This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Today, I got my job allocation as an incoming doctor. After 9 years studying at Cambridge, a PhD and scholarships … I’ve been placed in Northern Ireland — hours away from any friends or family. So I’ve made the tough decision: I won’t be taking this job. I can’t justify sacrificing my family and my partner of eight years who will now be across the sea for a job that pays £36k.
These are the words of Shirom Chabra, a recent graduate in medicine, as posted a few months ago on Twitter. His situation is the result of a new system brought in last year for allocating “Foundation Year 1” or “F1” positions — the first NHS job freshly minted doctors take after medical school.
F1s can be sent all over the UK, and, naturally, there is more competition for some places than others. Jobs are assigned by an algorithm based on the preferences stated by each candidate. Until recently, candidates were ranked by scores based roughly on academic performance, with those with the highest scores most likely to get their first choice.
But under the new system of “Preference Informed Allocation” (PIA), the academic scoring system is scrapped. Instead, candidates are randomly assigned a rank, and it is those with the highest randomly assigned rank who have the best shot at the top jobs.
Advocates for PIA say that it means a slightly higher proportion of medics get jobs in their first-choice area. The main benefits, though, according to an NHS FAQ page, are that the “removal of competitive elements of the application process” makes allocation “less stressful”, and that it addresses “differential attainment concerns”.
Randomising allocations has obvious negative consequences. When exam success has no influence on your chance of securing a desirable job, there is much less incentive for medical students to work hard and do well. Many top candidates, like Chabra, will naturally decide to take their talents elsewhere — after the taxpayer has spent almost a quarter of a million pounds training them.
It will also make medical school itself a less appealing option. In what other profession could an A-Level student with five STEM A*s go to university, spend six years accumulating debt, work hard and come top of their year, only to be told they are moving to Belfast, like it or not, for a relatively uncompetitive salary? Promising students will not sign up for such an unattractive offer.
All in all, the result will surely be to reduce the calibre of doctors in the NHS. A policy introduced to promote equality — the idea that no medical student should be disadvantaged relative to others on the basis of academic achievement — may end up making us all worse off.
PIA has something in common with other controversial policy decisions in the last few years. In many cases, it seems public bodies have a blinkered focus on equality, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Inequality of outcome is the ultimate injustice, and there is no policy too heavy-handed and no cost too great when seeking to address it.
Some recent equal pay claims illustrate this clearly. It is already illegal to pay men and women differently for the same job. But these cases have gone a step further, arguing it is discriminatory to pay men and women differently for different jobs, if a judge decides the two jobs are of “equal value”.
At clothing retailer Next, predominantly female shop staff complained that their wages were lower than those of predominantly male warehouse staff and that this constituted sex discrimination. People of either sex are of course free to apply to either job — and an economist might point out that if retail staff truly believed warehouse staff got a better deal, they ought to switch.
But most people find the prospect of a physically demanding job which takes place at unsociable hours and in a cold, inconveniently located warehouse, less appealing than one in a comfortable high street shop. It makes sense, therefore, that the market rate for warehouse work would be higher.
However, using a grading table that scores jobs on factors including “planning and organising” and “responsibility for health and safety”, a judge decided that the market was wrong: the two jobs were of “equal value” after all. Next may now have to pay £30 million in compensation.
The mindset behind this is tacitly coercive. If Next is forced to raise the pay of retail staff, what is to stop warehouse staff migrating across to get the same money for what they may perceive as cushier work? Will they be forced to stay in their current jobs against their will? Or will Next be forced to go bust, if they cannot fill necessary roles and cannot raise wages to attract workers to them?
These questions are partially answered by a similar case at Birmingham City Council. Staff in predominantly female roles complained that predominantly male rubbish collectors got a better deal (though again, if they truly believe this, they are free to switch). The council was ordered to give the office workers a pay rise. But, having declared effective bankruptcy in 2023, it couldn’t afford to. The only option, if it was to comply with the law, was to give the bin men a pay cut of up to £6,000 instead. The bin men were understandably put out by this, and, at the time of writing, have been on strike for the last ten weeks. Mounds of stinking, rat-attracting refuse blight the city and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
As if this weren’t bad enough, a new quango — the Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit — has been proposed, which would make policing such claims and “deciding” which jobs are of “equal value” its full-time occupation. Mandatory pay gap reporting may also be extended to cover race and disability as well as sex. This means that if there is a discrepancy in average pay between people of different races in an organisation, the burden of proof would be on the organisation to demonstrate that this is not racist — even though there are plenty of very good reasons for pay gaps of this sort, such as that people of ethnic minorities are on average younger and therefore more junior.
The tyranny of equality is everywhere. Look, for instance, at the Sentencing Council’s draft guideline, released in March this year, which said a pre-sentence report should be “considered necessary” by default when defendants are “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority and/or faith minority community” — in effect, putting a thumb on the scale to make minority defendants potentially less likely to serve custodial sentences for the same crimes.
This guideline was met with severe pushback, including an uncompromising rebuke from Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood. In a statement defending itself, the Sentencing Council explained that the guideline was meant to address “disparities”. In other words, the principle of blind justice may be sacrificed for social manipulation in pursuit of equality.
We can also view some education policies through the lens of equality zealotry. The punitive imposition of VAT on private school fees and the removal of some academy freedoms regarding curriculum, hiring and teacher pay, despite compelling arguments that both might be significantly damaging, could be described as examples of “equalising” at all costs — even at the cost of worsening children’s education. Scotland’s disastrous “curriculum for excellence”, which devalues the learning of facts in favour of skills like “critical thinking”, could be understood as coming from a pro-equality agenda: nobody is more of an authority on concrete matters than anyone else. Anyone can “think critically”. So we are all equally expert.
In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt claims there are five principles that moral intuitions typically rest on: fairness, avoiding harm, loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity (for instance, taboos against desecrating graves). He argues that whilst conservatives value all five principles similarly, liberals typically place much more emphasis on the first two — fairness and avoiding harm.
Nobody can be allowed to feel that they are less intelligent, talented or hard-working
The public sector’s prioritising of equality could perhaps be understood as a bastardised version of liberal morality, where “fairness” means everybody must have the same outcome, whether deserved or not; and “avoiding harm” means nobody can be allowed to feel that they are less intelligent, talented or hard-working than any other person, regardless of whether that is true. In post-religious, post-aspiration Britain, we are not comfortable expressing any values beyond a bland commitment to equality.
Those who worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence sometimes talk about getting “paperclipped”. Imagine you are a superintelligent computer, and you are given a task: make paperclips, as efficiently as possible. Soon you have turned all the materials you were given into a heap of paperclips. But what’s next? You look around. Buildings, cars, aeroplanes — all contain steel that could be used to make more paperclips. Humans, animals and plants contain iron and carbon, which can be used to make more steel for still more paperclips. Nobody ever specified that you shouldn’t pulverise every living thing on the planet — they told you to work as efficiently as possible. Soon, the entire world and everything in it has been transformed into paperclips.
This thought experiment may seem silly, but the tyranny of equality likely arises from a similar process. For whatever reason, the powers-that-be have internalised the idea that inequality must be minimised. There is no active decision that side effects are unimportant; it’s more like a robot blindly carrying out its order. As a result, we all end up paperclipped by equality.
