Equality reimagined

How many laws introduced down the years have been used in ways never intended by Parliament, often causing greater harm than the injustices they were supposed to address? One example is the Equality Act of 2010, promulgated by the last Labour government to widen statutory protection from discrimination in the workplace. A report today from the Policy Exchange think tank shows how this otherwise well-meaning measure has become a means of stifling freedom of expression by “incentivising ideological uniformity”.

Paul Yowell, associate professor of law at Oxford University, says public and private bodies interpreting the act’s provisions have tended to consider discrimination “not as something that someone intends to do but as a product of unconscious or subconscious bias”. This has had a baleful impact on workplace relationships, with people facing disciplinary action or even dismissal for voicing opinions that are considered to show such subliminal bias, whether intended or not.

Prof Yowell says the prohibition on discrimination in the act should be amended to clarify the conditions under which direct discrimination can be found and to make intent, not unconscious bias, the test of any breach.

The Policy Exchange report also proposes amending the Public Sector Equality Duty so that the requirement to consider how institutional policies affect those protected by the Equality Act stresses the need for tolerance of differing political, philosophical, and religious opinions, especially in educational institutions.

This is a sensible approach that might help to restore some rationality to the whole question of freedom of expression in universities and elsewhere. It would require just a few legislative changes. The Government should get on with them.