Forget the woolly stuff about inclusion - it is all about doorways wide enough to push a wheelchair through. That was a view earlier this year from the Disability Rights Commission, anxious about the new equalities body that was finally announced this week. It is a fair point. Lumping gender, race and physical disability together runs the risk of diminishing differences in feeling or treatment in the market place. Is working the Human Rights Act - universal in scope and tone - the same as redressing the specific grievances of women, blacks and Asian people?
The architecture of equality has long needed attention. Neither the race or gender commissions (it is too early to judge the DRC) have covered themselves in administrative or legal glory. Meanwhile, those discriminated against for their beliefs, age or sexual orientation have lacked a public defender. The (curiously muted) impact of the HRA may have to do with the absence of an agency to sift grievances and support substantial complaints.
"Sift" and "substantial" are keys to the success of the new commission. Its principal arena will be employment. Its task will be protection of the vulnerable (who may on occasion include police superintendents), but also assurance. Employers need to be taught that fairness is functional. The government favours conciliation rather than (expensive) litigation. Fine, but the attitudes of employers, among them small business, have to evolve and court judgments in test cases can speed change.
The commission's creation is a tribute to the enduring strength - on another flank from David Blunkett and the "social conservatives" - of the interventionist liberals in Labour's ranks. Long may they expound the idea that government agencies can, independently, promote public and individual rights. The Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission were Labour creations of the 1970s; the DRC and the HRA are credits to the Blair government - a little something, perhaps, to offer those who ask what the party ever accomplished.
But Labour old and new, with the other parties, has hesitated over whether an equalities agency should also do diversity. Hauling a discriminatory employer before a tribunal is a pressing job; the agency needs sharp lawyers and investigators and a sympathetic ear. Promoting diversity and extolling difference is much less straightforward and, when it comes to schools and public services, much more controversial.
