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This chapter explores how equality is pursued, comparing two approaches. In Europe, legal responses to inequality have tended to focus on anti-discrimination legislation. This approach attempts to bring about equality by giving individuals a right to challenge discrimination through litigation before courts or other adjudicatory bodies. In contrast, the promotion of social inclusion has been more typically linked with policy-based mechanisms, not amenable to judicial enforcement. A dichotomy thus arises between two pathways for advancing equality: antidiscrimination and social inclusion. The chapter begins by reviewing in more detail the characteristics, strengths, and pitfalls of each of these two approaches. It then seeks to explore whether these approaches might be brought together and, to this end, it examines the European Social Charter, which appears to marry some of the qualities of both approaches. It is an instrument of international law, yet it has a holistic outlook on social rights and their implementation in practice. In order to make a more concrete assessment of the Charter's potential to promote equality, two discrete case studies are considered, focusing on the social situation of Travellers in Ireland and Roma in Italy.

Creating equality of opportunity seems to be a viable strategy for resolving the conflict between the contending principles of competitiveness and solidarity. Both principles lie at the core of the European Union’s agenda. Anti-discrimination law appears to be a way of mediating between them. The relevant legislation protects people who happen to bear certain characteristics—most of which are socially salient, for example, sex, race, religion, ethnicity—from disadvantage that arises from actions by private persons or the state in the context of the provision of goods and opportunities. Characteristically, the protection is limited to certain critical goods, such as jobs, salaries, housing or access to education. The European Union has been the driving force in the development of anti-discrimination legislation in the legal systems of its Member States.

This chapter traces changes in immigrants' social rights first in the United States and then in the United Kingdom. The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the US have centered on the extension and contraction of immigrants' welfare rights. In Britain the universalism of the early postwar welfare state encompassed all residents, and the politics of inclusion have been less concerned with the extension of social rights to immigrants but rather with strengthening their social rights through anti-discrimination legislation. The contraction of immigrants' social rights, however, resulted in quite similar policy outputs — lengthy bans on utilizing means tested benefits — but the politics behind the policies was quite different. The concluding discussion summarizes the contrasts and similarities in the politics of exclusion in the two countries.

This chapter takes a historical, political, and statistical view of the official collection of data that are currently labelled ‘ethnic group’, in order to better understand how they are used in the making of myths and, indeed, in the counterarguments to those myths. It presents a roughly chronological review of the development of race statistics in Britain in relation to specific policy arenas. It considers the influence of pre-20th-century eugenics, immigration control, anti-discrimination legislation, multicultural policy, and community cohesion agendas. It gives examples from three countries — Britain, France, and the US — of solutions to the dilemmas of how to measure race. It aims to demonstrate that the categorisation and measurement of race is highly contentious, with data serving several specific policy agendas. It concludes that ethnic group statistics in Britain have meaningful potential for assessing social conditions and social change.

This chapter assesses the employment opportunities for older workers, comparing them to that of the younger workers. It cites institutional changes that affected older workers including anti-age discrimination legislation, changes in state pensions and retirement rules, and changes in the nature of employer-provided pensions. The chapter also explains that the recession of 2008 onwards had two broad effects on older workers, namely, an adverse labour demand effect and an adverse shock to asset values.