Equality Bill

My Lords, I think it was President Coolidge of the United States who attended church one Sunday and, when he went home for lunch, was asked by his wife what the preacher had preached about. The President said that he had preached about sin. "What did he say?" asked his wife. "He was against it", the President said. An awful lot unites us in what we are saying today, and indeed there is something in what everyone has said that I can agree with. Perhaps that is a good Anglican position to adopt on the subject; I am not sure. I shall start with the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. I think I could just about compete with him for humble origins, coming from a council estate in Birmingham. The grammar school system gave me an opportunity. But I would not want to go back to it for the very reasons outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, about the way the secondary modern system worked then. Indeed, it is one of the tragedies that the comprehensive ideal has not been made to work better in our society. I go into schools a lot, and shall be in one first thing tomorrow morning, which is probably why I will not be able to move my amendment later this evening. However, an awful lot of good work is going on in schools precisely to put into effect what this clause seeks to do. I also agree with the noble Lord about the importance of opportunity and freedom. I am one of those who is grateful for the reforms his Government brought in with the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, 30-odd years ago. I have always supported the basic thrust of those reforms. But the problem about releasing opportunity and having a society which emphasises opportunity is that, if unchecked, it leads to exaggerated outcomes of success and failure, wealth and poverty. That has, in many ways, been the defining feature of our society for the past 30 years. We have become more American in that sense and are now almost beginning to ape the underclass that has dogged America over the years, alongside the "land of opportunity". That is relevant to the clause—I agree with the noble Lord that it is unclear and could be misused—in that, in a society that properly gives a place to freedom of opportunity and allows wealth and poverty to develop as they inevitably will, it is a key duty of government to smooth that out in any way it can. A key task of local and central government is to try to take a view that, as it were, smoothes outcomes as far as possible while encouraging equality of opportunity for everyone. If I had drafted this clause, it would provide for equalities of both outcome and opportunity, as one or two noble Lords indicated earlier. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, that to think that all this can be achieved by passing a law is complete nonsense. The law has a limited role, but perhaps it has one in which it simply gives a programmatic undergirding to the whole range of government policy. In that sense, this clause at the beginning of the Bill is a noble aspiration.