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TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: David Walker
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick


BBC
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Broadcast Date: 16 March 2000
Repeat Date: 19 March 2000
Tape Number: TLN 010 00 VT 1011
Duration: 27.43

TAKING PART IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

DAVID LIPSEY, Labour Peer and former special adviser to Anthony Crosland

PATRICIA HEWITT, MP , Minister for small business and e-commerce at the
Department for Trade and Industry

HILARY WAINWRIGHT, Editor of " Red Pepper"

ALISSA GOODMAN, Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal
Studies London and co-author of "Inequalities in the UK"

GURBUX SINGH, Chief Executive of Haringey Council, London and
Chairman Designate of the Commission for Racial Equality

ANNE PHILLIPS, Professor of Gender Theory at the London School of Economics and author of " Which Equalities Matter"

STEPHEN POLLARD, Columnist on the " Express " newspaper, think-tanker and author of " Class Matters"


Walker : You may have lately caught surprising snatches of an old political tune. The Blairite glee club has been singing those golden oldies, equality, fairness,injustice. But this time round they are being revamped to suit these New
Labour times.

Lipsey: It's no good now thinking you could hold down the salaries of top
businessmen in Britain because they'd just move abroad. And there are certain aspects of equality we just have to give up on because to pursue them would destroy our economy.

Hewitt : It is nonsense to think that you can equalise life chances by taking away the material advantages of the rich and then signing a cheque to the poor.

Walker : Equality lite from Labour peer David Lipsey and minister Patricia Hewitt.Could it be because the serious pursuit of equality tends to damage your wealth?

Wainwright : Any commitment to equality of opportunity has got to deal with the inequalities of wealth that many people face from the moment they're born. I
mean you can't tackle inequality unless you tackle it at the top as well as
at the bottom. And they just refuse to do that.

Walker : Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper.No Labour government is ever going to do enough to satisfy her kind of egalitarian so why this revived and officially sanctioned talk of equality?
Maybe it's fear of losing touch with the party base personified by Peter Kilfoyle, the Liverpool MP who resigned as a minister over neglect of Labour's core working-class supporters. But having raised expectations of policy taking an egalitarian turn, won't the government have to deliver: there's a budget next week...
I turned for confirmation of my sense of the game having moved on, or
should that be back, to a keen participant observer. You heard him a moment ago,the voice of realism: a Blair peer, David Lipsey was once special adviser to Old Labour's prophet of egalitarianism, Tony Crosland. Why suddenly is equality talk permissible again?

Lipsey: There certainly has been a long swing against egalitarianism in the Labour Party, and so has in society generally. And partly this is a result of
continuing social change, that the social class divides that so enraged the
early socialists are nothing like as sharp today. But I do now detect the
beginnings of a swing back. Because we are seeing on the one hand huge
wealth accumulated by a handful of starts in society, and on the other hand
we are becoming increasingly aware of social exclusion and poverty at the
bottom. It's very significant that the Prime Minister did slip that word
'equality' into his Conference speech last year and many of us took that as
a symbol of the future direction. There is a clear human instinct that
certain kinds of dividing up of the wealth of the country are simply unfair,
and that it is the duty of progressive governments to struggle endlessly to
reduce those disparities. It is as simple but as deep as that.

Walker : A key word that "endlessly": to run a capitalist system with a social
conscience is to be condemned to a Sisyphean task. Neo liberalism doesn't permit much redistribution.
Yet David Lipsey worries instinctually about disparities of material
condition,rich man in his castle poor man at the gates. How many are there? Alissa Goodman runs the numbers. She is an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and co-author of the definitive study 'Inequality in the UK'. Are there signs that our society has become more rather than less unequal?

Goodman : The answer to that question is clearly 'yes'. The most recent evidence from the last two years that we have available data, 1996 and 1997, is that growth in income inequality may have picked up again. Although it's
impossible to know whether we're back onto a track of sustained inequality
growth or whether that's more of a blip in the data. But certainly we have
observed that often periods of rapid economic growth are also periods of
rising inequality. There is some evidence to suggest that more highly
flexible labour markets which have inherent to them a higher degree of
inequality in pay, are also ones which encourage growth and the US model is
an example of that.

Walker : So that when we hear Tony Blair talking, extolling freer, more flexible
labour markets, effectively he is saying he wants more, not less inequality
of income distribution?

Goodman : I think that that's a likely outcome although it's not a necessary one. Of course that's an issue which is very open to debate.

Walker : The debate, in Blairite terms, is about the golden goose - how many feathers can you pluck before the bird stops laying. And it mustn't because the work it provides is New Labour's main recipe for more equality - the more work the fairer the society.
Is that all? What about civic equality, say for ethnic minorities? Here's a  Home Secretary grappling with the fall- out from the murder of Stephen Lawrence -
the Macpherson report, the reform of the police. So is there a sense here,too,of revived egalitarianism, renewed struggle?
Gurbux Singh is Chief Executive of the London Borough of Haringey, shortly
to become chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. The need for action is
incontrovertible.

Singh : Take the young people who live in Haringey. Some of the Afro-Caribbean youngsters who live in Tottenham between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. 70% of them have not actually worked. And I think that is a
function of the labour market and the extent to which discrimination has
meant that these youngsters cannot get access to jobs. Now it is reasonable
to expect that the sort of youngsters I am talking about also receive
fairness and equity in the labour market so that they can get jobs and have
a decent living like the rest of us.
I believe that Macpherson will go down in history as a major landmark for
resurrecting the whole debate about equality, fairness, racial justice. And
that's why I for one believe that the agenda is changing. I believe that we
will now see very much up front the whole question of race inequality being
tackled by key institutions in this country not least by government itself.

Walker : He is on message to the extent that like the government he believes
work is the portal to greater equality. For women, too. I put it to radical feminist Hilary Wainwright, that recent years have seen great progress in equilibrating men's and women's positions in employment?

Wainwright : Quite a few advances have been made for middle class women. For women on high incomes. They are not yet in positions of equality, but relative to what they were say ten years ago there's definitely been an advance.
I think for the mass of women the situation has actually got worse.
Casualisation- what's called the flexible labour market, is flexible for employers but not really for workers. They just face more insecurity.
The latest response of the government to the Directive on Part-Time
Employment coming from Europe is a classic example of the limits set on the
government's policies for women. Limits set by the needs of the employers
ultimately. The fact that this government isn't prepared to go along with
that directive which would give part- time workers basically the same
pension and other employment rights as full-time workers on a fractional,
proportional basis, is an incredible indictment of a government that
proclaims to be about the needs of women, proclaims to be about equality of
opportunity.

Walker : There Blairite response to that criticism would say that we are doing all that we can about inequalities of income that the operations of the economic
system permit - including new tax credits and a minimum wage which Uncle Gordon may have been persuaded into raising in the budget.
The political question in our programme is whether that's enough - to satisfy the troops, let alone make Britain a fairer place. Is the government coherent in its own terms? In Labour's dark days Patricia Hewitt was a senior aide to leader Neil Kinnock and is now minister for small business and e-commerce in the Department of Trade and Industry.

Hewitt : It's important to understand why actually in the Labour Party we stopped talking about equality for a while when we were going through those early days of modernisation. Because equality had come to mean a really bizarre
combination of sameness and difference. Sameness because apparently in those
days what we wanted to do was punish anything that was exceptional,
particularly if it was success, particularly if it was financial success.
And that was all about taxing the rich until the pips squeak as Denis Healy
once disastrously said. But at the same time we seemed to want different
treatment for women and various minority communities, indeed almost to the
extent that it seemed the only people we weren't interested in were
traditional working class Labour voters. And so equality had just got
hopelessly muddled up. And we found for a while that we did have to stop
using it and we talked about fairness instead. But fundamentally it comes
back to the idea that every individual is worthy of equal respect. And then
you go on from there to say that actually every individual needs to have the
widest possible opportunities to fulfil whatever potential it is that they
have to be the best that they possibly can be.

Walker : Equal respect has the advantage of not costing the taxpayers a penny and of course it is important, as the basis for making progress against racism.

Singh : People who are born here no longer see themselves as members of minority communities. They see themselves as equal but different. They are different,but they almost see themselves as belonging here and they'll have an
expectation that they'll get fairness and equity in all the things that they
do in this country.

Walker : Gurbux Singh. Not all would be as confident of his sense of fitting in. And the equal respect formula runs into difficulties when we think about
groups who may want to emphasise how unlike men or the mainstream they are.
You can reconcile equality and difference by insisting everyone acquire a common citizenship. Once we all have our own individual pairs of running
shoes what we do past the starting gate will be different. Last autumn Anne
Phillips,Professor of Gender Theory at the London School of Economics published "Which Equalities Matter". She thinks equality is bound up with autonomy.

Phillips : I certainly think there's been a sea change in terms of people talking a
language of empowerment. Saying that there are questions about the degree of
control that people have over their lives which can't be reduced just to
economic and social conditions.
And secondly the difficulties that people have found in holding together a
very important set of initiatives in terms of thinking about equality in
relation to difference, with recognising that you need equalisation in terms
of basic economic and social conditions. So that you have much more a sense
that we need to think about equality of citizenship as something which
recognises difference, which can respect diverse cultural and religious
practices, which no longer equates equality with sameness. That's in my mind
been an undoubted development and improvement in the ways in which people
have thought about issues of equality.

Walker : But if she is right about a sea change, oughtn't it to be washing through this New Labour era in an ever greater commitment to education - for where else but the schools do you get the tools for success? For the Blairites, greater equality comes essentially from labour market participation; good
materialists, they see empowerment coming from an employment income. But even if those young black men in Tottenham got jobs they would still be black. The assault on inequality, says Gurbux Singh, needs to be mounted across a broad front.

Singh : I do not believe that the single explanation for the plight of some of our
youngsters within Tottenham and indeed within other inner city areas, is
simply to do with racial discrimination. I believe the issue is far more
complex. It's about poverty, it's about social class it is about the fact
that the education has consistently failed some of our youngsters, so that
they leave school without any formal education or any formal qualification
which enable them to then compete in the labour market.
What we need is a multi-faceted approach. We need to tackle the problems of
poverty, we need to tackle the problem of schools and educational
institutions which are failing our young people. But at the same time we
also need to tackle the stubborn, persistent discrimination which exists in
this country.

Walker : Does that then make you favour a rubric for administration in politics such as 'social exclusion' which seems to encompass the various ways in which
some groups are kept out from the mainstream?

Singh : My fear is that the whole debate about social exclusion somehow hides the facts of racial discrimination. And that somehow it camouflages a
fundamental element which contributes to social exclusion- and that is
racial discrimination.

Walker : But race may not be the only thing camouflaged by "social exclusion". The Cabinet Office unit with that title has produced some great reports but no obvious changes of policy. That may be because social exclusion is a euphemism for class. Several of our contributors have used the word but it is still non U in the government. Perhaps that's because it implies a structural analysis which might show permanent and persisting social divisions built into the very fabric of society. The author of "Class Matters", think tanker Stephen Pollard says you cannot understand Britain without it.

Pollard : I think class matters for very specific reasons. You look at for instance
education performance and it's overwhelmingly clear that where you're born
determines first of all what your educational qualifications are going to
be, and that that in itself is going to determine where you're going to end
up in 30 or 40 years' time. It's an absolute direct link. It's about the
fact that children are about five times more likely to die before they reach
16 if they're born to working class families as it were than if they're born
into social groups A1s and Bs. It's about cold, hard facts about people's
lives.
I would consider myself to be New Labour. But the sort of analysis that I
employ talking about class is deeply, deeply unpopular within the sort of
New Labour policy making agenda. Because it implies conflict. Politics at
the moment is about consensus, it's about drawing people together. It's
about showing that , you know, if you apply the best minds to things you can
all come up with a solution. As soon as you're talking about class you're
talking about barriers. You're talking about different groups competing
against each other. For resources and for all sorts of different kinds of
opportunities. And that's a deeply, deeply unpopular thing to say at the
moment in the current climate. But it is after all what the public thinks is
going on at the moment. 81% of them say that there's a class struggle going
on today.

Walker : But the selfsame public is far from consistent. It applies strict tests of
desert to who should and who shouldn't get government assistance; it shows
little appetite for tax and certainly does not believe there is an alternative to
the present economic system. It's no accident that class went underground, says David Lipsey.

Lipsey: Well, class is off the agenda partly because it's declined as an objective
phenomenon and partly because it's a loser for left-wing politics. At the
time, thirty years ago we talked roughly half the population, more than half
the population was working class. Now that figure is down to about one
third- what is identifiably or can be identified as working class. So to
become a class party in Britain today is to condemn yourself to perpetual
opposition and to be able to do nothing about inequality.
The Blairite strategy of reaching out to the middle classes is absolutely
right and absolutely inevitable.

Walker : But it does embrace convincing the possessors, the middle classes, that they need to share more fairly, that they need to degrees of redistribution if
any strong effort is to succeed in making Britain a fairer place?

Lipsey: Well, I mean nobody's ever said that you can have total equality. Everybody with the same incomes- it's not a possibility at least in a free society.
The question is the degree of inequality that you have to put up with.
And you can make different amounts of headway in different dimensions. I
think you can make a lot of headway in equality of opportunity which is a
generally socially accepted value. I mean if you imagine how different this
country would be if for example all black people had equal chances with all
white people - now that would be a very substantial advance for general
equality though not for equality of outcomes.

Walker : But is he really saying Labour is no longer bothered by the distribution of wealth and income - the "outcome" of market operations? New Labour is reviving equality of opportunity. If we are all wearing Nikes at the notional starting gate, the winners fully deserve their medals. But you cannot ignore the results,says Gurbux Singh.

Singh : It is actually about both because you may have equality of opportunity which may then not lead to a fair outcome. So what I'm actually interested in is
the results of things that happen. And therefore I'm a great believer in
what we should be measuring is ultimate performance in outcome terms.
I happen to believe that the way in which you change institutions is to have
a rigorous performance approach. Therefore part of my agenda over the next
four years will be to promote within institutions the need for race performance indicators to be strongly built into performance measures that we all set within organisations.

Walker : But assessing fairness means making judgements of social worth: does companychairman x deserve that remuneration package; is that windfall gain from stock appreciation merited. This is turbulent water for New Labour, which wants to show business a friendly face. No surprise then that New Labour's equality focus  has been on poor children. Raising their life chances represents one way of cutting into the transfer of inequality through time. And you don't have to be too cynical, says Anne Phillips, to see the other reason for making children the centre of your inequality crusade.

Phillips : One thing that's very clear is that the current government has a very clear commitment to eradicating child poverty. However, for example in relation to children you never have the issue about who's deserving and who's
undeserving.
I mean nobody would say of a ten-year-old child: Well, we've done our best
for you, you've frittered it away and now you've got to stand on your own
two feet.
I think you could have a very sincere commitment to the kind of
redistribution that's necessary to tackling the position of children living
in poverty while being totally agnostic on other issues to do with equality.
It doesn't commit you for example to any position on whether you think it's
fair that one group in society could be living on an income which is one
tenth of the income of another group in society. It doesn't commit you to a
position to whether there is in some sense a contradiction about a
democratic society in which there can be such a huge range of incomes.

Walker : But desert cuts two ways. Public opinion applies tests of  deservingness to welfare beneficiaries; it also scratches fat cats. Patricia Hewitt speaks for the Blairite desire to leave judgements of merit to the market.

Hewitt : We're seeing some extraordinary fortunes being made at the moment in the sort of " dot.com" economy. Nobody really knows where those stock market
evaluations are going to go. So I don't think we should get too hung up
about them. But I think the guiding principle is that if somebody has a
brilliant idea on the back of which they create a new business. And from
that new business they make wealth for themselves as well as for other
people, then providing they're doing that within a fair competitive market
than actually that is fine, then that's a fair outcome.
And part of it is creating a sense of egalitarian values in which people
come to value each other for a great deal more than simply for the money
that they have or haven't got. But in which we also seek to bind the lucky
and the wealthy back into our community not simply by taxing them -I mean of
course we've got to have fair taxes because we've got to finance everything
else we want to do- but also by encouraging them, for instance, to give some
of that money away. To put that money into charities into community
investment funds and so on.

Walker : But appeals to philanthropy are no substitute for concerted policy to make sure chances to do well are genuinely spread. But even if they are, the
possessors of the fruits of success will always make damn sure their offspring emerge at the head of the pack next time round. This "meritocracy", says Stephen Pollard,comes perilously close to an omnibus justification for any given
distribution of income and wealth.

Pollard : It's an argument that you can turn on its head against those who say that we are a fully meritocratic society. Yes, we're meritocratic in that once you
get to play the rules of the game then you're able to compete and the cream
will rise to the top. The best lawyers will earn a fortune, the best accountants will earn a fortune the best bankers and so on.
The argument that you can make is that if they then peel off at the top and
exist in a closed world then their own defence mechanism -they argue quite
proudly because among open competition between the whole of society merit
has been rewarded. The superclass proclaims now that they've got there on
merit. A hundred years ago it was whom you knew, where you were born to.
They were slightly ashamed when they were challenged. If you go into the
City now and you ask a fund manager for instance whether he should be
allowed to earn this amount of money he'll look at you as if you're
completely crazy. He got there on merit.
But what happens in two or three generations' time? When you have for
instance two city lawyers who are earning a hundred thousand pounds each.
And you compare them with two cleaners who are earning ten thousand pounds
each. The moment you have an income differential of ninety thousand pounds.
The next generation two of them marry- you've got two hundred thousand joint
income as against twenty thousand joint income. And over two or three
generations suddenly you've warped away, you've got a completely different
sort of income inequality far beyond anything that we've been used to. And
that's happening now.

Walker : The state is left, generation unto generation, sweeping up, trying and
failing to get poor children to the base line of competition while the meritocrats consolidate their position. Remember the word 'endlessly' used earlier by
David Lipsey. The left doesn't like this sense of fatalism. It believes you can
cut through inequality once for all. This is Red Pepper's Hilary Wainwright.

Wainwright : If the government was really serious about overall levels of inequality then first there would be a massive wealth tax, should be a massive wealth tax introduced.
Because even take their commitment to equality of opportunity: One of the
major obstacles is the way in which inequalities are passes from generation
to generation.
Secondly they should introduce a progressive income tax so that the
inequalities between the rich and the poor are addressed. Rather than as at
the moment merely a redistribution from the not-so-poor to the very poor.
I think in terms of wealth creation there should be much more imaginative
thinking to achieve creative forms of public investment. Co-operative
investment, all kinds of social investment which wouldn't be the old style
centralised command economy types bur would be using local authorities,
local enterprise boards. If you're serious about inequality you have to
address equality of outcome.

Walker : Apart from ouch, remember Denis Healey and the squeaking pips, the Blairite response to that might be, once again, to emphasise incentive, even strongly to assert that economic growth may be a cause of inequality but is also its solvent.And yet - you hear it in speeches by Gordon Brown - inequality does worry them.
Without equality the question of Labour's identity really does become
problematic. Recall Patricia Hewitt's plea for equal respect. Isn't that a precondition of political participation?
There is a permanent tension between the idea of democracy and equality says
Anne Phillips.

Phillips : Democracy is not just about us having equal rights to vote and so on. The dream about democracy is about citizens having equal standing and equal
worth within their society.
It seems to me that there are certain kinds of economic inequalities which just fundamentally undermine that claim. It really does become a gesture to say that people have that kind of equality when they are living in conditions which so powerfully segregate them into different forms of existence associated with different levels of income. So that the shift to the greater recognition of the importance of political empowerment, the importance of political equalities has to my mind resulted in a de-coupling of political equalities from economic and social equalities.  We now I think, we risk these being treated as very sort of separate issues.

Walker : Put that point strongly: there is a limit to how much inequality you can
allow

the market system to throw up without endangering democratic society. But
how

much - that's Labour's practical problem and Gordon Brown's budget is
unlikely to move far in an egalitarian direction. Which leaves us with a puzzle.
Having opened the rhetorical box marked equality the government has raised the expectations of its supporters but it is bound to disappoint them.