Equality Bill

If the Government decide to call something the Equality Bill, they expect everyone to support it because we are, of course, all in favour of equality. But this is the most incredibly misleadingly titled Bill, as one of its central planks is not to enshrine equality in law but to reintroduce discrimination into the workplace. We heard earlier how 40 years ago Labour Governments banned race and sex discrimination in the workplace, but this Bill tries to bring it back via the back door and—unbelievably—in the name of equality. The Bill has nothing to do with equality. It is all about the politically correct extremism of the Leader of the House and her trendy, left-wing prejudices. Most people who support the concept of equality support the concept of equality of opportunity, but this Bill is not interested in that. It is about a socialist, 1980s Labour party agenda of equality of outcome. Indeed, page 1 of this long-winded Bill explicitly says that it is""designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage"." To be honest, I do not know how this Government dare talk about reducing socio-economic disadvantage. They have the nerve in their explanatory notes to give the example that this would lead to a duty on local education authorities to ensure that children from deprived areas have a better chance of securing a place at their school of choice. This from the Government who hate grammar schools, which probably did more than anything else to enable kids from the poorest backgrounds to access the best schools, and who scrapped the assisted places scheme, which paid for the brightest kids from the poorest backgrounds to get the best education at top private schools. Perhaps the Solicitor-General will make it clear when she winds up that this provision will mean that many of the parents in my constituency, who live in villages close to popular primary schools such as Eldwick, Burley-in-Wharfedale and Bingley, will be unable to send their children to their local school as pupils from poorer areas will be bussed in to take their place. Is that really what the Bill proposes? The Bill is massive—250 pages, including the schedules, and nearly 250 pages of explanatory notes—but if it were truly about equality, we would not need 250 pages of politically correct gobbledegook: it would be a very short Bill, which would simply enshrine in law the fact that people who seek jobs should be selected on merit alone and that they should be given jobs irrespective of their gender, race, age or disability—