Labour’s record in government may have been a litany of U-turns and broken promises, but there’s one cause on which the party hasn’t wavered. When the party pledged before the election to ‘make equality central to policymaking’ this, it turns out, was quite true. Businesses clobbered by energy bills and those wanting the small boats to stop may be whistling in the wind, but at least there is one constituency Keir Starmer’s Labour still thinks it can court: diversity managers.

After a months-long consultation, Labour is set to push ahead with plans to reintroduce the ‘socioeconomic duty’ in the Equality Act. Whether there’s a burning public demand for more equalities legislation is far from clear, but the idea, we are told, is to ‘level up opportunities for all’. The Tories say the duty, which they disapplied in government in 2010, will ‘impose socialism’ on Britain, and even that it will amount to a ‘war on the middle class’.

Why is Starmer adding a new hoop for central government to jump through, to go with all the others?

Why is Starmer adding a new hoop for central government to jump through, to go with all the others?

Under the socio-economic duty, which has been activated in........

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