SCHOOLYARD CHANTS
When I was attending Primary School in rural Cheshire 60 years ago, there were two chants that the kids from impoverished families would raise:
1. ‘It’s a free country’
2. ‘It’s fair – it isn’t raining’.
By the first, they meant to convey the message that their families had picked up from wartime exhortations for society to pull together – namely that the price of their collaboration was to be redeemed by an extension of democratic, legal and social rights (in opposition to the Class System).
By the second, they meant that ‘fairness’ had an element of the survival of the fittest – that is one had no right to complain if one could not defend one’s own position (often in physical terms).
It is interesting to see then how these principles of liberty and fairness have played out over the intervening years, bringing us to where we are today – to the continued disadvantage of the children of the poor and less powerful.
WELFARE AS A WRONG
The New Zealand Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett has recently argued the case for requiring solo mother ‘domestic purposes beneficiaries’ to accept part-time work when their youngest child turns 6, or risk having their benefit halved.
This provision of enforced work availability will not apply to beneficiaries who are widows. In consequence it has been held to be in breach of New Zealand’s Bill of Rights which prohibits discrimination on three grounds: sex, marital status and family status.
The Minister has commented:
"I think that is a discrimination that most New Zealanders will see as being fair and reasonable."
This set me thinking again about ‘What is fair?’
And I went back to a thoughtful article by Will Hutton in the UK Observer of Sunday, 3rd May 2009. I have adapted the article somewhat but you can find the complete original online:
LIFE MAY NOT BE FAIR: BUT THAT’S STILL NO EXCUSE FOR AN UNJUST SOCIETY
Hutton asks:
‘What's "fair"? Well, it's a concept that is horribly abused. Almost everybody seems to be complaining that they are the victims of some gross injustice, showing little sense of what fairness really means.
What is fair is difficult territory. Too many with Left-of-Centre politics assume that preferences for more equity and proportionality are so widely shared that support for liberal policies is semi-automatic.
Higher rates of income tax for the better-off or making public services available to everyone on the basis of need are so self-evidently the right thing to do that the mass of popular opinion will rally to one's side.
But it doesn't - and it won't. Fairness can be used to justify any position on the political spectrum. One of the reasons the UK Labour party is facing problems in the forthcoming election is that it has not managed to build a consensus over what is fair'.
The gap has been filled by a cacophony of self-interested Right-of-Centre voices insisting that the dice are loaded against them by increasing their taxes and redistributing income and rights towards a ‘rainbow’ of welfare recipients and non-mainstream groups - reinforcing the sense of a government that has run out of moral authority.
Fairness, according to Hutton, has four dimensions and none of them is automatically Left-of-Centre territory:
1. There is the fairness of equity, so embedded in our DNA that four-year-olds protest at the lack of justice in not being treated as well as their brothers and sisters
2. There is the fairness of need: I should be helped or compensated for the bad luck of life. So if I am born into a poor family, suffer heart disease or am thrown out my job through no fault of my own I deserve your support
3. There is the fairness of efficiency and merit: I worked really hard to get this job and I do it well; it is only fair that I should be paid more than you. The economy needs me to be given that incentive because such an expenditure of effort needs to be fairly rewarded
4. Lastly, there is the fairness of proportionality: I can be paid more than you for doing the same job because I am more productive.
Commenting about the UK, Hutton argues:
‘This is a political minefield and unless parties of the left walk carefully, they soon find that ideas of fairness are deployed against them. And New Labour in the UK has believed in the political value of ambiguity. Thus it can appease the tabloids without being accused of inconsistency. No leadership over what's fair has been offered, nor has any serious thought put into how these dimensions of fairness might consistently be put into action.
Now the party and wider society are suffering the consequences. The extreme Right position is that Britain should be for the British and British means being white. Even if it formally repudiates racism, its core philosophy is about identity politics, which it masks by appeals to fairness. It argues that economic migrants can access British public services instantly on the basis of need, at the expense of the native born.
Although some of the wilder stories are apocryphal, there are enough real instances of housing being allocated to new immigrant families and non-English speaking children making classrooms hard to manage and so on for a growing minority of working-class families to believe that the principle of proportionality is being abused. In other words, people should only be allowed to use and consume public services in proportion to what they've paid in, rather than enjoy the benefits the instant they settle in the UK’.
Let’s see how the cards can be played in successive hands:
Deal 1: Keep out immigrants who haven't paid for public services. Equity trumps
Deal 2: Help honest immigrants who have settled. Need trumps
Deal 3: Ensure access is fair to all and cheats are not rewarded. Merit trumps
Deal 4: Curtail assistance to immigrants and reduce taxation. Proportionality trumps.
Hutton goes on to argue that there is a consensus on fairness waiting to be built, and that a majority of people believe in the principles of equity, proportionality and merit and are prepared to support the needy as long as they don't cheat their way to benefits.
The trouble is that efficiency, merit and productivity have taken such a strong hold on society’s collective unconscious in the USA, UK and New Zealand that justice and need are in danger of being relegated to items on a utopian wish list.
LIBERTY AND FAIRNESS
I remember listening in 2008 to an address by Dr Michael Basset – a former NZ Labour Party Minister who has become a political turncoat and Right-of-Centre eminence grise – in which he devoted his entire speech to a vitriolic attack on solo mothers. In his view, they represented the single biggest threat to New Zealand’s future economic stability and growth.
I was not at all surprised then at Paula Bennett’s actions and their justification. But I was challenged by the notion of reasonable discrimination.
It seemed then appropriate to return to the principles that had been widely discussed in the 1970s – and which must have influenced both Basset’s thinking and my own – namely the Rawlsian Theory of Justice.
John Rawls published ‘A Theory of Justice’ in 1971. In the book, he attempted to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilizing a variant of the familiar device of a social contract. The resultant theory is known as "Justice as Fairness", from which Rawls derives his two famous principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.
Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of two or more parties who have ends which they seek to advance, though they wish to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms.
Rawls argues that if an individual does not know how his life’s opportunities are going to evolve, he is likely not going to privilege any one class of people, but rather develop a scheme of justice that treats all fairly.
He goes on to claim that the parties would naturally adopt the liberty and fairness principles, which would then govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society.
The First Principle of Justice
“First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.”
The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (i.e., to vote and run for office), freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of personal property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest.
The Second Principle of Justice
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that:
1) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).
2) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
Rawls argues that inequality is acceptable only if it is to the long-term advantage of those who are worst-off.
COMMENT
I would have to say that re-reading about Rawlsian justice did not help much in clarifying my thoughts.
What did bring into play some commonsense and goodheartedness was Hutton’s reference to schoolyard ‘fairness of equity’ and the memory that it sparked of my fellow schoolyard ruffians.
It is all very well talking about trade-offs between Rawls’ Two Principles or Hutton’s Four Dimensions but surely the real point is that children are ignored in both approaches – as indeed they are by Paula Bennett and Michael Bassett.
The main reason that people on the Left-of-Centre like me must continue to argue for intervention to promote fairness and justice is that children cannot take up their own case:
1. They can be readily denied fairness of equity by adults, as they lack power
2. They are frequently victims of fairness of need – through circumstances totally beyond their control
3. They are unable to argue fairness of merit because they are, as yet unable to work
4. Fairness of proportionality does not apply because they are not yet differentially productive
5. The concept of basic participatory liberties is largely irrelevant to them.
In terms of justice and fairness though, they do come into the picture directly in that they are often the least advantaged members of society while representing, in the best sense, people who remain potentially open to life’s opportunities.
That’s good enough for me. Regardless of discriminating against solo mothers – don’t discriminate against their kids!
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