Traditional social democratic egalitarians, like Hattersley, focus on giving people equal educational opportunities and then correcting later inequalities through redistributive taxation. Brown sees this as an anachronistic approach. When the social division of labour is in flux, as it is today, it makes no sense to think of equal opportunities in the static terms of providing equal access to a fixed range of goods at the beginning of a working life. As Brown understands it, the attempt to promote equal opportunity must be life-long. It must also stress inclusion.
Inclusion means being connected with the mainstream of social life.
Nothing promotes inclusion better than work, and no kind of social exclusion is more disabling than the long-term lack of it. The excluded need access to the productive economy, not a little extra income redistributed from the better off. The ideal of inclusion points to the worst divide in late modern societies such as Britain - between those who are in the labour market and those outside it. Here it is worth marking a contrast between social inclusion and social democratic notions of equality. Exclusion is wrong because of the injuries to human wellbeing and the weakening of social cohesion that it entails, not because it violates principles of equal distribution.