Annunziata Rees-Mogg, is Head of Communications for Popular Conservatism.
In the dying days of his premiership, Gordon Brown rushed the Equality Act 2010 onto the statute book just four days before Parliament was dissolved for the general election that he lost.
What a dismal legacy it has proved to be.
Last week, a steely Kemi Badenoch delivered a speech pledging to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty – that insidious bolt-on to Brown’s Equality Act. She has signalled a real determination to bring back fairness, merit, and plain old common sense to our public institutions. This is no half-hearted tinkering of the sort we have endured from previous administrations. It is a principled broadside against the administrative machinery that has twisted equality from a noble ideal into a tool of division.
The Equality Act was presented to the British people as a simple safeguard against unfair discrimination.
And who, in their right mind, would quarrel with protections from unfair treatment based on sex, race, disability or religion? In its stated purpose, it echoed a decent, liberal conservatism: individuals treated as equals before the law, no favourites, no grudges. Yet, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, and what transpired is something far more concerning.
The Public Sector Equality Duty obliges officials to “have due regard” to advancing equality and fostering good relations between groups. Benign on paper, perhaps. In reality, it has become a licence for grievance politics, endless box-ticking, and the quiet elevation of certain protected characteristics above all others: identity over ability or need.
Kemi Badenoch was spot on when she observed that public bodies, so fixated on hunting institutional racism, have ended up institutionally incompetent.
How true.
We have watched NHS trusts pour resources into diversity workshops while patient safety languishes. Police forces contort themselves to placate activist cliques even as crime stalks our streets – with the horrific case of Henry Nowak, in which his murderer’s fictitious cries of racism appeared to be put above his dying pleas that he couldn’t breathe, being a shocking and unforgivable example. Schools, meanwhile, push contested gender theories on children in the name of “inclusion”, but teachers feel unable to state biological facts.
Far from delivering genuine equality, the Duty has entrenched a hierarchy with some groups being “more equal than others”, breeding greater inequality and resentment. White working-class boys – once the backbone of our nation – languish at the bottom of every priority list, excluded from certain internships and failed more than any other group in our education system. And free speech withers as public servants bite their tongues, fearful of breaching some vague obligation to “foster good relations.”
None of this is mere philosophical abstraction.
The costs are painfully concrete. Since the Duty’s inception, billions vanish into diversity, equity and inclusion schemes that sow discord rather than deliver results: independent estimates and government figures show over £500m every year is spent on DEI schemes, including over 10,000 dedicated diversity staff. DEI providers make millions as public services focus on ticking boxes over good outcomes and provisions. Able people are passed over for advancement simply because they fail to tick the approved demographic boxes.
Conservative principles should always oppose this top-down social engineering. Our philosophy speaks instead for the common sense of the British people: judge individuals on character and ability, not identity or immutable characteristics. A level playing field, not a score draw every time.
As a woman, I would far rather compete with men on equal terms than spend a career secretly wondering whether I had been ushered through the door merely because of my gender.
I opposed all-women shortlists under David Cameron, and was duly selected against men for a target seat. I knew I was there by merit, not some quota. The true gift of a quota culture and positive discrimination is to undermine those with protected characteristics who genuinely deserve their position. Merit remains the great leveller – it honours effort, talent and achievement without the condescending pretence that some groups require endless ladders as they could not climb unaided. Badenoch demonstrably grasps this truth.
Her announcement marks the first serious step towards overhauling the wider Act. She is right to insist the Equality Act must serve as a “shield, not a sword”. It should protect everyone equally – the white man no less than the black woman, the Christian no less than the atheist, the gender-critical feminist no less than the trans activist. Repealing the PSED will release our public institutions from the statutory duty to play favourites or heed only the loudest voices. No more vacuous virtue-signalling that alienates the very people it claims to champion, and takes valuable resources away from frontline services.
The left will, of course, howl that this is an assault on rights, ‘a sop to bigots’: it is the opposite.
The core protections against discrimination remain untouched. What goes is the bureaucratic canker that has perverted them into instruments of ideological control. As Badenoch wisely noted, common sense can resolve the muddle. We hardly need a sprawling equality industry to remind doctors to treat patients according to medical need or teachers to instil basic respect. Fair play and ‘do unto others as you would have done unto you’ are part of our national identity.
From a Conservative vantage, this reform resonates deeply with those voters who drifted away from the party in recent years, not through any lurch to the extremes but out of sheer exasperation with an establishment that seemed to prize the sensibilities of metropolitan elites and global NGOs over the concerns of the ordinary taxpayer. They crave functioning borders, shrinking NHS queues, and a culture that rewards aspiration rather than one that nurses grievances.
Of course, reform of the Equality Act and its offshoots cannot stop here. The entire Act demands rigorous examination. But it must be reversed, amended and replaced with precision. The wholesale demolition of the entire framework urged by Reform UK may grab public attention but it is ill-considered and would throw out the baby with the bath water. It is exactly this sort of overcorrection that created these bad laws in the first place.
Conservatives have no wish to return Britain to some imaginary era of unchecked prejudice. Rather, the aim is to restore the soundest parts of our liberal tradition: liberty for the individual, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, not outcomes, and the right to hold unfashionable opinions: safeguarding the vulnerable while allowing talent and effort their due reward.
Kemi Badenoch has set out her stall with characteristic directness. The way ahead will not be easy.
There will be legal challenges, predictable media storms and resistance from the usual quarters. But with clear thinking and public support, real progress is possible. Repealing the Duty is an important beginning: a chance to rebuild confidence in our institutions and in the British people’s own sense of fairness. Britain deserves better than equality by quota or division by decree. Britain deserves merit to be rewarded and the chance to thrive, no matter who you are.