Dealing with bad arguments can be like playing Whac-A-Mole. Every time a bad argument pops its head up and you smack it with your verbal hammer, another one appears. Dealing with them one by one can be futile. Eventually, you have to ask yourself: where are these moles coming from?
Trying to understand the strange decisions of public authorities in the UK can get frustrating. The scale of their absurdity is often matched only by their volume, which makes them difficult to comprehend, never mind to deal with. But a lot of them develop from the same bad assumptions. A lot of the worst decisions of public authorities in the UK, for example, stem from the belief that equal outcomes are to be expected. Equality is the organic state of human beings, and if outcomes are unequal, that means funny business is afoot.
Take the recent efforts of the Sentencing Council. There are average differences in the extent to which people of different ethnicities are in prison, it tells us, and it is right. Therefore, this must be explained by injustice, and therefore people from ethnic minorities should be treated with greater leniency.
Eh? Where is the evidence for the last two steps? (Actually, as Henry Hill pointed out for The Critic, there is some evidence that jurors, if not judges, discriminate against white people.) Perhaps it sounds like I am not being fair in my paraphrasing, so check out this quote from the Judicial College’s Equal Treatment Bench Book, which the Sentencing Council uses as a reference:
It recognised that there remains an overrepresentation of ethnic minority people within the criminal justice system and disparities in aspects of their treatment. For example, ethnic minority groups continue to be more likely to be remanded in custody at the Crown Court and remain considerably less likely to plead guilty, so ending up with longer than average sentence lengths if found guilty.
This is an interesting fact and one that I am sure could be addressed to some extent. But even the idlest readers surely understand that this does not describe a disparity in the treatment of criminals but a disparity in their behaviour. If ethnic minority people are less likely to plead guilty, that does not mean they face a disadvantage — it means that they impose a disadvantage on themselves.
In Birmingham, trash is piling up in the streets as refuse workers have gone on strike. Rats are terrorising England’s second largest city. Birmingham Council is on its financial knees after thousands of employees from predominantly female professions, like teaching assistants and catering staff, protested that it was unfair that binmen were being given bonuses while they were not. Birmingham Council paid out hundreds of millions of pounds — bankrupting itself.
As an opinion columnist, of all things, I am the last person who should fail to acknowledge the importance and difficulty of teaching and catering. But teaching assistants and caterers don’t have to be out in the cold and rain scraping used condoms off the bottom of bins. It sounds plausible that it is a bit easier to employ them. Certainly, it does not seem obvious to me that we should expect people to be paid the same.
Finally, the Telegraph is reporting that Westminster Council has continued to twist itself into institutional knots “to raise the proportion of global majority employees, including senior managers, to match the 45 per cent in the borough’s resident population”. Allegedly, a “privilege test” has been given to staff to root out “unconscious bias”, with questions including “I think twice about calling the police when trouble occurs” (my understanding is that all London residents think twice about calling the police when trouble occurs, because it is usually a total waste of time).
I’ve already commented on the insidious and irrational concept of the “global majority”. But why should we expect the Council’s staff to reflect the demographics of the borough? Ethnic minority people are less likely to be permanent residents, with Westminster being in the top 1 per cent of local authorities when it comes to the proportion of residents who do not identify as being British, while others are liable to be newcomers who are not able or inclined to jump into local politics. A lower proportion of ethnic minority people on the Council’s staff is completely predictable. Reaching its goal depends on preposterous institutional contortions.
Of course, none of this is to claim that unfair inequalities cannot exist. If, in a half marathon, runners with brown eyes had to carry bags of rocks and runners with blue eyes did not, it would take an idiot — or maybe someone with blue eyes — to claim that it was fair. Injustice is always a possibility.
But the British state too often acts as if it would conclude that lighter people tending have better times than heavier people must be a result of structural bias. Inequalities are not necessarily unjust. They are often underpinned by nuanced and complicated cultural, institutional and biological factors. Sometimes, we will find a means of closing gaps. Sometimes, we will not.
Sometimes, we should not. If male cricket players are being paid less than female cricket players, for example, it is not just obvious that this can be reduced to structural discrimination rather than organic appeal, it is not obvious that the authorities should intervene rather than letting people watch, and pay for, what they like. To use a more dramatic example, Belarus has lower income inequality than Poland. Where would you prefer to work?
Again, I am not denying that inequalities can be wrong — and, indeed, evil. But “inequality”, “disadvantage” and “disparity” should not be invoked like sacred concepts, beyond questioning or analysis. Thinking otherwise has brought a lot of equality into British people — it has made British officials equally terrible.
