v.Equality and ‘the market’

One of the reasons commonly given for the promotion of equality and diversity agenda is that it makes economic sense. In a competitive environment one does not want arbitrary and prejudicial practices preventing the selection of the best candidate for a particular role. This may be impeccable market logic, and perfectly fine as far as it goes, but it also raises suspicion of a particular collusion between the way in which equality and diversity is currently conceived and the needs and mechanisms of the Market. For, to put it sharply, while equality within the operation of the Market might be desirable, the Market itself might actually be working against the production of what is genuinely fair.

In contemporary Western society wealth is a conspicuous form of power. More precisely, it helps shape one’s ability to access education, health services, legal representation and advice on minimizing one’s (social) tax liability. In other words, in an unequal society, wealth as power perpetuates and secures advantage. Given this obvious truth, and the current ‘protected characteristics’ strategy in equality and diversity, one has to wonder why it is that socio-economic group is not a protected characteristic. One should not suffer discrimination because of one’s lack of economic or social advantage.

We can go further. Equality needs to be rooted in something which holds transcendentally for all persons. In present secular and multi-faith Britain there is, of course, no consensus on a religiously transcendent underpinning for equality. Yet, there is a transcendent, metaphysical conception of a form of equality that is in common use: money. One person’s pound, be they gay or straight, Muslim or Buddhist, Woman or man, Blind or sighted, is of equal value to anyone else’s. But this one agreed, transcendental signifier of value is not used to support the equality of persons, but rather the reverse: to distinguish between the various values of persons to the economy on the basis of differential wages and incomes.

To argue in this fashion is to make oneself a ‘heretic’ over against the ‘neo-liberal’ economic ‘orthodoxy’ that has held sway since the Ragan and Thatcher era of politics. That a thorough-going market economy generates inequality as a product of wealth-creation is not in dispute. By measure of the Gini coefficient of distribution (where 0 equals perfect equality, and 1 equals the concentration of all wealth in just one household) neo-liberal economic strategies saw an increase in household wealth inequality in Britain from 0.25 in 1979 to 0.37 in 2008. Strikingly, Daniel Dorling in Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, (2010) observes that to find a gap in wealth between the top fifth and bottom fifth of the population as large as it is today one needs to go back to 1854! For many, such a distribution is simply assumed to be the inescapable consequence of economics, a kind of ‘law of nature’, to which there is no alternative. But it is surely legitimate to wonder whether the degree of inequality so generated can be justified against the hoped-for long-term benefits of increasing wealth (and the ‘trickle-down’ to all). Especially when, following the ‘crash’ of 2007/8, the Market was revealed to be in need of Government intervention and support to keep it working. Thus, far from an inevitable ‘law of nature’, its operation was revealed as a human artefact, and product of willed choice.

But the point of our discussion is this: if the present equality and diversity agenda is revealed as serving, rather, than challenging, a robust notion of equality, then the conception of equality with which it works is shown to be partial. At best it concerns the equitable distribution, by ‘protected characterises’, of current social inequality. By contrast the theological conception of equality based on the Gospel goes further and deeper. It concerns the ambition of a fundamental and universal equality rooted in the gift of God. As such, theology need not feel intimidated in making its own case over against a secular pluralism that is in danger of colluding with the inequalities of present capitalism.