The British case study showed how the notion of equality was reformulated by the Labour Party, as part of a strategy to regain power from 1979 to 1997. J. Tournadre-Plancq recalled that this ideological revision took place in a triple context: the belief in the rise of individualism and the emergence of strong middle classes, divisions within the Labour Party between the left of the party and the "soft left", and the intellectual hegemony of the Conservatives succeeding in changing the terms of public debate and forcing Labour to adjust its discourse.
In this context, the speaker showed that the left initially tended to avoid any reference to equality, a value disqualified by the conservatives who, as part of an offensive against the social state, imposed a confusion between equality and uniformity. Labor rejected the notion of equality of results, associated with the old left, on the grounds that it did not allow individual efforts to be taken into account. Following the report of the Commission on Social Justice in 1994, inequality became acceptable as a reward for merit or effort. J. Tournadre-Plancq qualifies this by pointing out that, rather than abandoning the notion of equality, it was a matter of reorganizing this value. Equality was understood as equality of status, seen as a guarantee of social cohesion, and then, under the influence of Gordon Brown, as real equality of opportunity. From then on, for neo-workers, the role of politics was no longer to correct the unequal distribution of goods by the market, but to ensure equal access to strategic goods (education, training, culture, etc.). The facilitating state had to be able to "encapacitate" individuals to enable them to integrate into society and economic competition.
The discussion highlighted the distortion by neo-workers of many terms with a long history, such as the ideas of "classless society" or "social equality".
Jérôme Tournadre-Plancq is a CNRS research fellow at the Institut des Sciences sociales du politique, Université Paris-Ouest. His books include Au-delà de la gauche et de la droite, une troisième voie britannique (Dalloz, 2006).
