Caste Aside

A poor, unfortunate throwback to the days when the Liberal Democrats pretended to some vague interest in liberalism and democracy has accused Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition of dragging its feet over an amendment to the anti-discrimination law. With bad grace, having been defeated twice in the House of Donors, the Government agreed this spring to amend the Equality Act 2010 and put caste discrimination legally on a par with racial discrimination. It is easy to see how this sort of thing must rankle with the Bullingdon Club and its fags: legal equality between wogs and Englishmen is bad enough, but the idea that the law should intervene to compensate for social differences resulting from accidents of birth must have given the upper echelons of the Conservative Party a severe case of moral indigestion. Accordingly, the whole business has been conveniently kicked into the long grass. The responsible department is Maria Miller's Department of Cultchah, Murdoch and Prolefeed, which gives some indication of how seriously the Bullingdon Club takes matters of equality; and the department has announced that employers, public authorities and the judiciary will need to be consulted for a couple of years before anything happens. This will probably delay the amendment until the summer of 2015, by which time the Conservatives presumably hope to announce the repeal of the Equality Act itself. If the untouchables don't like it, of course, they can always go home.