by Joanna Williams on substack
This week I attended the launch of a new paper from the Prosperity Institute: Some More Equal Than Others, The Case Against The Equality Act, by Alka Seghal Cuthbert and Anna Loutfi.
The authors do a tremendous job of explaining how the Equality Act has instigated legal and social changes that have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of life in Britain today. They show that far from simply bringing together disparate strands of existing anti-discrimination legislation (as is often suggested), the 2010 Act intentionally introduced entirely new ways of understanding equality, discrimination and the relationship between citizens and the state.
Seghal Cuthbert and Loutfi note that earlier anti-discrimination legislation was the creation of elected governments and, to a large extent, had the backing of a politically engaged public. The 2010 Act, on the other hand, ‘was the product of an international group of lawyers imposing wide-ranging positive law upon the British public amidst dwindling voter turnout.’ Indeed, the Labour government that initiated the Equality Act was voted out of office before the new legislation became enshrined in law. The crucial point here is that a fundamental renegotiation of the social contract took place without the consent of the public.
Most significantly, the Equality Act represents a shift ‘from negative legal prohibitions against discrimination to a positive legal duty to enforce equality’. The impact of this change cannot be overstated. It moves the law away from penalising those guilty of actively discriminating against people, for example, by refusing to allow someone access to a service or a product or a job because of their sex or skin colour. Instead, the law becomes ‘the agent by which society will be reformed’ through a more substantive, transformative understanding of equality that requires a focus on compensating for presumed disadvantage and creating the conditions for equality of outcome. In other words, the Equality Act demands that institutions treat people differently and provide special dispensations to some to level the playing field for those assumed to be disadvantaged because of a particular ‘protected