Better late than never

Prompted by a report from the IFS, Conservative Home and The Spectator have woken up to the implications Harriet Harman’s much vaunted Equality Act. Just like some of us did about 6 months ago.

The paradox of Hattie’s little scheme is that the result will be the diametric opposite of equality and the total opposite of tolerance and forbearance. As minority after minority take their grievances of perceived prejudice, disadvantage, offence or discrimination through the courts, a hierarchy of protected minorities will emerge. The result will be an acceleration of the balkanisation of society that is already well established under this Labour government. The very divide-and-rule approach to control that has deprived the British people of their ability to just rub along together, brushing off perceived sleights.

• Gay rights will trump Christian rights.
• Muslim rights will trump gay rights and women’s rights.
• Women’s rights will trump men’s rights (except Muslim men).
• Pedestrians rights will trump those of cyclists.
• Cyclists’ rights will trump those of motorists.
• Mothers with baby buggies will trump the rights of pedestrians, especially if they’re breast-feeding at the time.
• Children’s rights will trump those of parents, except mothers, who are a protected group.

This way lies madness. Can anyone not see that?

Okay – perhaps the full implications didn’t quite fall into place back then – specifically that the..

law opens a government to judicial challenge over virtually anything that it does.

What that means is that, as Theresa May pointed out earlier this month,

… cuts in the budget could widen inequality in Britain and ran a "real risk" of breaking the law, a letter leaked to the Guardian shows.

The letter was sent to George Osborne on 9 June, less than a fortnight before his emergency budget, and was copied to David Cameron.

May wrote "there are real risks" that people ranging from ethnic minorities to women, to the disabled and the old, would be "disproportionately affected".

May urged that steps be taken to avoid breaking the equality laws, warning that "there is a real risk of successful legal challenge".

How?

Paragraph 32 of Harman’s Act states that any individual is not prevented "from bringing judicial review proceedings against a public body which  has not considered socio-economic disadvantage when taking decisions of a strategic nature". So if anyone makes cuts which Jo Blogger thinks hit kids with special needs, they can have the decision subject to a judicial review. And, perhaps, try to claim legal aid for so doing. The Treasury might claim this is baseless, but they may end up being sued nonetheless – it will be great fun for the unions to find out how far they can go.

Oh dear…

In this way, Labour transferred power from parliament (where it was about to lose power) to the courts (where the lefty judiciary reign supreme). Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail. Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly.

But he won’t, probably because the DibLems won’t let him, and we’ll have years of legal wrangling while any ability to slash the deficit is mired in legal red tape.

Of course, no mention of the Equality Act could pass by without the Wimmin wanting some of that action, via their favourite fake charity:

Fawcett launches legal challenge to government budget

The Fawcett Society has filed papers with the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the government’s recent emergency budget. (1)

Under equality laws, we believe the government should have assessed whether its budget proposals would increase or reduce inequality between women and men.  Despite repeated requests, the Treasury have not provided any evidence that any such an assessment took place.  (2)

Even a top line assessment of the budget measures show 72 per cent of cuts will be met from women’s income as opposed to 28 per cent from men’s. This is because many of the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on, and the changes to the the tax system will benefit far more men than women.

ORLY? Well, let’s have a little think about that. Or we could let Anna and DK take care of the thinking.

Ed West is on good form too.

AJ

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Rape-a-dope.

Incredibly rare, these occurrences.

A mother-of-four who lied about being raped because she was ashamed of having sex with a soldier in an alleyway has been jailed for 15 months.

Cheryl Moss, 26, wasted 180 hours of police time and £5,500 of taxpayers’ money before finally admitting the allegation was false.

The single mother pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice after police found nearly an hour’s CCTV footage of the consensual intercourse taking place.

It really galls me to say this, but thank goodness for the pervert CCTV operator. And this isn’t the first time a false-accuser has been caught out by CCTV evidence.

Ouch.

AJ

Equality: Great job, ladies

I wonder if the ConDems are intent on keeping Jack Straw’s policy of preferential treatment for female convicts.

Miss Brown stabbed her boyfriend’s upper thigh with a carving knife severing several arteries, before running away.

Her sister Toni, 25, refused to call an ambulance to her home in Greater Manchester.

A jury at Manchester Crown Court was told he would probably have survived if he had received medical attention.

And another:

Lucy Viner-Mood, 22, and Lois Gibson, 18, locked Georgia Fenn in a flat for 18 hours while they beat her unconscious repeatedly.

Miss Fenn, 19, suffered burns from a cigarette lighter, had her ponytail cut off and suffered two black eyes and a broken nose.

The two flatmates attacked her in March after hearing that she had slept with Viner-Mood’s former boyfriend, Maidstone Crown Court heard.

A judge, who described the attack as “evil”, sentenced Viner-Mood to five years in jail and Gibson to three years in a young offenders institute.

Actually, this raises an interesting point. The latter pair got 5 & 3 years for “burns from a cigarette lighter, her ponytail cut off and two black eyes and a broken nose”

The former, where a guy was stabbed to death?

Samantha Brown was sentenced to five years in a Young Offenders Institute while her sister was received a four-year jail term

Oh, fair enough then. In the eyes of the law, the life of a man is worth less than the life of a woman.

That’ll be just fine. Pfffft.

AJ

ConDems busy with the *real issues*

I’m pleased to see they’re keeping focused on the prize.

The coalition government is to put the fashion industry under pressure to stop promoting unrealistic body images and clamp down on airbrushed photographs in magazines and adverts.

Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, who has long campaigned against size-zero photoshoots, will convene a series of discussions this autumn with the fashion industry, including magazine editors and advertising executives, to discuss how to promote body confidence among young people.

WHAAAAAAAT?

Are you paying for that ‘series of discussions’, Lynne?

Oh, no, of course you’re not.

WE ARE, YOU LUDICROUS MONG.

 
Lynne Featherstone, after being airbrushed with a big pile of our cash.

AJ

Girl Power

Nice lasses.

(Pic from The Times)

TWO teenage girl torturers smirked for the cameras yesterday after a court heard how they used a vacuum cleaner to leave a vulnerable young man in agony.

Danielle Sinclair, 17, placed the nozzle of the cleaner over the vict im’s eye and pr ivate par t s and switched it on. She also bludgeoned the man 16 times with a metal pole.

Paige Sharp, 16, repeatedly punched the 21-year-old and set his jeans on fire. She was only 15 at the time of the assault.

A shocked sheriff described the attack – filmed on a mobile phone by another teenager – as "degrading" and "almost feral".

Lawyers for Sinclair and Sharp said they were ashamed of what they had done, but they were both smiling as guards led them from court in handcuffs.

AJ

Anonymity for those accused of rape: One good reason right here.

Re this, you might well expect feminist harridans to be up in arms. You’d not be disappointed.

No sooner have I left a left a comment under her blogpost, than a perfect illustration presents itself:

A 21-year-old woman drove a man to suicide by crying rape and forced a second innocent man to consider taking his own life after falsely accusing him of a similar sex attack.

Despite being exposed in court as a serial liar, the law means the woman cannot be identified and can hide behind the cloak of anonymity.

A jury took just 45 minutes to clear medical student Olumide Fadayomi, 27, of rape and several jurors at Sheffield Crown Court broke down in tears when the judge then revealed the ‘victim’s’ history of crying rape.

And in an emerging theme, the CPS are also left looking like pig-ignorant vindictive functionaires.

Judge Patrick Robertshaw launched an astonishing attack on Crown Prosecution Service lawyers for making Fadayomi stand trial, simply to abide by the woman’s wishes.

He said:’The evidence did not, and was never going to, prove rape. The prime overriding consideration in the CPS’s decision had been merely that the complainant wished the case to go ahead.

‘It was little short of a craven abdication of responsibility for making an independent and fair minded assessment of the case.

‘It is quite astonishing these decisions are made by those who simply do not have experience of what happens in Crown Court because they never come into Crown Court. They sit behind desks and make decisions that result in this sort of trial taking place.’

You do surprise me. Not.

Meantime, Ms Williams, untwist your knickers, wake up and smell the coffee. Or pipe down.

AJ

Déjà vu, again.

Back in September, I noted this case:

Today, I see something very similar:

Surprise!

And…

Two other men, Reon Hall and Aaron Gelly, both 20 and from Surrey, were sentenced to nine years each in June for their role in the sustained three-hour attack.

From Surrey? Let’s be crystal clear about this: Croydon and Thornton Heath are in Surrey. I doubt they are from Godalming.

Savages.

AJ