UK Equality Act Can Be Amended, But Some Argue Trends Are ‘Unlikely to Be Reversed’

Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch talks in the House of Commons in London on Oct. 20, 2020. (Parliament TV)

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.

While the government’s “Inclusive Britain” policy paper has set out a raft of measures that translated the findings from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report into concrete action, critics say that current legislation still creates a new “hierarchy of inequality” and can even be changed for the better with a few simple legal tweaks.

The new policy followed on from an independent review from Dr. Tony Sewell, the education consultant who chaired the Commission, who concluded that British society was not deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.

The review was set up by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in July 2020 to examine inequality in the UK in the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests over the death of George Floyd.

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.

More recently, the gender-critical views of Maya Forstater, who lost her job at a think tank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex, were ruled as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, according to a judge-led panel. In 2020, a hearing gave ethical veganism protection under the Equality Act 2010.

‘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.”

The Act has been also been criticised for stunting free speech (pdf) as well as an increase in the number public and private bodies promoting unconscious bias training as well as BAME only internship opportunities. The high salaries of diversity tsars, some often claiming higher wages than the Prime Minister himself, have also come under fire.

In an article for Unherd, author James McSweeney proposed a simple trick to fix what he called “the blob” of the Equalities Act.

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.

Furthermore, Section 149 (pdf) meant publishing measurable “equity objectives” meaning that every public body had to hire diversity duties. This, in turn, created a situation where the UK now has twice as many Diversity and Inclusion workers per capita as any other country.

Though McSweeney said that these trends are “unlikely to be reversed” by repealing the Equality Act.

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.