Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill, published this week and set to come into force in autumn 2010, is absurd, says Edwina Currie in the Daily Mail. The idea is that there will be a single legal duty to eradicate inequalities, from the pay gap between men and women (businesses are to be forced to report on gender pay) to women’s right to join golf clubs and breastfeed in public.
Has Harman not noticed how many small firms, already strangled by red tape, are going bust? These proposals will cost “a mint to fulfil”, pushing more firms under and more people onto the dole. The other fact this bill ignores is that much of the gap between male and female earnings is not caused by discrimination but choice. Many women with young children would rather work part-time. Why should ambitious men, who have been working full-time, be discriminated against?
The bill would be “bad law at the best of times”, says The Daily Telegraph. Given that we are in the grip of the worst recession since the 1930s, it is “indefensible”. It imposes on all public bodies the “wholly unachievable” and “immensely costly” duty of removing inequalities in the provision of state services, and a “battery of regulations” on private firms. In these straitened times, there’s a strong argument for a “moratorium” on non-essential legislation. On that basis, this pointless measure would have been vetoed – “as would the bulk of Labour’s legislative programme”.
Pointless? In Britain, “birth is destiny for almost everyone”, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Any attempt to make it a fairer place should be applauded. A public sector duty to close the gap between the rich and poor is a radical idea; it is only sad that it has not served as Labour’s “guiding light” since 1997.
Addressing class inequality during a recession is “frankly audacious”, says Rahila Gupta, also in The Guardian, but let’s hope it works. New Labour has done nothing to reverse Margaret Thatcher’s “assault on working class rights”. Here, finally, is a bill that “places a legal duty on public bodies to reduce inequality of outcome”. We should all support this “class new act”.