to privilege whilst it still has time. There must be no climbdown over equal pay audits; there can be no vacillation over the rightness of equality legislation. Tellingly, during Monday’s second reading it was a Conservative MP, John Bercow, who was the only member of the House with the guts to come out and say what everyone had been thinking:

‘I accept that the Bill is fundamentally a social democratic or New Labour piece of legislation-that is pretty unarguable-but that does not mean that we should not support it when it is fundamentally right. I put it to the hon. Lady that although the Bill can be honourably opposed, some of the people out there in the country who oppose it do so because they are so comfortable with either their prejudices or their privileges that they do not want them to be disturbed.’

If the Equality Bill harms Labour’s already pitiful election chances by disturbing a few more people who are all too comfortable in their prejudices, well – I for one call that a small price to pay.