“NEXT time any government minister tells you that violence against women and girls is a priority for them, don’t believe them. It isn’t. They literally don’t give a toss.”
Those are words that could easily have been written this week after Labour tried to sneak out the news that they were rowing back on their pledge to hold five local inquiries into grooming gangs.
GettyJess Phillips should be hanging her head in shame. She literally doesn’t give a toss about those abused by largely Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs[/caption] Labour have failed thousands of working class white girlsBut, in fact, that sentiment was tweeted in January 2024 by the Labour MP Jess Phillips about the failures of the last Tory government.
How ironic it was, then, to watch Ms Phillips, now Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, announcing to the Commons that the promised local inquiries would be watered down to mere “victim-led panels” without any teeth.
After thousands of white, working-class girls were raped and beaten by largely Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs with impunity for decades, we urgently need a national judge-led statutory inquiry, where every victim and whistleblower can name the police officers, social workers, care home staff, local officials and councillors who helped cover up these outrageous crimes for so many years.
Jess Phillips should be hanging her head in shame. She literally doesn’t give a toss.
Equal pay ruling=rubbish
IN a fair and just world, you might expect that the people who did the most essential jobs would be paid the most.
By that metric, those who work as carers, nurses and binmen would be among the highest-paid employees in the country because we simply can’t manage without them, while the likes of actors, singers and footballers would have to get by on the minimum wage.
SWNSBirmingham’s binmen are refusing to work due to a bitter dispute between their Unite union and the local council over pay cuts, sparked by an equal pay ruling[/caption]The comic Al Murray, as his hilarious Pub Landlord alter ego, brilliantly identifies during his live stage shows who is and is NOT essential.
Audience members brave (or foolhardy) enough to sit in the front row of the theatre have to endure the Pub Landlord asking what they do for a living.
Brutally mocked
Any serving soldier, fireman, doctor, nurse or police officer will immediately earn heartfelt respect, but woe betide someone who works in PR, at an estate agency or as a journalist because they are brutally mocked and told: “You’re not exactly ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL, are you?”
I think most of us, regardless of our own jobs, would agree that we wouldn’t survive very long without the people who do the vital work that keeps the country functioning.
So spare a thought today for the long-suffering residents of Birmingham, who have now been forced to endure many long weeks without the essential services of their local binmen.
It’s bad enough for most of us dealing with rubbish collections only once a fortnight, or even just once a month these days but Birmingham’s bins haven’t been collected for weeks and weeks on end, leaving the streets piled high with rotting, smelly black bags and a plague of rats and foxes — all reminiscent of the miseries of the Winter of Discontent from 1978 to 1979.
The city’s waste-collection staff are refusing to work, thanks to a bitter dispute between their Unite union and the local council over pay cuts for some workers.
It is part of massive cuts across all council budgets thanks to the hopeless mismanagement at Birmingham City Council over many years.
But the catalyst for these cuts is not unique to our second city and could have huge implications for all of us, in every part of the country.
That’s because Birmingham’s financial woes date back to an employment tribunal in 2010, which ruled that council workers had the right to equal pay for “work of equal value”.
That sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, who would quibble with the idea that people should get the same pay as someone else doing the same job?
Except that isn’t what that ruling meant.
Instead, the tribunal decided two people doing completely DIFFERENT jobs which were judged to be of “equal value” should also be paid the same.
The case was brought on sex discrimination grounds, on behalf of 4,000-plus female council workers employed mostly in traditionally female-dominated roles such as cleaning, care and school catering, who had been paid less than male council workers doing traditionally male jobs such as emptying the bins.
That was followed by a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 allowing backdated claims, so Birmingham is now left facing a £760million bill to settle the historical equal pay claims.
LNPAs council lawyers enjoy their high wages, it’s the people of Birmingham who are left to wade through mountains of smelly bin bags for another miserable week[/caption]Similar demands in other parts of the country could now lead to pay cuts and strikes in places as far afield as Sheffield, Brighton and Barnet.
Yet this all stems from the ridiculous notion of “work of equal value”.
What does that even mean? And who decides which jobs are of equal value to which other jobs?
How can anyone seriously claim that a dinner lady and binman do jobs of equal value?
How can working in a warm school kitchen, in normal office hours, be the same as being up before dawn lifting heavy, smelly bins in the wind and rain?
Lawyers’ wages
There is nothing to stop a woman applying to work as a refuse collector if she wants to, just as there is nothing to stop a man applying to work in a school canteen or as a cleaner.
And, anyway, if serving school dinners is of equal value to taking away rubbish, how do both jobs compare with being a Premier League footballer?
We may enjoy watching football but we NEED our bins emptied and our children fed at school.
So shouldn’t we treat dinner ladies and binmen as being of AT LEAST equal value to a star striker and pay them £100,000 a week too?
Of course not — that would be absurd.
Yet who is to say which jobs have this or that value?
As the lawyers for the council workers enjoy their own high wages for the work they choose to do, it’s the good folk of Birmingham who are left having to pick their way through mountains of smelly bin bags for another miserable week.
YOU really couldn’t make this stuff up but Hamas has hired lawyers to challenge the Home Office over its decision to designate the terror group as, well, a terror group.
Hamas claims the human rights of its supporters are being breached because being a banned terror organisation “unlawfully restricts” their freedom of speech and right to protest under, you’ve guessed it, the European Convention on Human Rights.
Now we’ve all picked ourselves off the floor and stopped laughing, this is actually deadly serious.
The ECHR isn’t the European Convention on Hamas Rights – it’s supposed to protect us FROM people like Islamist terrorists, not give protection TO the terrorists.
Yet, time and again, bad people (and you don’t get much worse than the masochistic rapists, kidnappers and murderers infesting Hamas) are able to use our human rights laws against us.
The Home Office must treat this appeal with all the respect it deserves and chuck it straight in the bin.
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