No equality in opportunity

Traditional Toryism justified social inequality. Old Labour believed in equality of outcomes. But today both parties have eschewed their earlier approaches and aspire instead to "equality of opportunity". For Gordon Brown, it is "the whole of social justice"; indeed equalising opportunity has captured progressive thinking and legislation for the last 30 years.

However, as the report by the National Equality Panel published today makes clear, this approach has failed and needs to be radically called into question. Inequality has risen, not fallen. Over those three decades the net income ratio of the top 10% to the bottom 10% has risen by more than a quarter. Governments have tended to tackle income at the edges with minor acts of benefit increase, but the real unaddressed agenda is wealth and assets, and here the ratio is truly stupendous: the total household wealth of the richest 10% is virtually 100 times that of the poorest 10%. One can only conclude that equality of opportunity is an ­inadequate and incoherent approach.

Why inadequate? Primarily, because it will not benefit most people. By definition, the winners in life are few, the losers several, and the middle the majority. Those who fail to win in the socioeconomic race still make a crucial contribution in doing mundane but necessary jobs. They, as much as the winners, deserve a fulfilling life in accordance with their capacities. But the ­rhetoric of egalitarian opportunity means that ­everyone who doesn't succeed is defined as a failure. Such contempt ­reinforces and repeats inequality.

Why incoherent? Because where opportunity displaces outcome, the accident of birth is treated as if it was entirely analogous to the accident of race or gender. But it is not. Society and government can refuse race or gender prejudice simply by not being prejudicial. But class is not so easy: one can never entirely extract people from their ancestry and upbringing.

These problems reveal a yet deeper incoherence. Equality of opportunity is advanced by those who advocate a meritocracy. But no account of what is objectively valuable for a society based on merit is ever offered. Instead the victors of such social competitions often have no inherent social values at all – look at the vast rewards reaped by the traders in socially useless banks. Equality of opportunity is thus wholly synonymous with a market without morals and a meritocracy without merit.

Paradoxically, what we need is a new synthesis of the traditional left's emphasis on addressing economic inequity and the old right's concern with justified inequality. In terms of the former, it is impossible to provide equal opportunities for children without improving the existing outcomes of the lives of their parents. We need a new political economy that will distribute resources more evenly and give working people greater assets and confidence, thereby ensuring a better start for their children.

The modern left scarcely addresses this need. Instead, by vaguely implying that all inequality is bad, it remains impotent in the face of a persistent inequality that is both merited and unmerited. But common sense tells us that inherited inequality is in part the result of economic injustice and in part the result of disparities of intelligence, skill and application. Currently the left tends to admit the latter truth for future practice, but to deny it in their theoretical account of the past.

It can escape this contradiction by embracing the "old Tory" view that privilege is not just reward for success, but also a way of providing the appropriate resources for the wielding of power linked to virtue. By virtue we mean here a combination of talent, fitness for a specific social role, and a moral exercise of that role for the benefit of wider society.

If we could conceptualise justifiable inequality, the results would ironically be more egalitarian than a vague and hypocritical hostility to any inequality whatsoever. Why so? First, because many current inequalities would turn out to be unjustifiable and so a proper politics for their removal would emerge. Second, because the more we seek to link social and economic prestige with virtue, then the more we can hope for good financial and political leaders ­possessed of compassion and integrity.

The politics of equality of opportunity has licensed ever greater inequality; we need instead a more radical ­economic egalitarianism coupled with the ­recognition of a difference of roles and a hierarchy of excellence.