Yesterday, on Sadine Nine’s Breakfast Show on BBC Radio Essex, our Honorary President Godfrey Bloom spoke in a two-way debate on “women’s rights”, employment legislation, and freedom of contract in a free society. The debate was separated into two halves. If you would like to like to listen to the debate, please click on the two audio links below.
In the first segment, Mr Bloom first speaks at 2:56:
In the second segment, Mr Bloom first speaks at 1:05:
This woman, Gillian Rutter, who runs a training firm, is typical of women who work in business and go on the media commenting about these issues, pretending that they have some sort of insight into the problems of business owners. She seems to be completely oblivious to the problems that people who run businesses face with this, and throughout the interview she uses left-wing political/ideological language and shaming tactics instead of addressing the points.
First, who in their right mind would employ a woman and pay her to get pregnant and have children? That makes no sense. You’d need your head read if you think that’s a good idea, yet it’s the law of the land. Why? I agree with Bloom that the real number will be significantly higher than 1 in 7. It’s probably in excess of 90% in very small businesses, which is only to be expected. Obviously there will be circumstances where a highly valued female employee has built up sufficient goodwill with an employer that it is decided she should be paid, in addition to a replacement employee being subsidised, but that’s more of a practice for larger businesses in the main as they can afford it, and it wouldn’t be typical if it weren’t for this legislation.
It’s not just that employers lose the labour of the employee for a year or so, it’s also that they must pay that employee a state-mandated wage for most of the pregnancy. Surely that’s outrageous. Surely the woman being interviewed here, Ms Rutter, can appreciate that employers might not be able to afford this and might have little option but the discriminate? It may be that these problems do not affect her business, but can she not appreciate that her experiences might not be typical? She seems to have her head stuck in the sand and doesn’t seem to grasp that these gold-plated rights she demands for women might actually be detrimental to employees.
The solution is, as Bloom says, freedom of contract. The result would be one further blow to career women and one further victory for those, like me, who believe in traditional families, where women stay at home and have children and men work. This explains the view of people like Gillian Rutter. It’s an ideological war. In my view, women should not be working, they are stealing jobs from men. In Ms Rutter’s view, men and women are equal and to enforce this, employers must be required to pay for women to go through the awful inconvenience to their stellar careers of having to fall pregnant give birth to children.
One further point. Nothing is mentioned in these discussions about the employees back at the ranch who have to pick up the slack for the absent woman who is off having a baby and getting paid for it. What about their rights? Wouldn’t it be fairer on them if the employer could simply replace the pregnant woman with a new employee, rather that having to pay both. Of course, many of the larger employers can afford to do just that, but here we are addressing the issues of smaller businesses that have limited resources. I suspect that in many cases the situation becomes very exploitative of the left-behind employees and employers also see this and decide to avoid it by not employing women of a certain age.
Another thing-
In the second recording, Godfrey Bloom keeps parroting PC platitudes.
At least twice he says: “We want young women in the workplace”.
Why?
I don’t want young women in the workplace. I want to see young women married, at home, having and looking after children. They need to make an early start on that: I’d favour arranged marriages for women from the age of 14 and above. That’s what young women are supposed to do, isn’t it? Marry, have children, take care of the home, etc.
I must confess, I’ve never understood this obsession with getting women into work beyond that it seems to be just a way of driving down wages, since women (on the whole) do depress wages for everybody. Workplaces with women in them are also very unpleasant environments (even women themselves admit this) and nobody with any sense wants to work with women – even women don’t want to work with women.
What is all this in aid of? What do we achieve by denying Nature and press-ganging and cajoling young women into doing paid make-work in dreary offices and factories, or as in this case, climbing scaffolding? What about having finding a husband and having children?
Also, when these career girls go off on their paid maternity leave so they can have their designer children for their plastic families, and presumably get right back to work the day after giving birth, what is the effect of this culture on the mind of children and on wider society?