Remember before the general election, as all the parties were looking for little slogans and soundbites to help you identify them by? If you were playing buzzword bingo, the Lib Dem slogan was a high score: “Change that works for you, building a fairer Britain”. A bit of a mouthful, but it did have both the buzzwords du jour.
Fast forward six months. Nick Clegg has today told us what his definition of a fairer Britain is. There is a lot I object to in his speech: the now familiar deficit narrative, the story about not passing on the debt to the next generation, some of the details on the coalition’s deficit reduction principles. One sentence, however, truly stands out; one sentence sends chills down my spine:
“True fairness is about the distribution of chances, not just about the distribution of cash.”
Clegg’s main argument is around the different definitions of fairness, and he sets out to convince us that his is the right one. It is, he argues, equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome that really matters. Those who make an effort to better themselves should be rewarded, while being shielded from the effects of pure bad luck. To achieve this, the Deputy Prime Minister proposes a £7bn spending plan, to make available pre-primary education to deprived 2-year-olds, as well as the pupil premium and a student premium (the latter not entirely thought through by the sounds of it). By doing this, Mr. Clegg argues, we will level the playing field, giving poor children the same opportunities as rich children, which will allow them to be successful in life if they are willing to work hard.
I don’t know if the Deputy Prime Minister doesn’t realise or is simply wilfully ignoring how dangerous his rhetoric is, how damaging the message. We can see first-hand what the message of equality of opportunity achieves in the United States – one of the most unequal societies in the world. The American dream is a treacherous friend. If only you try hard enough, it says, you can achieve anything. You can be anything you like – a millionaire, or even President. It points us constantly at success stories, both real and fictional, the current occupant of the White House one of them.
But the American dream has a flip side. By starting from the assumption that “all men are created equal”, it is blinkered to the inequalities inherent in society – to class and privilege, to path dependence and deprivation. If only you work hard enough, whispers the American dream, you will overcome all of that, and you will be successful. By extension, though, if you haven’t succeeded, you only have yourself to blame; you must not have tried hard enough, worked hard enough. Those other people from the same background as you succeeded (one in a million though they might be), so if you haven’t, it must be something wrong with you. So you deserve to be poor, you deserve to get no help – you didn’t try hard enough.
In all fairness, Mr. Clegg’s vision isn’t quite as blinkered to the existence of privilege and the topology of the playing field. This is precisely why he wants to invest £7bn in levelling said playing field; he specifically calls out the state’s role in doing exactly that. Yet it takes more than a couple of billion pounds spent on early education to dismantle privilege and create true equality of opportunity. It takes cultural and social change. If we truly wanted to level the playing field, we would close Eton. This move it not about creating equality of opportunity – it is about sustaining privilege while giving those of us born without it just enough scraps from the table of our masters to keep us quiet.
Much more importantly though, we should not underestimate the importance of equality of outcome as a key value and key definition of fairness. I am not saying we should all receive an equal slice of the pie regardless of our efforts; but looking at the gulf that separates rich and poor in Britain, all this talk of fairness based on equality of opportunity pales into insignificance. A country with the third-largest GDP in the EU has the seventh-highest poverty rate. Nearly one in five people in the UK live in poverty. London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, is also the region of the UK with the highest poverty rate – nearly 30%. Nearly 3 million children live in poverty, costing society as a whole £25 billion annually. (Incidentally, that is more than half of the interest payments on the UK debt that the Deputy PM so objects to.) The majority of those children are not from the Daily Mail poster cases of workless families on benefits. The majority of them have at least one parent in work – working hard – barely able to make ends meet. Nick Clegg’s £7 billion will not rectify any of that – it is not designed to rectify any of that.
So maybe instead of paying lip service to fairness, and leaving the next generation deficit-free in a damaged labour market with chronic structural unemployment, a privatised education system, and a hollowed out, gutted knowledge economy, Nick Clegg could give us something to really aspire to: a truly fair Britain where no one is left behind – not in opportunity and not in outcome.