I will not give way, as I am conscious that others wish to speak and I have already given way to the hon. Lady.
The last Labour Government did nothing to address the soaring costs of child care, which is arguably the single biggest practical problem for working women today, so I am delighted that the Government are shortly to announce proposals to address it. These are the policies that will make a real difference in the real world.
Finally, let me touch on a point raised by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. It is about the tendency of those on the left to label and treat any form of ostensibly low representation in one area or one sector or another as inequality, then bluntly equating it with discrimination. This fails to recognise, in the words of the great British liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin, that from
“the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”
That tendency is destined to stoke up social tensions, not to ease them. If we bow to this and go down the path that quotas and positive discrimination tempt us to go down, we will open the floodgates to special interest politics, with every conceivable social group turning every gripe and grievance into an equality issue. We invite lobbying under the Equality Act 2010 based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, faith, age, parenthood and even non-religious beliefs, but for those who bother to look at the Equality Act and at the list and number of protected characteristics, it becomes mind boggling.
Instead of reducing these dividing lines as factors that determine people’s fate in life, we make them decisive. That is a major social mistake and I would argue against it at all costs.
I would like to see us build a meritocratic society where people are not judged according to tick-box criteria—one that recognises that, in a free country, perfect parity of representation is not only utopian, but positively dangerous, and one that in the words of the great Martin Luther King judges people
“based on the content of their character”,
not on race, gender or any other arbitrary social dividing line. This directive is a social engineer’s dream and every meritocrat’s nightmare. I hope we send it back to Brussels and never see it again.
6.16 pm