Badenoch, Visibly Conservative
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
Consider three different ideas of equality. The first is outcome equality, or levelling down – clipping the wings of some so that they can’t fly higher than others. The second is legal equality, whereby no effort is made to level down or up: all that matters is that all are treated equally under the law.
Few Conservatives believe in the first (with a few exceptions) and all believe in the second. Most, however, believe in a third: equality of opportunity – seeking to ensure that all can fly as high as their potential allows. Or, if nature and nurture render it impossible, at least in seeking to ensure that opportunity is spread as widely as possible.
This is levelling up – or, as Disraeli put it, “the elevation of the condition of the people”, and this thread runs through Conservative and Tory-led governments from his own Public Health Act through Chamberlain’s contributory pensions to Butler’s education act, Thatcher’s council house sales and Cameron’s free schools.
Tony Blair’s equality laws muddied the waters by obscuring which form of it governments should aim to promote, and thickened them further by giving different claims for it no priority – and so throwing onto the courts the responsibility of deciding what should happen when, say, the claims of faith and sexuality clash, exemplified in the “gay cake” case.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
