As unemployment continues to grow, a new Civitas report reveals that new equality regulations threaten further job losses. The Equality Act 2010 introduced new duties on employers to protect disadvantaged groups from discrimination in the workplace and combines existing anti-discrimination law into one act. The Government’s official Impact Assessment of the Equality Act claimed that it would produce net economic benefits of £25-£87 million annually and increase access to jobs. But Assessing the Damage, by Nigel Williams, finds that the Government’s Assessment relied on a series of spurious assumptions, and that the more probable outcome is job destruction.

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As youth unemployment rises to record levels, a new Civitas report reveals that British workplaces spend up to a billion pounds a year complying with clumsy equality legislation. The costs put particular strain on public sector organisations, as well as making it more difficult for businesses to create and retain jobs. Furthermore, these policies have made jobs less accessible to disadvantaged, marginal workers.

The Rise of the Equalities Industry, by sociology professor Peter Saunders, examines the operation of Britain’s equality laws and concludes that they are seriously flawed.

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Wading into the debate over whether Clegg, or any others are hypocritical for their views on unpaid internships is a good way to avoid the argument.

Clegg claims unpaid internships are discriminating against the less well off, and as they are a vital leg-up in the world of work, this is a real hand-tied-behind-the-back problem. Without the internships they can’t afford, the best jobs will be closed off to them and social mobility will be stunted.

This may be true to a limited degree, but the majority of highflying internships are paid and those that aren’t are a reflection of the tough economic times. Major banks, law firms and consulting bodies all offer remuneration, negating Clegg’s argument, while others that aren’t paid are still satisfied by the quality of intern they bring in. If people didn’t want them, there would be no takers. The real unpaid phenomenon appears to be concentrated in the world of Westminster – perhaps his announcement was the sign of a guilty conscience…

Are unpaid politico roles socially backward? As MP Jake Berry said, his unpaid internships were ‘more along the lines of work experience’. This holds true for a significant number of wageless positions. Their length is often less than paid ones, weeks rather than months, and their responsibilities fewer. It would be a folly to rely on someone who isn’t actually obliged to turn up for work in the morning.

In these short periods, the intern is likely to be getting far more out of the experience than the employer, who will be training someone up and may only get a few weeks’ real productivity. The tables then turn when the length increases and the employer is gaining a real asset – and should pay for the privilege.

Other than the obvious free labour, which some companies will inevitably exploit, unpaid internships make it easier to hire – knowing that your intern isn’t workshy means recruiting is much easier and for some SMEs, the ability to offer unpaid roles could mean the difference between deciding whether to take on a new employee in the first place.

The real issue is perhaps less socio-economic than geographic. The vast majority of internship-offering firms are in London, and if you don’t live in or around the city, hard cheese. There are few, regardless of class, who could afford to rent temporarily in London for the duration of an internship, and at that level, whether it is paid or unpaid will make little difference.

Interestingly, given many unpaid internships cover travel expenses, this can be a better bet for some interns living in far flung locations with huge travel costs that the minimum wage but no travel expenses could not cover.

Does there need to be a resolution? Perhaps – Clegg raises an interesting if precarious point, but there should really be a limit to the time one can work unpaid. The real problem, of London being inaccessible, is something neither Clegg nor the Government can do anything about, except maybe to significantly lower the outrageous cost of train travel etc, making it affordable to commute in and out of the city.

Like the minimum wage, the unpaid internship has voracious defenders and opponents, but for once, it would be good to see the political argument based in reality rather rhetoric.

(In the interests of openness: Civitas offers unpaid internships up to a maximum of 6 weeks. Paid internships are offered for a commitment of three or more months)

It is a constant gripe amongst young people, and young men in particular, that they have been refused entry to an establishment, because of their sex, or their age ( ‘21 year-olds and over’ policies are common), two things the Government labels as ‘protected characteristics’. Usually the offending establishment is a nightclub, but increasingly it is the same for pubs. The new Equality Act defines 9 ‘protected characteristics’ including sex, age, race etc, which by law people are protected from discrimination. I myself was discriminated against this weekend because of the ‘protected characteristic’ of my sex, when I was refused entry to my local pub because I was a man. I was told that ‘there were too many men inside’ and that ‘the manager doesn’t like it when there aren’t enough women inside’. I’m sure this experience will be familiar to many men who have been refused entry to a nightclub or pub because of their sex. Some justify this by arguing that pubs, as private premises, can refuse entry to whomever they please. However, the Government seems to disagree. On the subject of discrimination in the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), regarding the provision of services, the Equality and Human Rights Commission gives this example:

‘Ladies’ nights’ where only women receive free drinks, “two-for-one”  offers or free admission are almost certainly direct sex discrimination against men. The same would be true of any other offer which was restricted to people with a particular protected characteristic. ‘

It seems as though restricting the offer of entry to those with the protected characteristic of being female would be in violation of the law; however, it is routinely done. A further example makes it even clearer that refusing service is illegal:

‘A pub cannot refuse to serve a customer because they are a transsexual person or with a transsexual person.’

I am not sure if pubs and clubs get around this by invoking some special dispensation, but I would contend that according to the information given by the Government on discrimination law in this country, their actions are clearly illegal.

I imagine that pubs and clubs get away with such practices because they are widely accepted (many women and men may prefer pubs/clubs with a more equal sexual distribution) and because many of those angered and negatively affected do not formally complain. However, I do wonder what the case would be if the discrimination was based on religion or race, or indeed if women were refused entry to ‘laddish’ establishments. In such a situation I imagine that the uproar would force discriminatory establishments to change their policy.  Until the Government decides to do something about this alarmingly regular, practice I may simply have to find another local…

Thus reportedly said equalities tsar Trevor Phillips recently about what he claims to be the unduly narrow and unrepresentative character of the House of Commons in terms of race and class.

The Quango that Phillips heads costs the tax-payer a lot of money, which includes his annual pro-rata salary of £157,000.

One would, therefore, expect his public pronouncements about racial and class discrimination to bear some remote resemblance to reality.  But if we do as he says and look at the statistics, we find reality bears little resemblance to what he claims to be the case. This should be genuinely worrying for those concerned about these issues,  given what a prominent and powerful position he occupies.

Consider, first, the ethnic composition of Parliament. It’s true that only just over 2 per cent of MPs returned to Parliament in 2005 were non-white, as against non-whites forming just under 8 per cent of the overall UK population according to the 2001 census. But we need to take age composition into account.

For a variety of very good reasons inherent in the nature of representative government, MPs tend to be relatively older than the general population. (One simple reason why is that good MPs tend to like their job, be popular with their constituents, so keep being returned).

Because of their comparatively recent settlement and comparatively much higher rate of fertility, the non-white population of the UK is much younger on average than is its white population.

In the 2005 Parliament, the average age of the MPs was 51 years, whereas only 15 per cent of the UK’s non-white population was aged over 50. That means that, as a proportion of the overall UK population, non-whites aged 50 plus formed only 1 per cent of the population.

The ‘under-representation’ of non-whites in the UK Parliament, therefore, is not at all unsurprising, nor out of line with the profile of white representation in terms of age. Nor is it even any less than what it is reasonable to expect it to be, unless, that is, you think that the affairs of state of this country should be debated and decided exclusively by teenagers. That is not a thought one is inclined would be likely to spring to the mind of 56 year old Mr Phillips who many think is likely to want to stand against Boris Johnson in the next election for mayor of London.

Next consider the composition of Parliament in terms of social background and previous occupation. Again, it is, indeed, true that the 2005 Parliament contained a disproportionately large number of MPs from a legal background. They formed nearly 12 per cent of the House. But is that really so surprising or unacceptable?

After all, what do lawyers do but debate? In what do they supposedly have expertise but the law? And what, after all, is the House of Commons but a debating chamber for deciding what laws should be enacted?

In any case, lawyers do not form even the largest single group within the House of Commons in terms of the professional background of MPs. That dubious distinction goes to teachers who comprised no fewer than nearly 13 per cent of MPs in the 2005 Parliament. Those with a background in business formed an even higher proportion of MPs than that: no fewer than almost 20 per cent.

The long and the short of it is that our dear Trevor does not appear to know what he is talking about, when he pontificates about how much of a lawyers’ club is Parliament.

That comes out still further when he remarks:

‘We don’t want a veneer of diversity. We don’t just want black people who are exactly like what’s there already in every respect other than skin colour. We want real diversity. We want to open doors.’

Do we? Is that supposed to be what representative government is truly supposed to be about?

If what Trevor Phillips was saying were really true, then we should be determining the make up of the House of Commons in the same way as we do juries, effectively by lot. But is that really the best way in which affairs of state are to be decided?

Our Trevor complains about how so disproportionately many MPs have gradated with a PPE from Oxford. But that is not altogether necessarily such a bad thing. Back in the 1940s and 1950s at least, if not now, they would have been made to study politics and the merits of different forms of government. There they would have been likely to read the likes of the philosopher E.F.Carritt who remarked in a section of his 1947 book Ethical and Political Thinking entitled ‘The Ideal State’:

‘To many of the ancients it appeared a truism that the best form of government is government by the best man rather than by the majority… The ancient condemnations of democracy were  partly due to the fact that the word then had a different meaning; it meant not government by majority-elected representatives but a universal chance of office, so far as possible by rotation, or, if the jobs would not go round, by lot, a device that worked as badly as might be expected. Election of representatives is a kind of retrievable trial and error device for securing what the ancients meant by aristocracy [rule of the best]…’

The essence here is selection of the best by trial and error. Electorates can correct their past mistakes at the next election, after they have discovered them, something they were credited by Carritt with wisdom enough to be able to discern. As he put it:

‘In one point the many are always wiser than the few; they know what shoe pinches most feet, and will at least try at least to choose good cobblers. We do not let cooks choose our dinners, since the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’

Well, with an up-coming election in a matter of months if not weeks, we shall likely have an opportunity to see Carritt’s surmise being carried out in action.

I am not suggesting that any one party has a monopoly of wisdom. But elections do at least give electorates an opportunity to exact retribution for misgovernment, even when the alternative with which they have been presented offers little better than a fresh unsullied pair of hands at the tiller.