Health, Status, Wealth & Income. by Les May

I HAVE little doubt that various groups will pounce on aspects of the recent report by UCL Institute of Health Equity and commissioned by the Health Foundation to investigate how the pandemic has affected health inequalities in England, in order to promote their own agenda. Calling yourself a ‘community’ isn’t a particularly good fig leaf for hiding naked self interest.

But as Professor Kate Pickett, co-author of the book ‘The Spirit Level’ pointed out in a recent BBC interview, it tells us nothing new. Health inequalities arising from differences in social status, wealth and income were reported on in detail by Sir Michael Marmot in 2008 and again in 2020. A Covid-19 mortality 25% higher in Greater Manchester than in England as a whole is just a further example of how these inequalities affect longevity and years of life without disability.

In my N.V. article ‘Levelling The Gradient’ of 16 June 2020 I drew attention to the fact that there is little appetite in the UK for recognising the effects of our very unequal society on the lives of our citizens, irrespective of their skin colour. When the 2020 Marmot review which looked at differences in health outcomes appeared it had zero impact on the campaign for Labour leader though two of the candidates felt that a Jewish pressure group and a ‘trans’ pressure group needed their public support. That review simply referred to ‘people’; not ‘black’ people, not ‘brown’ people, not ‘minority ethnic’ people, just people. So lets forget all this talk about ‘my community’ and concentrate on eliminating the disparity of a life expectancy at birth in 2016-18 for men living in the most deprived areas in England of 74 years, compared with 83 years in the least deprived areas; the corresponding figures for women are 79 and 86 years.

The full title of Pickett’s well researched book is ‘The Spirit Level; why equality is better for everyone’. It was published in 2009 and in a slightly revised edition in 2010. You can find it for about £4 at abebooks.co.uk.

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Margaret Hodge's ‘Irrelevant Man’ by Les May

IN an article I wrote for NV in February of this year I said:

‘Last year I attended a Labour party supporting discussion group. Everyone who attended was aware that the constant barrage of articles in the press on the squabbling within the Labour party about anti-semitism, was simply serving to distract attention from Labour’s policy proposals. One of the people who attended had first hand experience of the disciplinary procedures within the party because they had been subjected to an investigation. One outcome of this was that they had been told they must not discuss any aspect of the investigation or procedures with third parties. Secret procedures like this seem to me to have all the hallmarks of a ‘Star Chamber’, so after the discussion group wound up I approached the person involved, told them I wrote for NV and asked if they would speak to me if I gave them an assurance that I would ensure that they could not be identified, and a veto on the use any articles I wrote about their experiences.

'We agreed to exchange telephone numbers and e-mail addresses as we lived some distance apart. I said I would contact the person after they returned from holiday. When I did the person said they had had second thoughts because even with my assurances of anonymity and a final veto, they were still scared that they would be ejected from the Labour party if it came to light that they had talked to anyone about what their experiences. It does not seem an exaggeration to say they had been traumatised by their experience.’

As I have no reason to doubt the veracity of what I was told I find it difficult to understand how anyone can claim that allegations of anti-semitism were not taken seriously by the Labour party.

Taken at its face value, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn suggests that the findings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are being treated by the Labour party as something which cannot be questioned.

This is a dangerous road to travel. The EHRC is not a court. Its findings apply to bodies, not individuals, something which is much easier to ‘prove’ because individuals are protected by the rules of evidence whereby those accused can cross-examine the witness.

By definition ‘unlawful acts of discrimination and harassment’ are against individuals and as the adage goes “where there’s blame, there’s a claim”. In coming months are we going to be treated to the spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn fighting for his political reputation, and in many ways his political legacy, alongside the unedifying sight of individuals suing the Labour party for compensation and citing the EHRC report as evidence?

Figuring out whether Corbyn’s suspension and potential expulsion from the Labour party has an impact on membership won’t be easy due to its complicated support structure of ‘full members’, ‘affiliated supporters’ and ‘registered supporters’. In August 2015, prior to Corbyn’s election to the leadership the Labour Party reported 292,505 full members. In December 2017 this figure had risen to about 552,000 full members making it Britain’s most financially well party at the time. Perhaps Margaret Hodge’s ‘irrelevant man’ won’t prove to be so irrelevant after all.

Today, Saturday, speaking on the BBC News programme ‘Dateline London’ the political presenter Jo Coburn raised the question of whether if, in response to the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party, some unions reduced their financial support, Keir Starmer might be quite happy to see their influence wane. Coburn is asking the wrong question. As I point out in the last paragraph, the number of full members of the Labour party almost doubled in the two years after Corbyn’s election to the leadership. The right question is whether Labour can afford to dispense with the unions and Corbyn at the same time. Corbyn has asked his supporters to stay in the party; they may not feel they any longer have a home there.

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British Elites Know Who Isn’t Quite Their Type

The term “posh” appeals to foreigners, but the British know there are teeth underneath the smile.

As a British journalist living abroad, I get asked many questions, from the role of the queen to the peculiarities of Parliament. But one theme comes up again and again: poshness. What does it really mean? What’s posh, and what isn’t? Outsiders think they know the term, but they don’t understand it viscerally. And they often miss that when the British deploy the term, it comes with an edge whetted on the stone of class.

Understanding poshness matters, especially since it is in the air again: Like the damp in an old country house, it never truly goes away. And it’s back now with the current British prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an alumni of Eton College, the University of Oxford, and the Bullingdon Club. It can be seen plainly in the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose aristocratic self-fashioning is so risibly parodic he’s been labeled the “honorable member for the 18th century.”

Americans, in particular, lap it up. The notion of poshness seems to stir in them a kind of longing for the orderly hierarchies of the old world. They think of it as classy. They chuckle at those Brits and their cute accents, or they gasp in admiration or bewilderment at Downton Abbey. In fact, outsiders everywhere seem to admire it—but they miss the underlying complexities of class, and, as a result, they misunderstand Britain.

Poshness has frayed and faded over the years, but it lives on in a series of customs and habits, many of them inherited from feudal times: riding to hounds; murdering pheasants, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, and really anything with a pulse in the right season; drinking too much wine; and occasionally bonking each other’s spouses. It’s an attitude better suited to times of indulgence than ones of moral rectitude; the Victorian era, with its great surge of the middle class, was distinctly anti-posh, until it swung back the other way with the bulgy sybarite Edward VII.

More than anything else, to be posh is to reside at the top end of an ancient caste system. This is what outsiders all too often miss about class. They admire the aesthetics and the charm of what appears posh but miss the unforgiving social stratification that class imposes on Britain.

Johnson is the 20th prime minister to have attended Eton—a single astonishingly dominant school. Under Boris and his Etonian predecessor David Cameron, homelessness in the United Kingdom nearly tripled. Posh people, meanwhile, still own much of the country. Research published in 2019 found that some 25,000 people—and a few corporations—own more than 50 percent of land in the U.K. The Duke of Buccleuch’s estates, for example, extend to nearly half a percent of the entire country. And even when working-class people break into the professions, they earn 17 percent less a year than their posh contemporaries.

At the core of poshness is a network, a tapestry of titled aristocrats, gentry, and the fanciest of the upper-upper-middle classes. They attend the same schools (Eton, Harrow, Downe House, Marlborough, Winchester) and universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bristol, St. Andrews) and eventually intermarry to keep the whole show on the road. Poshness derives much of its power from educational hegemony. Even as the number of privately educated pupils at Oxbridge has declined, the grip of the elite high schools has tightened. A 2018 report revealed that eight top schools in the U.K. get as many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge as three-quarters of all schools and colleges put together.

And that’s key to poshness: It’s not just about money. It’s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “the right kind of person.” Poshness usually comes with wealth but not always. You can be posh but not rich, though it’s difficult to sustain indefinitely, and you can certainly be rich but not posh. Self-made moguls such as Philip Green (of Topshop) and Alan Sugar (of Amstrad) are seen as decidedly gauche. What poshness guarantees is access to wealth, even when you’re broke: the ability, for example, to bum around friends’ house parties and borrow holiday homes in Italy or France. And it can catapult you into the top; going to the right school makes you 94 times more likely to reach the country’s professional elite.

Posh is also an aesthetic, the original shabby chic—one that signals not just possession of land but also the antiquity and confidence of its ownership. Grand houses, yes, but with fraying rugs and dreadful central heating, full of tweed jackets and Wellington boots that don’t belong to anyone in particular but line up muddily by the front door for whoever is nominated to take the dogs out.

Poshness is a voice, sometimes described as cut glass—pronounced clearly and carefully. And with the voice comes a dialect: Say loo, not toilet; scent, not perfume; and napkin, not serviette. The forbidden terms are French and thus associated with middle-class social climbers striving to use seemingly classy language.

Many foreigners think posh is a compliment, but only posh people view it as such—and even then not always. Everyone else in Britain uses it as an insult. To be called posh outside of the houses of the posh is to be called spoiled, entitled, or pretentious.

The British monitor class carefully. And maybe that gives them an edge, a certain realism, especially over their trans-Atlantic cousins. Class is not the story America chooses to tell about itself today. People don’t write about it. They don’t make movies about it. The national myth is founded on the idea of freedom, wealth, and opportunity unshackled from the conventions of the old world. And if one doesn’t like that story, well, then there’s a far gloomier one to tell about racial oppression and native genocide. Class doesn’t usually come into it, much as the British often overlook race.

But when you examine the numbers, the British have a slight edge on social mobility over Americans. A child born into a family in the bottom 20th percentile of income levels has an 11.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20th percentile in the U.K.—as compared with a 7.8 percent chance in the United States. Tellingly, Americans are much more likely to overestimate social mobility in their country, even though the middle class has grown in Britain while it has shrunk in the United States. Much of Britain’s relative success on that front has been driven by traditional equalizers such as universal health care and low-cost higher education. Yet those systems were in fact created in part because of poshness—the middle-class politicians who created them despised and campaigned against the aristocracy. So too, ironically enough, was the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s—a grocer’s daughter who taught herself a posh accent but whose contempt for antique institutions was legendary. A country that thinks about class so obsessively also understands its power better.

The specifics of British poshness might be unique, but to understand its core, take a look at the people who have power almost anywhere in the world—and examine whose kids they are and what schools they went to. They might speak with a different accent, be less charming, and have less of a fondness for dogs and horses—but they will likely embody the inherited privilege that comes with being posh.

Josh Glancy is the Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Times. Twitter: @joshglancy.

Foreign Policy

Published from Foreign Policy & the George Orwell facebook page

Sex Equality Means Just That,

 No Ifs No Buts

By Les May

IT’S A WEEK since, in giving a ruling brought by women attempting to have the pension age for them restored to 60, two judges of the High Court, Lord Justice Irwin and Mrs Justice Whipple, referred to ‘historic direct discrimination against men’.

Yet in the past seven days I have come across numerous extracts from newspaper columns and long ‘letters to the editor’ written by women continuing to complain that the pension age for them has been raised and trying to suggest that in some way this is ‘unfair’.

But it is also true that I have not seen any columns or letters written by men drawing attention to the fact that the pension rules prior to 2018 did amount to discrimination against men and that the judges also ruled ‘this legislation does not treat women less favourably than men in law‘.  Not only did women receive their pension earlier, but they were, and still are, likely to receive the pension for longer as on average women tend to outlive men.

Too many women claim that any comment by men about the way they are treated should be dismissed as ‘backlash’ or ‘mansplaining’.  Too many men seem to be unwilling to be assert that they too should be treated equally. I’m not one of them.  Are you?

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A Rat’s Nest of Contradictions

by Les May

SOMETIME this month draft guidelines drawn up by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are expected to be sent to English and Welsh schools.  The Scottish government cancelled what are assumed to be similar guidelines in June.

A leak of the new guidelines suggests that schools would be advised and sometimes required to open areas of school life that have previously been treated as separate on the basis of sex to children who identify as that gender.  A boy who identifies as a female would be allowed to use girls’ changing rooms and on school trips could legally be placed in the same bedroom as a girl, and vice versa.

A women’s advocacy group, Fair Play for Women, has argued that whilst the EHRC guidelines consistently protect children who identify as ‘trans-gender’ equal weight has not been given to protecting girls. They go on to say it must be made explicit that sex and gender identity are different, and that it is important that girls to be able to recognise and name the male sex as otherwise the right of girls to assert their boundaries, e.g. with regard to touching, is taken away.

See also:

http://data.parliament.uk/WrittenEvidence/CommitteeEvidence.svc/EvidenceDocument/Women%20and%20Equalities/Enforcing%20the%20Equality%20Act%20the%20law%20and%20the%20role%20of%20the%20Equality%20and%20Human%20Rights%20Commission/written/90972.html

Under the guidelines if a girl feels uncomfortable that a child she identifies as a boy, but who self identifies as a girl, is using a girls’ changing room then it is the girl who feels awkward who must go and change elsewhere, not the boy.

In 2018-19 the number of children, some as young as three (3), identifying as ‘trans-gender’ was 2,590 according to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of the NHS.   This is 30 times (3000%) more than ten years ago. A governor of the NHS trust under which GIDS operates resigned this year concerned about the ‘affirmative model’ used by GIDS too quickly leads to the prescription of puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones.  He also suggested that in some cases the difficulties which some children have, and which become identified as being about gender identification, may in fact be because they have become aware of their sexual orientation. In common parlance ‘they are gay’. This suggestion deserves serious consideration.

When the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee took evidence for their report, Enforcing the Equality Act: the law and the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission it received submissions from members of the public. Two of these were:

‘We desperately need legal clarity on the terms ‘transgender’ ‘transsexual’,

and ‘gender reassignment’—I think [the] way they are currently being

used, and the way the [Equality Act] interacts with the GRA 2004, is being

abused, misused, misapplied and misrepresented.’

‘The combined effect of the [Gender Recognition

Act] and the [Equality Act] is to conflate sex and gender irretrievably, and what remains is a rat’s nest of contradictions, where sex-based rights cannot be properly invoked.’ (My emphasis)

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/women-and-equalities-committee/news-parliament-2017/equality-act-role-of-ehrc-report-published-17-19/

I agree entirely with the two submissions quoted above. The media use the word ‘trans’ and ‘trans-gender’ interchangeably and with no clarity about what is meant when they are used. Ditto when ‘non-binary’ and ‘gender fluid’ are used. This makes the situation more opaque when clarity is what is needed.

As the law stands schools have to provide lunchtime meals suitable for Muslim children. If the guidelines soon to be issued by the EHRC are enacted Muslim girls could find themselves sharing a bedroom with someone they, and their and other parents, identify as a boy.   Expect trouble!

My apologies to rats everywhere for dragging them into the ‘trans’ argument. You deserve better.

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Income and Wealth. It’s a Carve Up

by Les May

THERE are estimated to be about 50 million adults, i.e. persons aged 18 or over, in the UK.   Based upon a sample 13,000 people the Financial Conduct Authority has identified a half of all adults, 25 million people, as potentially vulnerable to a change in circumstances.  About 13 million adults are considered to be just ‘surviving’ and at high risk of falling into financial difficulties. A similar number have been overdrawn in the past year and about 3 million have used an unauthorised overdraft.  For about the same number of adults expensive ‘pay day loans’ are the only way to make ends meet.  Seven million homeowners say they would struggle to pay if their mortgage rose by £100 a month.  A half of people who rent say they would struggle if their rent rose by less than £100 a month.

This is the bleak picture which emerges when one looks at the balance between income and expenditure.  A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) has shown a similarly bleak picture with regard to the distribution of wealth in this country.

A quarter of adults have less than a £1000 in savings and one in eight adults have no cash savings whatsoever.  The wealthiest 10% of households own 45% of the country’s wealth and the least wealthy 50% own just 9%.  In cash equivalent terms that’s an average of £1,320,000 owned by each of the wealthiest 10% and an average of £3,200 by the bottom 50%. So much for the Tory vision of a ‘property owning democracy’ and of wealth ‘cascading down the generations’.

The picture all these numbers paint is that the UK is a country of vast inequality.  But if you are reeling at the onslaught of the numbers from these two reports don’t worry, you are unlikely to see much said about them in the press, even by those columnists and who like to style themselves a being ‘of the left’.  And of course some Labour politicians have far too much to worry about to bother their pretty little heads about something so mundane as inequality.

In the past ten days my paper has contained something about Harvey Weinstein on nine of them. Even the Radio Times got in on the act with a story about how an actress I had never heard of had been asked to audition in a bikini. Shock horror! There was me thinking that these women were all shrinking violets who shunned publicity.

Now I don’t doubt that there are men in the film business who think that ‘get your kit off’ is a chat up line. But if it offends you there is always the option of walking away.  And if think that will damage your career, then it’s decision time; career or virtue.  Yes it’s about power, but as Shakespeare didn’t quite put it, ‘Caesar would not be a wolf if the Romans were not sheep’.  As I said, it’s decision time ladies.

When I read stories like this the question I ask myself is ‘am I bovered’. The answer is ‘No!’.  Why should I concern myself with the goings on of a privileged few when I live in a country where 10% of the population each have 400 times the individual wealth of more than half of the rest of us?  Or when 3 million people have to take out ‘pay day loans’ at outrageous interest rates because they haven’t got a few hundred pounds in savings when a minor crisis arises.  What ‘power’ do these people have? What power has someone on a zero hours contract?

Yet the outrage is all about the dodgy goings on in Hollywood.  It’s certainly not about inequality. How many actresses have been propositioned in the US and UK I don’t know, but I can say with some certainty it won’t be in the millions.

Why is it that the Left is so unwilling to show its outrage at the inequity of British society?  Why is it that Harriet Harman, one time Deputy Leader of the Labour party, can seriously think that the biggest problem faced by society is that there aren’t any ‘whistle blowing hotlines’, so that women can complain about the Harvey Weinsteins of this world?  And just to remind you; Harman is the woman who urged Labour MPs not to oppose a Tory bill to cut benefits.

I’m still waiting for an answer to the question I posed in a recent NV article.

‘Why is it that people, and not just young people with their demands for ‘safe spaces’ and the like, cannot resist sniffing out and condemning anything they think smells of racism, sexism or homophobia, yet don’t show the same enthusiasm for combatting the rise in vast inequalities in both income and in wealth, the growth of zero hours contracts, the receding possibility that they will be able to live a dignified and not poverty filled old age, the demonisation of the poor as work shy scroungers, the lack of social housing and the increasing proportion of household income that is going to a new rentier class?’

I’m not looking to Harriet for an answer or to any of those columnists who style themselves as ‘of the Left’.

The National Trust in Totalitarians Times

VOLUNTEERS at Felbrigg Hall, a Norfolk property owned by the National Trust, were being dragooned last week into wearing gay pride type badges.  It has been reported that dozens of unpaid guides have either refused to do so or quit the job.

The disgruntled volunteers are protesting against the requirement they wear the gay rainbow badges as part of the Felbrigg Hall commemorative season entitled 'Pride & Prejudice' to mark 50 years since homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967. 

Annabel Smith, head of volunteering and participation development at the Trust, has said volunteers sign up to the organisation's 'founding principles' of promoting equality of opportunity and inclusion.
However, she added:  'We do recognise that some volunteers may have conflicting, personal opinions,'.

Dame Helen Ghosh, the well-paid director general of the National Trust, has said the National Trust was marking the anniversary of the law change at 'a dozen or so of our properties of the people who lived there and whose personal lives were outside the social norms of their time'.

Dame Helen has been adept at climbing the greasy pole in the national bureaucratic hierarchies.  She did alternate stints at the Department of Pensions, the Cabinet Office, the Department for the Environment and HM Revenue and Customs under Tony Blair's New Labour regime.  She was made a Dame in 2008 when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, and became Permanent secretary of the Home Office in 2011.

She was appointed to the National Trust, which has an income of £500 million a year.  Last year, Melvyn Bragg accused the National Trust of 'mafia tactics' when it used it's deep pockets to buy Lake District farmland at inflated prices, and in doing so outbidding local sheep farmers who had hoped to work the land.

In the real world the National Trust operates a funny kind of equality of opportunity and inclusion.

FT's Chris Giles on Hard Left Economics

by Chris Giles in the Financial Times

CORBYNOMICS should not be as incoherent as it is.  Leftwing economic platforms need not be stupid, but proponents must understand their strengths and limitations.  So here are some suggestions for Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left veteran likely to become UK Labour party leader next month.

There is no left-right dividing line in sensible economic policymaking.  Everyone needs to define their ambitions, understand how policy might achieve goals and recognise constraints.  Mr Corbyn’s ambition is clear: he wants a more equal and a more prosperous society.

Since this desire is shared across the political spectrum, the radical left must demonstrate its ability to act where other, more conservative forces, are constrained.  The left’s important freedom is its ability to worry less about preserving individual property rights than others.  Such rights are never absolute — any form of taxation is lawful extortion — and if they stand in the way of growth and greater equality, a leftwing government can remove them.  This surely should be the guiding theme of any practical economics of the hard left.

The constraints are sadly real, however.  You can tax the rich until the pips squeak, but if the pips are mobile, you will find the fruit you are squeezing is seedless.  Governments can also fail more regularly than markets.

With this in mind, an economically coherent leftwing platform would weaken the property rights that most impede prosperity, allowing these gains to offset damage from likely government failures and weaker incentives to work and to innovate.  Once you are clear about such essentials, it is not too difficult to devise sensible leftwing economic policies.

Abundant land is disastrously used in Britain, constrained by arbitrary planning constraints and not-in-my-back-yard attitudes of small “c” conservative residents.  Greenbelt restrictions protect wasteland around cities, preventing both growth and more affordable housing and ensuring older and richer people, especially around London, entrench their privileges.

Regulations could be substantially loosened, with the state appropriating most of the increase in land value of areas that currently cannot be developed.  Many parts of inner cities, often freehold land owned by the public sector, could be rebuilt at higher densities with widespread compulsory purchase.  A third runway at Heathrow — a pro-growth measure opposed by local property owners — should go ahead.

To be clear, this is a red policy, not a green one. Alongside higher property taxes on those who gained from buying in the right place at the right time, it would efficiently redistribute income and wealth, improving the lives of poorer people.

Few want a generation of lazy trust-fund children. So, other forms of overt redistribution should include heavier inheritance taxes.  These are justified on the twin principles that bequests damage beneficiaries’ work incentives and the dead find the taxman more difficult to avoid than the living.  The constraint here is to understand that people will seek to divest their wealth before they meet their maker and even a hard-left government will need to trade off higher revenues against inevitable avoidance.

In taxation, the left should understand that revenue raising is a collective activity and that to generate sufficient receipts to devote more of the nation’s resources to the poor, to education, to health or to other public services requires more than a raid on the rich. There are not enough of them.  Higher taxes for all, as in Nordic countries, is the solution.

All of this is economically literate, radical and left wing.   Little of this is Corbynomics.  For him, there are vast untapped pools of free money, to be accessed via setting up a national investment bank, attacking so-called “corporate welfare”, engaging in quantitative easing “for the people” or simply ending austerity.

That is not a coherent programme for the left, but just another form of populism.  And of course it comes with other popular fallacies such as saying the finances of the British state are regressive — when it is obvious that poor families receive their income from the state.  Slogans are easy to write if you wilfully confuse objectives with policy, making empty statements such as, “faster growth and higher wages must be key to bringing down the deficit”.

It is Mr Corbyn’s populism, not his being hard left, that destroys his economic credibility.  A smart hard-left stance could claim to boost both prosperity and equality.  It would be radical and coherent, but in undermining property rights, possibly not all that popular — one of the reasons why the hard left rarely wins office.

chris.giles@ft.com

Caste & the Equality Act 2010

CASTE DISCRIMINATION, THE EQUALITY ACT 2010, AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF TIRKEY V CHANDOK   

THURSDAY 1 MAY 6PM-8.30PM                                                   

MMU BUSINESS SCHOOL, ROOM G.35 [drinks beforehand in the Business School Atrium]:   

Manchester Law School is delighted to be hosting a panel of high profile discrimination and employment experts to debate caste and the Equality Act 2010.  They will be joined by two experts on caste. The panel will be discussing the implications of Tirkey v Chandok and we hope that you will join us for what should prove to be a lively, informative and interesting panel discussion. Attendees will be entitled to two hours SRA or BSB CPD as appropriate.

Caste has risen to the top of the discrimination agenda for lawyers and non-lawyers alike since the Equality Act 2010 provided for the possibility of adding caste to the definition of race in the Act. In 2013 Parliament inserted a provision in the Enterprise & Regulatory Reform Act requiring the addition of caste to the Equality Act 2010. Caste legislation will be introduced only after extensive public consultation and this is unlikely to happen before October 2015. However, claimants in two employment tribunal cases have argued that caste is already covered by the Equality Act 2010 under the existing definitions of race and religion or belief.

In 2012 in Naveed v Aslam the ET held that on the facts of the case, caste was not covered by ethnic origins, one of the existing subsets of race.  In contrast, in December 2013 in Tirkey v Chandok the ET concluded that in the context of that case, race in the Equality Act 2010 can and should be construed to cover caste.   

Our panel of experts includes: 

Chris Milsom, Barrister at Cloisters Chambers, London and Counsel for the claimant in Tirkey.
Nessa Sharkett, Senior Lecturer in Employment Law at Manchester Metropolitan University and part-time Employment Judge of the North West Region.
Professor David Mosse, Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, expert on India, Dalits, Adivasis, caste and religion. 
Dr Annapurna Waughray, Senior Lecturer in International Law, Human Rights Law and EU Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, expert on caste discrimination and the law in India, the UK, and in international human rights law. 
Dr Meena Dhanda, Reader in Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton, expert on caste, identity and caste discrimination in the UK and the diaspora.
Barry Harwood-Gray, employment law specialist Barrister and Head of Employment Law at Kenworthys Chambers, Manchester.   

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday 1st May and hope that you will join us for refreshments in the Business School atrium from 6.00pm prior to the panel event in room G.35.  

AGENDA  

6pm                                      Drinks in the Business School Atrium

6.30pm                              Weclome - Professor Ruth Ashford, Dean, MMU Business & Law

6.35pm                              Introduction to the Panel and the event - Barry Harwood Gray

6.40pm                              Caste: A Very Brief Legal Overview – Dr Annapurna Waughray

6.50pm                              Caste in the UK - Professor David Mosse & Dr Meena Dhanda

7.10pm                              Tirkey v Chandok - Chris Milsom

7.20pm                              Questions from the perspective of an ET judge - Nessa Sharkett

7.30pm                              Questions and discussion

8.30pm                              Summing up and close.