HOW could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, a game and (for those who think blondes have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square.

A sense of fairness, as any parent knows, develops irritatingly early. A wail of “It's not fair!” is usually the first normative statement to come out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. People seem to be hard-wired to demand fairness. Studies in which people are offered deals that they regard as fair and unfair show that the former stimulate the reward centres in the brain; the latter stimulate areas associated with disgust.

For the British fair play is especially important: without it, life isn't cricket (especially when you score a perfectly good goal against the Germans and it is unfairly disallowed—see above, ref). Their country becomes quite pleasant when the weather is fair, though unfortunately it rarely is. And these days fair-trade 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 curmudgeonliness, while gesturing in a chin-up sort of way towards the possibility of future improvement.

The French have taken to using le fair-play in sport, presumably because (as their coach's refusal to shake hands with his opposite number after losing to South Africa suggested) their own culture finds the concept rather difficult. When talking politics, however, the French, like the Americans, tend to go for the more formal notion of justice. But 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.

Fair dos

Yet the fact that everybody believes in fairness is a clue to what's wrong with the notion. Like that other warm-blanket word, “community”, it signals limp thinking. What exactly is “fair” about restricting trade, for instance? Or “unfair” about letting successful people in business or other fields enjoy the fruits of their enterprise without punitive taxes?

“Fairness” suits Britain's coalition government so well not just because its meanings are all positive, but also because—like views within the coalition—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.

Fairness is fudge. This newspaper will have none of it. We reject the wide, woolly notion of fairness in favour of sharper, narrower words that mean what they say, like just or cruel. Sadly, British politicians are unlikely to follow our lead. They will continue to paper over their cracks with fairness. Which, given how handy the word is, is probably fair enough.