12 - Equality versus efficiency

Summary

The policy objectives of the 1945 Labour government were, perhaps like all governments, complex and potentially contradictory. This chapter is concerned with the place of equality within that set of objectives, and its relation to the efficiency concerns which, as earlier chapters have emphasised, came to be seen as so important. Lessening inequality was certainly a long-standing general aim of Labour policy. The case for equality had been powerfully argued with both practical trenchancy and ethical force in Tawney's Equality, first published in 1931. This became a standard reference point for much later Labour discussion, including the key works of Dalton and Durbin. But even those who didn't acknowledge Tawney's work saw inequality as central to the socialist project, and with a similar ethical stress: ‘economic inequality is in itself bad. It is bad because it propagates a false scale of values: a false servility on the one hand, and a false compliance on the other. It is impossible to deny that inequality destroys freedom, independence, self-respect and integrity … But besides all this inequality is evil because it is unjust.’

A general predisposition to reduce inequality doesn't go very far in making a practical political programme. But Tawney and those who followed him had a clear, if broad, view about how greater equality was to be achieved. Tawney's ‘strategy of equality’ can be summarised as involving ‘social policies to extend collective provision and equalise opportunities in education, health and housing, of taxation policies to strengthen the position of the worker, and of economic policies to bring the power of private capital under public direction’.