A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD DOES NOT PRODUCE A UNIVERSAL TIE:

The left should recognise that equality is undesirable: It sounds horribly rightwing, but a fair society may be one in which people have the right to strive for inequality (Julian Glover, 10/11/10, guardian.co.uk)

I think the EHRC has a wrongheaded idea of fairness. It measures the extent to which people's lives are different, and then calculates the action needed to make them more the same. The assumption is that equality is what we all want.

This overlooks the possibility that the actions needed to compel equality may be seen as unfair by those who do not benefit from them. An equally valid idea of a fair society may be one in which people are given the space and the right to strive for inequality: advantage achieved by their own efforts.

This sounds horribly right wing. But there is a challenge for the right in this too. The corollary of rejecting equality as a goal, and placing greater responsibility on individuals, must be to increase opportunity by reducing unfair advantage. If the state is to do less to bail people out of disasters of their own making, it must do more to give people a chance to avoid disaster in the first place.

We are very bad at that in Britain. As the report says, inequality of income is less sharp than inequality of wealth. People inherit privilege. They buy their way into private schools. Others get trapped in generational cycles, as Iain Duncan Smith is not the first to point out. State mechanisms for releasing them have not worked despite a decade of never-to-be-repeated support. To the extent that Labour reduced poverty at all, it was by shoving large sums of cash from the rich – and the budget deficit – to the poor. This didn't make the country fairer: it simply papered over the underlying unfairness.

If we are not to discard fairness as a useless concept, we must sharpen its definition. A liberal government like the one we have now cannot be content with reducing benefits for all and hoping people will call that fair. That's fairness as a flabby excuse for cuts. It is right that people on high incomes should not have benefits protected when those lower down do not, but deeper fairness demands giving people the chance to make something of their lives and not be held down by inherited disadvantages.

The tough choice for the left is to understand the impossibility and undesirability of equality. The tough choice for the right is to realise that a divided and hierarchical society cannot – in the best sense of that word – be fair.