Turning Around Equalities

Abstract

This chapter looks at how equality policy under the Coalition was being made to fit into the political logic of austerity and a minimalized state. It focuses particularly on how the narrative techniques of imposing chronology and point of view, and delineating the crisis and its resolution, are deployed to frame this new vision of equality, which both individualizes and neutralizes the definition of equality, so that it becomes one corporate objective among others, and so that the space for considering collective disadvantage and structural inequalities based on social differences is severely constrained. By reducing equality to a limited sense of individual equality of opportunity, and by neutralizing the role of the state in addressing structural or institutional discrimination, this ‘turning around’ of equalities policy sets the stage for further retrenchments in the treatment of social difference across the Coalition social policy agenda.