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This bold equality push is just what we needed. In 1997

This article is more than 14 years old
Polly Toynbee
Harriet Harman's bill is a frank recognition of the role of class in Britain. A decade earlier, it might have had a real impact

Socialism in one clause! It was hyperbole - but that memorable phrase will stick to Harriet Harman's hard-won equality bill nonetheless. A new duty will oblige the entire public realm to focus on reducing class inequality. How can you challenge the unfair treatment of women, minorities, the disabled and the old while ignoring the one great inequality that trumps all these several times over? What family you are born into predicts your life chances even more certainly than all these and more surely than it did 30 years ago.

No act of parliament can with a click of the fingers fix deep-dyed cultural prejudice and entrenched social disadvantage. But Barbara Castle's Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts did transform the cultural landscape. So did race, disability and anti-homophobic legislation. It became socially unacceptable to abuse or cheat people for their physical differences. The phrase "political correctness" was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic or queer, all those who still want to pick on anyone not like them, playground bullies who never grew up. The politically correct society is the civilised society, however much some may squirm at the more inelegant official circumlocutions designed to avoid offence. Inelegance is better than bile.

It is doubtful, however, that this bill will lead to the word "chav" disappearing from common usage. The royal princes actually attended a "chav" fancy dress party, dressed up as their vulgar subjects. Those who want no social change draw great comfort from this abuse: if one useful word can condemn the lower classes as stupid, lazy, fat and low in both taste and morals, then all's right with the world as it is. Despising the lower orders is wonderfully life-affirming for those who acquired their position through no particular merit. Most born middle class can never know what part merit played in their success.

This bill opens up a more frank recognition of what a class-stratified nation this is. Requiring public authorities to examine their spending and shift it towards those in most need asks new questions about who gets what and why. Denial of the facts on class destiny runs deep. It's uncomfortable for people at both ends of the spectrum to acknowledge that birth and fate usually outweigh talent and determination.

Whatever the statistics show, people prefer to believe that everyone has a chance. Rags to riches stories are eagerly used to prove it - even if, by definition, these are only extraordinary exceptions that prove the rule. Anyone can indeed make it up the social ladder, and some do, but what matters is the odds - and they have got worse: children entering secondary school in the 1960s were more upwardly mobile than those in the 1980s. (And no, it had nothing to do with grammar schools, which were overwhelmingly filled with children already middle class.) But people prefer to point to anecdote - Alan Sugar, John Prescott - than look at the figures and the odds.

All parties think they believe in equal opportunity for every child - but acting on that belief is extraordinarily difficult. It means challenging middle-class interests - and nowhere more than in schools policy. Labour tried hard to improve schools for poor children, with some considerable success. But never if it meant angering middle-class parents. So under Labour the number of places in faith and grammar schools has been allowed to grow, places pre-empted mainly by the better off.

Interestingly, both the Conservatives and Lib Dems would give a higher per capita "pupil premium" to the one in five children on free school meals, tilting funding in exactly the way the equality bill proposes. But no party has come up with radical ideas for breaking the class divide concerning who goes to which school. Conservative Brighton was a pioneer in holding a lottery in places for over-subscribed schools - which worked well. This bill should encourage all local authorities to do likewise.

The CBI and the Institute of Directors protest at one key provision in the bill that obliges companies with over 250 employees to state in their annual report the average pay of their female and male staff. They object that it is "misleading" if all it happens to show is that the women are at the bottom of the scale and all the men at the top: it's not like for like, they say. And so they miss the point completely, which is to urge them to ask why all the women are at the bottom.

This begins to push open the door to a much bigger question: who earns what, why, and why don't we all know? Ignorance about pay scales is far greater now than it was in the days when strong trade unions made earnings a top political issue, so people knew pretty much what others earned. Society was far more equal as a result. Now people are misled, everyone imagining themselves nearer the middle than they are. But the rich are most ignorant of all. In focus groups for our book Unjust Rewards, those in the top 1% thought the poverty line began at £22,000 - which is nearly the median. How can people know how fair society is if they don't know what others earn?

A vital section in this bill outlaws "secrecy clauses": currently nearly a quarter of employers ban their staff from talking about their pay to each other. It's only a first step, but if every company's payroll and all tax returns were made public - as in some countries - people would be better armed to confront inexplicable differentials between those doing equally indispensable jobs. The day total income transparency was declared would feel at first like compulsory nudism, so deep is the taboo against it. The shock would be considerable, but if everyone stripped financially bare together, it would lead to pressure for fairer shares. Transparency is a democratic necessity: knowledge is power.

A great regretful sadness hangs over this bill. As with the 50p tax rate, if only back in 1997 this had been an early beacon showing which way Labour meant to travel, instead of zigzagging, there would have been time to build on it, time to implement it well. It would have given Labour a better narrative and a clear trajectory. Now these things feel like last echoes of what might have been, had Labour followed its better instincts from day one.

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