February 5, 2024 - 6:00pm
Social inequality is a seemingly intractable problem. If anything, it seems to be getting worse. Most Britons would agree that a key objective of social policy ought to be making social mobility easier and ensuring inequality doesn’t become an entrenched reality.
The Labour Party has just pledged that if elected to government it would “extend the full right to equal pay that now exists for women to black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workers”, in order to tackle the ethnicity pay gap.
Yet, since discrimination on grounds of “colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” was already barred by the Race Relations Act of 1965 and race was specifically made a protected characteristic in the 2010 Equality Act, further legislation in this area is unnecessary. Really, it would operate more as a public relations ploy than a serious strategy to grapple with inequality.
This is because what undergirds Labour’s proposal is the idea of “disparitism”, which is reminiscent of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology so prominent in America. DEI has a simplistic understanding, in both diagnosis and resolution, for an issue as complex as social inequality. Namely, that any disparity on a social indicator between ethnic groups prima facie is evidence of grave racial oppression and must have been produced primarily by racism. Thus, it must be corrected by officialdom to more equitable levels.
Moreover, it ignores certain “disparities” that are actually positioned in favour of particular ethnic minorities. For example, British Indians and British Chinese are the country’s highest average earners. In addition, British-born black employees earn more hourly than their white British counterparts.
While these facts don’t disprove the existence of social inequality — given that overall black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens earn less than white Britons, Indian and Chinese — they do demonstrate that a lot more factors than racism go into producing disparities. These might concern educational attainment, homeownership, geography or immigrant background, and are especially significant when the different groups which combine to form the BAME umbrella are broken down.
The problem with the disparity discourse is that it implicitly presumes the primary form of social inequality is racial and gender-based. Inequality itself isn’t the problem, just those created by — or who claim to be created by — sexism and racism. Therefore, the course of action isn’t to eliminate inequality and social immobility as such but, as with Labour’s proposal, to manage these issues in such way that they aren’t disproportionately held by ethnic minorities.
The solution, then, is the redistribution of existing resources pushed by the state to achieve racial equality. But wouldn’t a better way be promoting economic growth — to create more wealth and surplus that can be attainted, enjoyed and built upon by struggling Britons? Growth on its own certainly isn’t a sufficient condition, but it is still necessary to eliminate inequality and reverse declining standards of living.
Nobody can seriously claim that society is somehow totally beyond racism. Nevertheless, extant racism isn’t the primary source of social inequality today. Contemporary inequality and social immobility have developed in the context of an economy that — for white people as well as ethnic minorities — is becoming more unequal across the board. Wages and salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, the aspiration to homeownership is virtually impossible for many, and building some level of intergenerational wealth is a pipe dream.
This is how the problem of social mobility should principally be seen, not through tendentious racialised ways of thinking that obscure the problem by falsely diagnosing it, rather than contributing to bettering the lives of ethnic minorities.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeThe best-paid job that a working class school leaver in England can aspire to is Premiership footballer.
There seems to be a disparity in the ethnicity of successful applicants for this role. I trust that the new Labour government will address this problem. It is axiomatic that all races are equally good at everything, so the players should represent the proportions of ethnicities in the wider population.
“But wouldn’t a better way be promoting economic growth — to create more wealth and surplus that can be attainted, enjoyed and built upon by struggling Britons?”
Exactly. And in the absence of a robust, growing economy (hampered, in part, by a utopian Green agenda), the best a government can do is redistribute the shrinking pie according to whichever ideology currently prevails. Sadly, for the most part, Western governments no longer know how to stimulate economic productivity and growth.
Maybe governments do know how to stimulate growth, cut red tape and reduce the size of the state; but they are hamstrung by their ideology and desire to stay in power that prevents them from taking hard decisions.
So Labour are going to bring back Grammar Schools to increase social mobility then? No, I didn’t think so.
If you look under the hood at Internationalism, nothing is considered more oppressive than the English language.
Ralph Leonard is right to highlight that this is a distraction. Labour truly are underwhelming and if this is best they can do to address inequality, then slow gradual economic and societal decline will continue.
I see them as far worse than underwhelming. I fear the slow decline into the sub-marxist swamp we are approaching will become turbo-charged and, with all desperate hope of turning around gone, our collective arrival far will be swift.
Unfortunately, to expose Labour and much of the DEI rhetoric as being the divisive claptrap it is, we will have to let this play out when Labour win. Only when it starts affecting people will they turn against it. Until now, people have been contemptibly apathetic on this.
It is affecting people already – companies/institutions failing because of the utterly pernicious racist claptrap of D I E
Discrimination – against white men
Inequity – for white men
Exclusion – of white men.
Precisely!
The engine of inequality in Britain is the housing market. It pauperises wage earners and rent payers whilst showering the middle class with vast quantities of unearned wealth which, as it passes to each new generation, is destroying social mobility and creating a new and utterly parasitic social elite.
This would be simple to fix through a reform of Council Tax. So will Labour fix it? Of course not. Their middle class electorate wouldn’t stand for it. So they deflect with all this phoney DEI nonsense.
id love to see your definitions of Working Class and Middle Class. It steh middle class that keep the country going.
Does Labour’s equal pay rule apply to football as well?
Rather than race look at culture. The Races that encourage academic effort (Indian, Chinese, White Middle class) do well. Races that dont respect education so much do badly.
It’s not a colour difference. West Africans – notably Nigerians do well, Those from Caribbean cultures do less well. Its a cultural difference.
So how do you deliver equality when one culture prefers not to study as hard as another ?
I doubt it has anything like as simple and explanation as that. Carribbean parents used to be – perhaps still are – strict and prize education. The adoption of not particularly helpful radical values by a younger more liberalised generation -.and racism in the past did play a part -.was a complex process.
If you overlay global IQ map on political and economic map, you would see straight away why some countries and cultures are successful and others are not.
Simply really.
I know some of you guys have a very simplistic (not simple) ideology of IQ determining all inequalities, but it is rubbish, and an ounce of critical thinking would demonstrate. Presumably the South Koreans are vastly more intelligent than Northerners, and themselves much more intelligent than they were in the 1950s, when Korea was one of the poorest countries on Earth. Brits obviously got more stupid after 1890 as Germany and the US started to outperform us. Jamaicans in Jamaica – stupid – Jamaicans in the US – clever. Etc etc
This isn’t about social equity, per se. It’s just the same old, tired socialist cant wrapped up in twenty-first century word salad. Let’s wish it a swift demise.
You have created a logical argument, here, Ralph, based on evidence.
However, the post-modernist version of the Labour Party does not share this view of evidence etc.
Adrienne Barnett explains it quite clearly here: https://youtu.be/-GiefGCZI74
For them, the purpose of ‘scholarship’ is not to approach truth, but to promote the prospects of the group you define as ‘oppressed’.
We need to tackle the ideology, not try to engage it with logic.
Start by defunding the Woke university courses (somehow)
It has been shown that groups or cultures who highly value education and effort do better than cultures that prefer not to defer present enjoyment of life for future rewards; except for women who, thought as a group, pursue education more widely, still, as a group receive less profit.