Introduction

Serious candidates for public office in a democracy generally try to convince their electorates of how much they cherish the pursuit of fairness and social justice for their country. Whether from the left or from the right, liberal or conservative, competing candidates find their own ways of deploying the rhetoric of fairness, even when their routes to its achievement and their ultimate goals are poles apart. The reason, as Orwell suggested in his celebrated essay on politics and language, is that the concept of fairness – not unlike the concept of democracy itself – means different things to different people. ¹ Above all, it differs according to a person's vantage point in society and their society's vantage point in the world.