By Anthony O’Hear

IT WAS ALL PROBABLY a mistake.

A few years ago I was invited to a breakfast meeting at no 11, Downing Street, the residence of Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Finance Minister. (‘Working’ breakfasts were all the rage in those days.) I can’t remember what the official topic was, but the then-Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was going to be there and to take part. So I went, along with a sprinkling of leftist think-tankers, journalists and gravely-voiced working-class MPs. In attendance were some of Mr Brown’s advisors and Mr Brown did indeed appear, smiling and glad-handing elements of the croissant scoffing throng.

For some reason, in best Rawlsian spirit, and as one would doubtless have predicted of such a gathering, the discussion veered in the direction of the topic of equality. No, we weren’t in favour of equality of outcome (=Stalinism, a command economy engaging in punitive redistribution). But we were in favour of equality of opportunity, that sun-kissed upland in which everyone would take off into a shining future of ever-burgeoning opportunity, rather like the advertisements of my youth for Clark’s shoes, in which two little children are seen from behind, bravely making their way along a straight and perspectivally narrowing road into just such a horizon.

The group’s conclusion was not in itself interesting or surprising. Equality of opportunity is the politically acceptable face of egalitarianism, which pretends to allow us to enjoy equality in a social and political sense, while keeping the rewards we may get from any work, luck or talent we may do or have. Not surprisingly such a confused and confusing vision is at the heart of the ‘new’ Labour project, but what had come to irk me was that post-1997 (and possibly earlier) ‘equality of opportunity’ has come to be a central plank of nice (or ‘compassionate’) conservatism. It was, indeed, one of the fundamental Conservative aspirations in the 2005 general election, and in a mood of frustration I had given the matter a little thought.

A little thought is all that is needed. For equality of opportunity is only equality of outcome one stage further back.

Look at it like this. When exactly is this equality of opportunity supposed to obtain? Let us say, for the sake of argument, at the age of 18. Then if we have real equality of opportunity, everyone must have the same chance, the same opportunity at the age of 18 – the same opportunity, for example, to go to Oxford or to some other prestigious university. At the moment, 18-year-olds don’t have that. Things like exam results, previous schooling, parental care and ambition, ambition itself, talent, hard work, motivation and, yes, luck all make chances very unequal at that point (as at every other point). In theory we could discount them all, and let anyone who wanted to go to a good university, go. All outcomes at the age of 18 would thus, at a stroke, have to be equalised in order to give everyone an equal opportunity for the next stage. Or, if ‘resources’ didn’t permit, we could have a lottery, which is a certain (and now, by many equalitarian political theorists, seriously advocated) manner of equalising opportunities. I imagine, though, that most people, who were not doctrinaire about equality, would say that we should not discount most of the entry-affecting factors I have just mentioned. Some reflect merit and to that extent are themselves demanded by fairness, while to tamper with most of the others would produce unwelcome and unjustifiable intrusions in our lives, intrusions which could be achieved only by state force.

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NONE OF THIS PREVENTS governments from tinkering. The government of Gordon Brown is constantly trying to discount the effects of schooling and parental effort in university admissions by giving advantages in entry and funding to those from poor schools and from families without academic backgrounds. And the whole ideology of comprehensive education from the age of 11, in which all pupils of all abilities and backgrounds go to the same school, is justified in the name of equality of opportunity. In the latter case, the results are widely admitted to be disastrous except where the effects of this equality in type of school are mitigated by splitting pupils up within the school according to ability (“setting” or “streaming”), and so, as egalitarian critics will aver, undermining the very comprehensive principle. But this is not the main point of objection to a politics of equality of opportunity.

The main point of objection is that even with equality of opportunity at the age of 11 – and differences of outcome at that age discounted in school entry – within an initially ‘comprehensive’ school all sorts of inequalities of outcome will grow as the years go by, and will certainly have manifested themselves by the age of 18. So, in the name of equality of opportunity, we have to discount these new inequalities of outcome at the age of 18 – and so on and so on, at any and every point at which we wish to produce equality of opportunity, and in whatever dimension of life interests us as equalitarians: income, social status, and maybe even with possibilities of genetic engineering looming, in such matters as looks and sporting prowess (as I saw advocated recently in a book on biological futures, sponsored by some Oxford bioethics unit).

I am not saying that people should not be allowed and encouraged to make the best of their circumstances and what they are, and that politicians should not consider whether the circumstances in which some people live are inhumane, and in the name of justice need improving, even by the state. (They are and they do.) But these considerations should not be analysed or justified in the name of equality – either of outcome or of opportunity. These two are but two sides of the same coin, and aiming for either, as already remarked, must mean the forcible discounting of such factors as the influence of a person’s family or up-bringing, their hard work and effort, their schooling, their talent, their curiosity, their interests, their particular type of ambition and motivation, and many other abilities and circumstances most of us would recognise as part of life.

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ALL RIGHT. ACCORDING TO a certain mind-set, life isn’t fair. Plato recognised this when, in pursuit of equality among his social and intellectual elite (but only among his elite), he demanded that children be taken from their parents at birth, and not even know who they were. They would in effect belong to the equalising state guardians. The logic of Plato’s position is unassailable, though he spent little time examining the likely consequences of his policy. He was obviously not aware of Mombert’s definition of original sin, as ‘an imperfection which marks all human effort, especially where it aims to avoid it’.

I asked Mr Brown at that breakfast whether he was a Platonist. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to get in return la ot of blather about how he believed in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome, neatly failing to address the point I was making. I should have expected nothing else, and I haven’t been to a Smith Institute breakfast since. (Actually, I don’t think I have been invited.) But it isn’t to Mr Brown that I should be putting these points. Show me one Cameronian conservative who isn’t ‘fully and passionately committed’ to equality of opportunity, and I might even consider voting for him or her. Otherwise not.

Anthony O’Hear, who spent a decade as a British Government special advisor on education, is the director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and an editor of  the Fortnightly Review. He is also Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University,  and, with Chris Woodhead, established the university’s department of education. Prof O’Hear is the author of Plato’s Children: The State We are in, among many other books.