Truss: Focus on trendy issues means poor children suffer
She blasts Left for tackling race and gender but not class divide
LIZ Truss yesterday condemned the focus on race, gender and sexuality which has left white workingclass children neglected.
The women and equalities minister said Whitehall had focused too much on these ‘fashionable’ issues and not enough on geography and class.
She dismissed quotas, targets and unconscious bias training as ‘tools of the Left’ that ‘do nothing to fix systems’.
And she vowed that in future, ministers will promote opportunity by tackling poverty and the North-South divide as part of Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ agenda.
Her remarks were labelled ‘gratuitous provocation’ by Labour and she was accused of offering a ‘false choice’ by unions.
They come after a number of ministers voiced fears over the Black Lives Matter movement, saying it has become politicised and does not aid racial harmony. In her speech yesterday, Miss Truss – who is also International Trade Secretary – called for the equality issue to be ‘led by facts, not by fashion’ as she said the debate had been ‘narrowed’.
While she conceded that people of certain races, genders and sexualities suffered discrimination, she said these were not the only forms of bias.
She said that the focus on protected characteristics, laid out in the 2010 equality Act, ‘has led to a narrowing of the equality debate that overlooks socio-economic status and geographic inequality’.
‘This means some issues – particularly those facing white working-class children – have been neglected,’ she said. Her speech to the Right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, called The New Fight For Fairness, outlined an approach rejecting ‘identity politics and loud lobby groups’.
‘It will focus fiercely on fixing geographic inequality, addressing the real problems people face, using evidence and data,’ she said. ‘If you were born in Wolverhampton or Darlington, you have been underserved by successive governments. No more. Things must change and things will change.’
‘This new approach to equality will run through the DNA of this Government.’
She said that the equality Hub, an arm of the Cabinet office which will be moved to the North of england, will ‘embark on the
Government’s biggest, broadest and most comprehensive equality data project yet’. Asked about the comments focusing on class over race and sex, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: ‘I don’t believe there’s a suggestion that we will stop focusing on those issues.’
Labour’s women and equalities spokesman Marsha de Cordova said: ‘When Liz Truss dismisses “fashionable” causes she
‘Identity politics and loud lobby groups’
actually dismisses the devastating impact of discrimination and unfairness in people’s day-to-day lives.’
Frances o’Grady, of the Trades Union Congress, said Miss Truss was ‘presenting a false choice’. ‘Ministers must both tackle the barriers facing today’s diverse working class, and act to end the additional discrimination and disadvantage affecting BMe, women and disabled workers,’ she added.