On my mind

IT was French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac who pessimistically wrote: “Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact”. I have a feeling he could be right. Remember Orwell’s some equal people being more equal than others?

The fact that the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales has reported the Welsh Government to the Equality and Human Rights Commission over delays to testing in care homes is an example of how big the gap can be between the concept of equality and its delivery, or, in this case, between ‘the science’ and plain common sense.

The powerful rhetoric of ‘Equality’ and equal rights has made it a political slogan since the French Revolution, but it is a slippery concept with many different contexts clamouring for its application. The Equality Act of 2010 includes provisions that ban age discrimination against adults in the provision of services and public functions and there is a real concern that there have been serious breaches in Wales regarding older people and the pandemic.

The UK Government’s initial and timewasting flirtation with the herd immunity thesis - in effect don’t do anything and let the old and the vulnerable die – would have resulted in a disastrous breach of human rights if continued. It highlights a significant feature of ‘equality’, namely human worth and value.

Some people, with their heads in the clouds, think that Covid-19, which has brutally exposed the disdain of political leaders over the past decade to public services, will bring about a re-evaluation of people and occupations according to their contribution to society.

Don’t hold your breath. Even Orwell didn’t have a flying pig. It will take more than a virus to change the dogmas of the old order.

■ Follow Graham on Twitter@GeeTDee