Labour draws up equality law revamp that will inflict ‘socialism’ on Britain

[IwantToRetire]

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is drawing up new statutory guidance that critics say amounts to a “war on the middle class”.

Under the plans, public sector bodies will have a new “socio-economic duty” imposed on them, meaning that all decisions they make must strive to reduce inequality in society.

The policy would lead to benefits claimants and deprived families being prioritised for taxpayer-funded services, with the middle classes pushed to the back of the queue, according to the Conservatives.

The socio-economic duty has been dubbed “Harman’s law” after Baroness Harman, the former Labour deputy leader who originally brought it in as part of the Equality Act in 2010.

It included a clause that required public bodies to “have due regard to the desirability of exercising [their functions] in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”.

The Tories kept the Act when they won the election later that year, but scrapped the socio-economic element, with Theresa May, then home secretary, describing it as “ridiculous”.

Full article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/03/29/labour-equality-law-revamp-inflict-socialism-britain/

And at https://archive.is/397ko

Oh here we go.

What'll we bet that this turns out to have the practical effect of removing women's sex based rights? No wonder Bridge has been sitting on the SCJ guidance. This one will cancel it out.

Can I self-identify as deprived?

Seems pretty unshocking to me, especially as it is simply reintroducing a requirement that was already present in the law and was zapped by the Tory Austerity crowd.

They were told it was release the guidance - which has to comply with the law - or re write the Equality Act.

I'll bet that's going on beneath this aspect. It would be the kind of deceit and dishonesty that is becoming this government's trade mark.

Jesus Christ, favouring the people with least? Who on earth would be in favour of that...

Hmm it sounds like Labour are planning to table an amendment/ add an additional public sector duty to the EQA. But it is the job of the EHRC to issue statutory guidance?

it would explain why the amended guidance has been sat on for such a long time.

Would they try and sneak in changes to protected characteristics affected by the FWS SC ruling, as they have not consulted on this.

having said that if they are planning major amendments to sex based rights that would explain the foot dragging by the statutory sector and local government bodies.

So we will see.

The article states, “In practice, they warn that this could lead to middle-class families being discriminated against when it comes to school places, police resources and hospital and GP appointments.”
So the very people who pay for all this will not be able to avail themselves of state services. What, I wonder, will happen when all those who pay in decide they have had enough, and take their money and talents elsewhere? Already, there is a worrying exodus of young, qualified people. If I were the government, I would be most concerned about the fact that “In the UK, approximately 46.7% of individuals live in households that are net contributors—meaning they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits—as of the financial year ending (FYE) 2024, according to Office for National Statistics data” - which means more than half live in households that take more than they contribute.

Well the principle of making a more equal society and ensuring that those at the bottom have food, warm safe housing , and a chance improve their life seems a good thing to me

and yes you have to take from the top sometimes
and yes the middle may see the gap between middle and bottom reduces - although for real equality its the gap between top and bottom that matters - and I guess that’s what’s scaring the toffs and so the want to make sure everyone is scared

Good. Well done Starmer.

Does Starmer really want to gift the next GE to Reform?
Because if every public body is going to effectively be obliged to bias towards one group over another, with the group biased against already paying thru the nose for worse and worse services and outcomes, expected in the next few years to pay more and more for less and less, then a complex and ultimately fragile social bond is broken.
And Reform will be able to argue that equalities legislation is pure social engineering. And win on a platform of rolling it back.
Lob in the hand grenade that trans identities will be positioned as most vulnerable in society, least free and socially mobile, most prejudiced against, thus needing maximum protections.
No wonder Phillipson has been treading water on the SC ruling for over a year now.
Hang on in there, Bridget, hang on in there...

According to AI (which I know some dont like) but its summary is as valid as the Telegraph effectively, does say:

Recent and proposed amendments to the UK Equality Act 2010 focus on strengthening employee protections, addressing 2024 Brexit-related legal shifts, and updating guidance on sex and gender. Key changes include mandatory employer duties to prevent sexual harassment (Oct 2024), inclusion of breastfeeding as sex discrimination, and increased protection for pregnant workers

which refers to updating guidance on sex and gender which I didn't see in the article. Very suspicious.

But as with all of this, I suspect the implementation will be the problem.

And no doubt the Telegraph slant on the middle class is to distract from those really wealthy people who have experts to help them evade tax.

Many people (and campaign groups) have calculated that increasing at the top end would raise anything round £24 billion pa.

But Labour wouldn't dare do that.

I see what you did there! 😄

I do not usually engage to much with political posts, because i am a homeless socialist.

I found as i have gotten older that i recognise the whole omnicause stuff, i find myself often not agreeing with either side on certain issues (where there are sides) and having no alternative solution to mind.

For example the Palestinian situation.

But on this post i would like to suggest that a large proportion of people receiving benefits are in work.

the issue to me is low wages especially for city dwellers and service sector workers.

I think Churchill once said that businesses who cannot afford to pay a decent wage have no business being in business.

Yep, this is how they will get around the Supreme Court ruling. They won't do it in isolation but they'll hide it in a raft of equalities legislation updates. They will make the excuse of not approving the EHRC guidance because of upcoming Equalities updates. And they won't have thought any more deeply about defining terms like gender or what exactly makes someone a transwoman. They have learnt nothing and listened less. The entire culture war is of the left's making. Sowing the seeds of an inevitable backlash.

I dont think this is about benefits, although agree that despite what talk tv and the red tops like to scream about, ie that most go to people in work. ie taxes are being used to prop up employers who are under paying staff, or putting them on temporary contracts to avoid in work benefits.

What this about is rationing. I assume Labour is hoping that the middle class, will then for instance go private.

Rather than having a discussion about how the state cant manage the business of governing the country so that the system works they get us to fight with each other rather than them.

And even though there is waste, and frivilous projects, the over all problem is that as much to do with how we conduct business and organise public services, we cant provide at the level most have come to expect.

And part of that is us as consumers. We have adopted as US like style that you life to make money to buy things. But then because we cant afford to pay the actual cost turn a blind eye that a lot of what we consume has been made by underpaid staff, or manufactured overseas in quite often terrible conditions.

And thanks to Thatcher's asset stripping of the country's resources eg selling off housing, the railways, water, etc., a lot of money that could stay within the UK in fact goes into the pockets of companies and individuals based over seas.

We no longer have an empire giving us at below market value the resources that allowed us to eat more cheaply and manufacture more cheaply.

Much as I think politicians are pretty useless, we are also the problem because we keep thinking somehow there is money of the magic money tree.

And we want more of this mythical money.

Just as Trump's mad armed aggression has shown we dont even have any navy vessels in working order to join with "allies". We had to borrow a ship of the Germans!

That's how short of money we are.

Quite honestly if we had a referendum and decide that GB was going to retire from Global politics, and return to peasant farming and street trading we might just scrape through!

But try telling your children and grand children then cant have a consumer focused life, even though many in other countries already dont.

Re short of only, there is always money for armaments and privatised projects.

money not only!

Yes but the guidelines are just in addition to the law. The tell me like I’m 5 bit. After stonewall spread their shite everywhere. The law is the law.

He sees the Green Party as the bigger immediate threat than Reform, because if they do well at Labour's expense in the May elections then Starmer is out. By going far left he thinks he's taking them on and making it too difficult for Labour to oust him and replace him with someone seen as more left wing.

It's entirely performative, but the result will be detrimental to the electorate and he'll still lose his job anyway.

Given the largest statistical actual risk to children from a safeguarding pov is poverty, I don’t see how anyone here can’t see that this is the purpose.

They’re not re writing any laws clarified by the SC judgement here.

Yup.

I’m not so sure.

Quite a lot of really good child centred policies were swiped away by the tories when the got in.

The greens are indeed a worrying problem. The entryism is out of control there.

Don’t forgot that the telegraph is the Tory loudspeaker and they are trying to get people back to them too.

I'm not sure why this shift in the Equality Act is provoking so much fear here. Surely in an era of increasing socio-economic inequality and decreased social mobility, it is a good thing that public bodies should be required to assess the impact of their policies in relation to this?

I do understand, of course, that among feminists there is a huge amount of mistrust of the government, because of its obstruction of the guidance relating to sex. But I'm not convinced that this newly resurrected duty is connected with that.

It seems pretty amazing that this socio-economic duty was ever removed -- and you can see what an embarrassment it would have been to the Tories as they collaborated in eroding a whole load of services in the name of austerity. When services collapse (schools, provision for special educational needs, policing, early years childcare, healthcare, etc etc) it is very often the poorest who are impacted the most, and the abolition of the socio-economic duty helped to make those impacts go unassessed and unaddressed.

Maybe there is a overlap with people very concerned about "sex related issues" (read: trans stuff) and those who are are fearful of equality

I got things a bit wrong in my previous post - the duty wasn't abolished, it was simply never 'commenced'. The act has always provided for this duty to be implemented, but successive Tory govts refused to, because it was an embarrassment to their mission of eroding services.

It looks like one of the factors behind the renewed push to commence it is the findings of the Covid inquiry, which showed how the differential effects on people of the pandemic were shaped by socio-economic inequality.

Assessing inequality isn't 'socialism'. It is a pragmatic part of the self-monitoring of any efficient and principled government.

And although the duty is embedded in the Ewuality Act, I don't think that it has bearings on the current failure to implement guidance relating to single-sex spaces. It's not as if the duty makes poverty a protected characteristic -- it is a different dimension of the act.

There is useful info about the duty here: https://justfair.org.uk/campaigns-2/1forequality/