The government has a plan to tackle racial inequality while building a more inclusive society. But some are questioning how some of the unforetold consequences of the Equality Act can be reigned in.
Equality Act
Launching the new strategy last March, Minister of State for Equalities Kemi Badenoch told the Daily Mail that the answer to ethnic minority disadvantage is “not to get civil servants to read books on white privilege or worry about statues in Oxford colleges.”Brought in under the former Labour Party PM Gordon Brown, the Equality Act came into force in 2010, with the purpose to protect individuals from discrimination and promote a fair and more equal society.
Badenoch’s report said the government will now aim to strengthen the Equality Act’s independent regulator, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), with statutory powers to “defend the right to equality” and “to continue to protect those most vulnerable from discrimination.”
The protected characteristics in the Equality Act are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership (in employment only), pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
‘Hierarchy of Inequality’
However, some have argued that protected characteristics create a hierarchy in which some types of offences against members of protected groups are deemed more offensive than others with none.A spokesperson for Don’t Divide Us, an organisation set up to counterbalance and take a stand against the UK’s “divisive obsession with people’s racial identity,” told The Epoch Times that the “biggest issue with the Equalities Act is that it creates a new hierarchy of inequality.”
Instead of revoking the Equality Act, the Conservatives should amend it, he said. For example, part 11 of the Act contains clause Section 149 which introduced a “public sector equality duty.”
“This obliged public bodies to “encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low,” he wrote.
Cultural Forces and Pressures
Professor Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, told The Epoch Times that he believed there were “two obstacles to really changing the political landscape in relation” to the issues of the Equalities Act.The prolific author and Spiked columnist said that “the judiciary and various institutions that are involved in this are heavily invested in promoting the ideological underpinnings of diversity and what’s behind it.”
“Every time the Government tries to do something it finds that its decisions are in practice are thwarted by the people that are involved in managing this, also there are very strong cultural pressures that promote the Equalities Act and its various manifestations, therefore it cannot be contained simply by passing a law because that assumes that these cultural forces and pressures are somehow going to go away,” he said.
Furedi said that the key battle at the moment is “a war against the past and the attempt to detach society from its legacy and tradition.”
The author added that he thinks this will the frontier of which a “lot of battles will be fought in the next couple of years.”
“At the moment there are people who are aware of this around different parties but the mainstream of the parties is pretty bad on these issues or even when they recognize the problem don’t really understand the significance of what’s going on here,” he added.