Liz Truss and the government are playing a dangerous game when it comes to equality

Editorial: The party seems content to create and exploit grievances to try to get ahead

The minister has vowed to focus on geographic disparities (Getty)

In a quiet corner of Westminster, the minister for equalities, Liz Truss, detonated something under the decades-long efforts towards ending discrimination.

In an almost casual remark during a keynote speech, she summarily dismissed the whole notion of equality in pay, educational achievement, social status and much else among the groups most grievously discriminated against. 

Ms Truss could not be accused herself of lacking ambition, albeit aimed in the wrong direction. Citing her target of achieving equality based on “Conservative values” – a glorious oxymoron – she pledged that equality will now be “about individual dignity and humanity, not quotas and targets, or equality of outcome”. 

So, the insidious suggestion goes, there is really no need for us to focus on data-driven studies that reveal such sharp disparities in jobs, wealth, income, the criminal justice system and all the rest because these are mere “outcomes”, and they don’t count so much. 

It is as if the Black Lives Matter protests, and the brutality and injustice that motivated them, never happened – for Ms Truss somehow forgot to reference the events of the summer. Nor did she refer to our multicultural society, still less make the case for it. Her speech also didn’t include the phrase “trans rights”, as if the polarised debate about them was somehow just another “fashionable” distraction. 

Ms Truss belittles the idea of “lived experience”. The speech was a rather audacious exercise in what is nowadays called “gaslighting”, and what used to be called denial. The denial of lived experience is plain hurtful to people who have indeed suffered acts of cruelty, large and small.

Of course it would be a little easier to take if there was some new drive for equality of opportunity for people of colour, “founded on Conservative values” or otherwise. But there was little mention of that – and it is a conveniently vague aspiration. 

While admitting that discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, sexuality, disability and so on exists (even she’d be hard pushed to pretend otherwise), there is to be a new curious front opened up by Ms Truss in the struggle: “the scourge of geographic inequality”.

This is especially pernicious, divisive stuff. It is perfectly fair to highlight, as Ms Truss does, the position of white working-class children – but deeply shaming for her to state that their plight is because of a focus on fighting racial and other discrimination. 

This she explicitly does: “We will not limit our fight for fairness to the nine protected characteristics laid out in the 2010 Equality Act, which includes sex, race, and gender reassignment. While it is true people in these groups suffer discrimination, the focus on protected characteristics has led to a narrowing of the equality debate that overlooks socioeconomic status and geographic inequality. This means some issues – particularly those facing white working-class children – are neglected.”

Yet equality is not a zero-sum game, where white children come off worst because children with black or brown skin, or those in a wheelchair or with a learning disability, have been protected from assault or assisted with their education. Who believes that? Ms Truss asks aloud why children in Wolverhampton and Darlington – two tellingly chosen constituencies – are neglected. Who shall they blame? Who will tell them and their parents that the heavy industry in these areas has long since closed down? And that all that happened long before the first BLM protest or campaign for equal trans rights?

All Ms Truss is doing is – dangerously – offering a new area of grievance for the Tories’ target voters, now that Brexit may soon recede. A new front in the culture wars is required, and Ms Truss is up for a scrap. She’s quite proud of it, in fact, citing the success of her party in the former Labour “red wall” seats, highlighting the “scourge of geographical inequality” and suggesting where the blame may lie. 

Nothing to do with long-term industrial decline, or a decade of austerity, of course; just trendy Labour councils with their silly ideas about diversity. And Brussels, though not for much longer. The “burning injustices” once described by Theresa May are being replaced with more politically useful ones.

Ms Truss is just another Tory politician on the make, content to create and exploit grievances. Unlike some in the past, this time she has her party leadership onside. Her speech looks to have the fingerprints of the Downing Street policy unit all over it, embodying the new orthodoxy that there’s no reason why you can’t get on in modern Britain if you work hard and grasp the opportunities that are there. 

If people of colour insist otherwise – with lived experience and irrefutable data on outcomes – then they are just imagining things, and encouraged to do so by socialist zealots obsessed by identity politics. But if all that is true, then cannot the same things be said of the white working classes in Wolverhampton and Darlington? Can they not work hard and get on? Or are they just being manipulated and used by the likes of Liz Truss and her new brand of identity politics?