Fair play should be at the heart of Brexit Britain

People are prepared to put up with inequality as long as they think everyone has at least a chance to do well

Children often understand things much better than adults; education and maturity lead us to ignore the instincts that drive them straight to the heart of the matter. That may be why it’s taken psychologists decades to accept the essential truth contained in the cry of every outraged sibling: “That’s not fair.”

Fairness matters, and matters more than other things that we sometimes think are more significant. A Yale University paper published this week in the journal Nature argues that though many people like to talk about equality, what we really want is fairness.

This is contentious in psychological circles, because lab tests for decades have suggested that people prefer equality. Ask test subjects to share out money or food and they tend to make sure everyone has the same.

So consistent are those results that some researchers talk about “inequality aversion” as a fundamental psychological force.

But life isn’t a lab. In the lab, subjects are handed resources to share out. In life, we work and compete for what we get, and competition means that some people win and some lose. Having reviewed the real-world evidence, the Nature study concludes that people are quite happy to accept unequal outcomes and live in unequal societies, as long as they think everyone had at least a chance to do well. In other words, as long as things were fair.

The Nature paper was international in scope but I think it has particular relevance to Britain, where fairness is embedded in our thinking and our language. This is the home of fair play, a nation that sees even war as an honourable contest with rules to follow: “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” in Henry Newbolt’s words. YouGov polling bears this out: 71 per cent of Britons believe life should be “fair”, higher even than the 63 per cent of Americans who say the same.

Unlike equality, which economists can measure mathematically, there is no way to capture “fairness” in numbers, or even a single universally accepted definition; like pornography, we simply know it when we see it.

Some politicians have already grasped the importance of fairness. As Home Secretary, Theresa May scrapped much of Labour’s Equality Act and declared that fairness was a more important concept. As Prime Minister, her speeches are peppered with the F-word.

She is alive to the risks that follow if people don’t think things are fair and that, as Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump both suggest, the system is “rigged” unfairly in favour of big business and the rich. That narrative could have real power: YouGov shows only 25 per cent of British people think life is fair.

So ministers are working on a Green Paper on “fair markets”, proposing measures to stop people feeling unfairly treated by firms duping them with low introductory prices that quickly rise, hiding price hikes in complex tariffs or renewing subscriptions by default.

This is vital work. Markets are the best way we know to make everyone richer and more free, but they can and do mean people end up with different amounts of wealth. We can accept that inequality as long as we know the process that led to it was fair. For markets to be politically and socially sustainable, we have to know that everyone in them has the same information and opportunity – that the game was not rigged.

Some people need help to get a fair deal from markets because they lack education or confidence, but this isn’t just about helping the poor or vulnerable. Even people of wealth and sophistication get ripped off: the market for pension savings products is not fair because fund managers’ opaque charges mean buyers cannot make the informed choices that would get them the best deal.

Fairness means politicians concerned about social mobility should beware quotas and other quickfixes that lower the bar for poor, clever kids to get good degrees and good jobs. What’s fair is to give those kids the same tools and aspirations as their richer counterparts, so they can compete equally for the same prizes.

British fair play is often cited by immigrants as a reason to come here to work: unlike other, more avowedly egalitarian nations, this is seen as a place where someone who works hard and plays by the rules can get ahead – and that means ahead of others who don’t do those things.

I believe Britain is better for having a labour market and a society that are open to people from elsewhere, but I know that more must be done to demonstrate that immigration is fair, not least by equipping British workers to feel they can compete with newcomers on a level playing field.

Britain’s sense of fair play (which leads to our strong commitment to the rule of law) is among our greatest assets as we face our post-EU future and vital to our global brand. It should also be the guiding principle for anyone trying to define the political economy of Brexit Britain. James Kirkup is Director of the Social Market Foundation

follow James Kirkup on Twitter @jameskirkup; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion