How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, or a game. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square. For the British fair play is especially important: without it, life isn’t cricket. Their country becomes quite pleasant when the weather is fair, though unfortunately it rarely is. And these days fairtrade goods crowd their supermarket shelves.
Fairness is not only good, but also moderate, which is another characteristic that the British approve of. It does not claim too much for itself. Those who, on inquiry, admit that their health and fortunes are fair-to-middling navigate carefully between the twin dangers of boastfulness and ill-temperedness, while gesturing in a chin-up sort of way towards the possibility of future improvement.
Fairness appeals to the British political class, for it has a common sense down-to-earthiness which avoids the grandiosity of American and continental European political discourse while aspiring to do its best for all men-and of course for maidens too, fair and otherwise, for one of its virtues is that it does not discriminate on grounds of either gender or skin colour.
Not surprising, then, that Britain’s government should grab hold of the word and cling to it in the buffeting the coalition has had since the budget on June 22nd proposed higher taxes and even sharper spending cuts. "Tough but fair" is what George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, called the cuts he announced. "It is going to be tough, but it is also very fair," said Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary. At last, something they could agree on.
"Fairness" suits Britain’s coalition government so well not just because its meanings are all positive, but also because they are wide-ranging. To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares. Those two meanings are not just different: they are opposite. They represent a choice that has to be made between freedom and equality. Yet so slippery-and thus convenient to politicians-is the English language that a single word encompasses both, and in doing so loses any claim to meaning. The author holds in the last paragraph that "fairness"