Levelling up

By Laurence Turner

Writing yesterday for the Guardian, Julian Glover adopted the tone of a patient monk dissuading an unusually enthusiastic initiate from the follies of excited youth. The real debate, he explained slowly, pronouncing every syllable carefully, was about fairness, not equality. After musing gently on the vagaries of the former term, he quietly confined the latter to the history books. The left, he informed us – I imagine with a wistful half-sigh – has ‘to understand the impossibility and undesirability of equality.’ And that was that. The homily finished, Brother Glover exited – perhaps to dispute on the finer points of transubstantiation, or to illuminate a particularly challenging manuscript.

The only problem with his argument is that it is completely wrong.

Glover does not define ‘equality,’ but he seems to be applying the term in a literal material sense. Such usage has never been at the heart of left wing thinking. Philip Blond and John Milbank made a similar error writing in the same paper, when they contended that ‘Old Labour believed in equality of outcome.‘ Yet as Ben Jackson demonstrates in his important book Equality and the British Left, the overwhelming majority of left wing thinkers have always accepted the necessity of some degree of material inequality. George Bernard Shaw was the last notable figure to advance a contrary position, and even then the old Fabian was probably playing devil’s advocate. Even Lenin was not a strict egalitarian.

That is not to say that the word equality is without meaning. If anything, it has acquired further layers of meaning in recent years. The last Labour government recognised, more than any other before it, the plural nature of equality. When the record is written, Labour’s victories against inequalities of race, gender, disability and sexuality will surely rank amongst its proudest achievements.

Glover is at least correct to say that New Labour rarely talked about equality during its first years in office, and this silence has allowed right wing commentators to reduce the idea to a mere caricature. This is a pity. The conviction that liberty is degraded by needless inequality unites left-liberals separated by party divides, and could form the basis for future co-operation with the Liberal Democrats. As recent books such as The Spirit Level and the Fabian Society’s The Solidarity Society demonstrate, there is a debate to be had on the significance of equality for the contemporary left. Equality can be an important part of our future, not just our past.

Of course ‘fairness’ is a malleable and at times nebulous concept, but it is also basic code for people’s sense of right and wrong. The cuts will bring misery to the bottom and the middle of our society, whilst leaving the upper crust relatively unscathed. It looks as though the villains of the piece, the bankers, will even emerge with their position enhanced. As the inherent unfairness of the government’s programme becomes apparent, we may well see an alliance between the dispossessed bottom and the squeezed middle against the profligate few. A revitalised Labour Party, committed to greater equality and social justice, should be leading the way.

If handled properly, a commitment to greater equality in society could help define a genuinely radical Labour alternative. But no doubt the Julian Glovers of this world will disagree, as they repeat familiar mnemonic certainties behind the insulating walls of their modest monastic cells.