Tackling Age Discrimination at the heart of Government

As I was saying, I am now retired from my previous employment and, whilst I may decide to take some time off, I certainly don’t rule out seeking employment in future and I was obviously interested when I picked up online chatter about a very interesting job advert.

Unfortunately, this job advert indicated an intention to breach the Equality Act by discriminating on grounds of age (without the slightest indication that this would be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim). So I dropped a note to the person responsible for the job advertisement…

“Dear Mr Cummings,

On your blog (https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/) you have advertised employment opportunities, apparently at the heart of Government.

In your blog post, which is an extended job advertisement, you state that “we want to hire some VERY clever young people either straight out of university or recently out with with extreme curiosity and capacity for hard work.”

Section 39(1)(a) of the Equality Act 2010 states that “An employer (A) must not discriminate against a person (B) in the arrangements A makes for deciding to whom to offer employment”. Section 13(1) of the Act defines Direct discrimination as follows; “A person (A) discriminates against another (B) if, because of a protected characteristic, A treats B less favourably than A treats or would treat others.”

Section 5 of the Act identifies “age” as one of the protected characteristics to which the provisions of the Act refers, and subsection (1)(a) of that section explains that “in relation to the protected characteristic of age a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a person of a particular age group”, whilst subsection (2) clarifies that “a reference to an age group is a reference to a group of persons defined by reference to age, whether by reference to a particular age or to a range of ages.”

I am a university educated 56-year-old man. As it happens, I am very clever, I have extreme curiosity and capacity for hard work and, as luck would have it, I have recently become available to apply for employment. However, by no means am I part of the age group of “young people” – I am part of the age group of middle-aged people. Your job advertisement makes it clear that you would not consider an application from myself for those opportunities which you are offering to “some VERY clever young people”.

You are therefore directly discriminating against me, in that you are treating me less favourably, because of my age group, than you would treat a younger comparator in the arrangements which you have made for deciding to whom to offer employment. Your conduct contravenes s39(1)(a) of the Equality Act 2010, read with s13(1) and s5 of the Act.

In order to avoid the need for litigation, I invite you to make me an appropriate offer of recompense. You may also wish to consider taking advice from colleagues in Human Resources before advertising jobs in future.

Please let me have your reply within fourteen days.”

I will blog again when I get a reply from Mr Cummings, or perhaps from one of his young assistants. If I don’t get a reply I will have to think about what to do next.

Leaving Lambeth

Today, Thursday 2 January 2020, has been the first working day since September 1986 when I have not had a job. After 33 years of local government service, my last day working for the London Borough of Lambeth was 31 December 2019.

Thanks to years of trade union struggle, and to the Local Government Pension Scheme which is the product of that struggle, my redundancy is not at all the personal disaster which job losses have been for so many, and I am looking forward to the next chapter of my participation in class struggle (including as a retired member of UNISON – unless and until I get another job and return to full membership).

As regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Blogger) will probably remember, I have spent most of my working life as a UNISON (and before that NALGO) representative in Lambeth (with occasional forays into the life of the trade union at national and Regional level). Three years ago I shared here my valedictory address to my trade union branch, looking back at the eventful quarter century or more in which I had held leading roles in the union locally.  

Now, as I leave Lambeth, I am pleased to reflect that, whilst someone joining the Council this month will join a Council in which there are many fewer staff, proportionately fewer trade unionists and less class consciousness than when I arrived from Lewisham in January 1987, they will have the same 35 hour week, the same mid-month pay date, the same annual leave entitlement and the same maternity leave entitlement as someone starting 33 years before. Their employment rights will continue to be protected by procedures negotiated and agreed with their trade unions.

I am equally pleased to know that a new starter in Lambeth will be joining an organisation in which, just as was true a third of a century ago, there are rank and file anti-racists in the workforce who will always try to press the Council, its leadership and senior management, to live up to professions of commitment to equality and opposition to discrimination in general and institutional racism in particular.

Lambeth has been a wonderful place to work because of its workforce, upon the militancy of a minority of whom I relied for many years in order to be a moderately effective local union representative. I have learned a great deal from employees of Lambeth Council over a great number of years, and I shall continue to apply these lessons into the future.

I was particularly honoured to be, for many years, one of Lambeth’s radical voices in the wider labour movement – and I always remembered that socialists could only speak truth to power with authority on the basis of strong rank and file organisation and an effective relationship with the local employer.

It was the support of the rank and file, and the consequent respect of the employer, that kept me in employment when, having been denounced by the Tory press, I was told, in 2011, by the General Secretary of my trade union that there was nothing that union officialdom could do to protect my job. I was protected instead by the strength of militant grassroots trade unionism, which had forged our relationship of mutual respect with our employer.

I have now left Lambeth Council, just as I left my various positions in UNISON in 2017, at a time (or, at least, a reorganisation and consequent redundancy situation) of my own choosing. It’s good to know when the time has come to move on. (I would add that, as a retired member of UNISON, I look forward to voting in the forthcoming election for General Secretary in accordance with Rule E.3.3).

I enjoyed the opportunity which my colleagues in Lambeth gave me to represent UNISON members on our Regional Committee and National Executive Council over many years (so that I could take on the fight for democracy in our trade union), but what mattered most, and what I will miss most, is having been part of the workforce of Lambeth Council.

There is no better place of work, and no better collection of colleagues and comrades amongst whom to have spent a working life. It's been an absolute honour.

Why did we lose? Let's not listen to the Rip Van Winkle's of the so-called "centre-left".

I still think it’s a bit early to offer a full account of what happened last Thursday. Ballot papers don’t generally offer us more than a cross in a box from which to determine the reasons why a voter cast their vote as they did – and the small minority who adorn their ballot papers with more detailed expressions of opinion, some of whom share their vocabulary of obscenities with the Council staff counting the votes, generally add very little to the sum total of human knowledge.

Understanding the reasons behind an election result therefore requires further research. Exit polls can tell us a fair bit about why people tell us they voted as they did, and I intend to study those further – but I don’t think that we can be guided only by what people say about why they do what they do in any case. In a sense that simply pushes the question back to another question – why do people feel as they do?

I will spend a bit more time thinking about this generally, but there are some things that can be said specifically.

I am fairly certain that some of the explanations being offered for Labour’s very poor performance last Thursday can safely be discounted. These are all those explanations for our 2019 defeat which plainly cannot also account for the result of the 2017 General Election.

A very fine example of such a failed attempt to explain our election defeat is available from Labourlist, and is offered by veteran Labour right-winger Luke Akehurst. Luke thinks it is “obvious” why we lost, he quotes his own (as he thinks) wise words from 2015 and says that our Party has been “indulging in a dangerous delusion for four years”. Basically, Luke (whilst expressing his horror and anger at a Tory victory) seems almost relieved that his understanding of the world has been confirmed by a defeat at the polls for a socialist programme.

I tried a little experiment with Luke’s article online. I searched for “2017” in his article. It wasn’t there.

Now that’s very odd, because, during the four years of our “dangerous delusion” (in his words) Labour had lost another General Election, whilst scoring our highest vote share since 2001 and our highest number of votes since 1997.

In 2017 we had the same Leader whose unpopularity is being blamed for the result in 2019.

In 2017 we had the same socialist policies which centrists are now decrying as responsible for our failure. 

We cannot simply attribute the result in 2019 (which was still better, in terms of vote share, than in 2015 or 2010) to the identity of the Leader or the socialist politics of our manifesto unless we can also explain why these factors did not apply in 2017.

I can only conclude that comrade Akehurst has been asleep since 2015 and therefore missed what happened two years ago (perhaps he ran away and hid, blaming himself for having argued that Corbyn should be on the ballot paper in the first leadership election?) He is auditioning, perhaps, for the role of Rip Van Winkle of the self-proclaimed “centre-left” (who generally come across as a bit more centre than left…)

For those who were here two years ago, whether from the right or left, we need to avoid attributing the 2019 result to factors which, whilst present two years ago, did not produce the same effect.

The Blairites screeching their hatred for Corbyn and socialism at every opportunity (of which the media gives them quite a few) are not doing a good job of understanding or explaining what happened last week.

Neither, however, are those good comrades on the left who want to blame the media’s hostility to Jeremy Corbyn for our defeat. That same hostility was expressed, with the same force, in 2017 as 2019. If we could get 40% of the popular vote in the teeth of such media vilification, we cannot use that same media vilification to explain why we got 32.1% in 2019.

As I said a little while ago, any explanation of our 2019 election result which is persuasive needs also to be capable of explaining the 2017 result. Mr Akehurst, and all those rightwing Labour MPs on the telly, must try harder to understand what has happened.

And so must we all.

A historical perspective on Labour's electoral performance

Having looked at the electoral experience of some of our near neighbours in order to begin to think about the reasons for our election defeat last Thursday, I also thought I should try to get a bit of recent historical perspective.

The evidence is easy to access from an authoritative source.

Our vote share fell very sharply, from 40% in 2017 to just over 32.1% in 2019 (and that comparison causes me to reflect that any explanation of the latter result which is to be persuasive needs also to be able to explain the former).

This was the largest fall in our share of the vote since 1983 (when we gained just 27.6% of the vote, compared to 36.9% in 1979). The factors accounting for the recent decline in our support are of similar magnitude (in terms of their impact) to the factors which produced that historic decline – but of course that does not mean that they are the same factors, or even that they have any great similarity.

Our 2019 result gave us our least number of MPs since 1935, but the vagaries of the electoral system means that yardstick somewhat exaggerates the scale of our defeat, since our vote share held up better not only than in our defeat of 1983 under Michael Foot (27.6%) but also than in 2010 under Gordon Brown (29.0%) or in 2015 under Ed Miliband (30.4%).

The 2019 result was bad, it was a defeat – and we face up to five years of a horrendously reactionary Tory Government because of it. However, the scale of our defeat in 2019 is marked very much by the contrast with the comparatively good result of 2017. If that had never happened, we would now be remarking that, under Corbyn’s leadership we had added 1.7% to our 2015 vote share, just as in 2015, under Ed Miliband, we had added 1.4% to our 2010 vote share.

Looking back at a number of election results in this way it becomes clear that any useful explanation of the 2019 election result needs also to explain other recent results – and also that we need to account for the performance of other parties as well as Labour. Under Boris Johnson, and pressing for the hardest of hard Brexits, the Tory Party gained their biggest share of the vote (43.6%) since 1979.

Very little of the instant punditry which abounds online as well as in the “mainstream media” seems to be making any attempt at such a useful explanation.

How does Labour's electoral performance look in a European context?

It may not be true that former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, when asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution said that it was “too early to say”, but it has nevertheless passed into legend.

At any event, I am still of the opinion that it is a bit early to rush into over hasty explanations for Labour’s election defeat this week, and before I start thinking about that further I have looked across the English Channel to try to get some perspective on what happened here last week.

So how are the traditional parties of the Centre-Left faring in Western Europe?

The French Socialist Party was slaughtered in elections in 2017, its candidate for President gaining just over six per cent of the vote. This was the same year in which the German Social Democratic Party saw its worst result since the Second World War, with just over twenty per cent of the vote, and the Dutch Labour Party had their worst ever results, losing three quarters of their Parliamentary representation and gaining fewer than six percent of votes cast. The following year, the Italian Democratic Party scored its worst ever result, with less than nineteen per cent of the vote.

Things are better for social democracy in the Iberian peninsula, where the Spanish socialists emerged from an election last month as the largest party, with 120 out of 350 seats in Parliament, having won 28% of the vote, a month after the Portuguese Socialist Party also won national elections – with almost 37% of the vote. In both these countries parties to the left of mainstream social democracy are also represented in Parliament.

Labour’s 32.1% share of the vote on 12 December looks a lot less miserable in comparison with the performance of our Western European sister parties. None of this means that the result in Britain was not catastrophic, but it does mean that our analysis and understanding of our election defeat needs to take into account an international (or perhaps, more specifically, a Western European) context in which the delayed effect of the 2008 economic crash is generally benefiting the populist right and not the social democratic left.