To Fit the Crime

The former Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone, who now plays Danny Alexander to Theresa May's George Osborne, has announced the Government's revenge on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Like many people who don't get to vote their own salaries through, the commission's staff are paid too much; and some of them have recently been so indiscreet as to tell the Government off for failing to consider how its policies would affect women, the disabled, ethnic minorities and all those other unimportant things that many former Liberal Democrats used to pretend to care about. Accordingly, the commission's budget and workforce are to be cut by fifty per cent; and, doubtless in deference to Deputy Conservative sensitivities about the extent of their potency in the coalition, its duty to promote a more equal society will be abolished.