BNP and the Equality Bill

November 20th, 2009 § 4 comments

Right. Lets get straight in to it.

The Labour Government’s Equality Bill, announced yesterday in the Queen’s speech, will actively discriminate against all white people in business and put large companies under a legal obligation to employ Asians or blacks rather than whites.

Guess who said that? Nope. Not the Daily Mail. Close though. Those words are the start of a big steaming pile of lies from the BNP.

In terms of the Equality Act, companies will be “encouraged” to favour black and Asian candidates over white people when recruiting. In addition, where companies have a choice between equally qualified men and women, they are obliged to employ the woman.

I had a little look and, astoundingly, their wrong.

I had a quick squint for the bill and and found two. The Equality and Diversity BIll and the Equality Bill. I’m not sure if they’re two different things or one is a summary of the other so lets look at them both.

The Equality and Diversity Bill is pretty simple and straightforward in it’s purpose…

A Bill To Prohibit the use of affirmative and positive action in recruitment and appointment processes; to repeal the Sex Discrimination Act (Election Candidates) Act 2002; and for connected purposes.

And what is ‘positive or affirmative action’?…

For the purpose of this Act, “affirmative or positive action” means any action that is intended to give a benefit or encouragement to a particular group or groups of people, on the basis of the—
(a) age,
(b) sex,
(c) sexual orientation,
(d) race,
(e) nationality,
(f) disability,
(g) religion, or
(h) socio-economic status of members of that group.

Not really obliging anyone to do anything except judge people on their merits, does it? And what of the other bill (please bear with me, I’m not used to all this parliamentary language and stuff so as I said above, it could well be the same thing)?

In Part 2, Equality: key concepts, Chapter 1: protected characteristics are listed as…

The following characteristics are protected characteristics—

  • age;
  • disability;
  • gender reassignment;
  • marriage and civil partnership;
  • pregnancy and maternity;
  • race;
  • religion or belief;
  • sex;
  • sexual orientation

Pretty much the same as the Equality and Diversity Bill. Here are some examples from it explaining what discrimination is…

Direct discrimination
(1) person (A) discriminates against another (B) if, because of a protected characteristic, A treats B less favourably than A treats or would treat others.
(2) If the protected characteristic is age, A does not discriminate against B if A can show A’s treatment of B to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
(3) 10If the protected characteristic is disability, A does not discriminate against B only because—
(a) A treats a third person who has a disability in a way which is permitted
by or under this Act,
(b) B does not have the disability, and
(c) 15A does not treat B in that way.
(4) If the protected characteristic is marriage and civil partnership, this section applies to a contravention of Part 5 (work) only if the treatment is because B is married or a civil partner.
(5) If the protected characteristic is race, less favourable treatment includes segregating B from others.
(6) If the protected characteristic is religion or belief, it does not matter whether the religion or belief is also A’s.
(7) If the protected characteristic is sex—
(a) less favourable treatment of a woman includes less favourable treatment of her because she is breast-feeding;
(b) in a case where B is a man, no account is to be taken of special treatment afforded to a woman in connection with pregnancy or childbirth.
(8) Subsection (7)(a) does not apply for the purposes of Part 5 (work).
(9) This section is subject to sections 16(6) and 17(7)

Here, the closest it gets to discrimination against men is 7, b, any special treatment of a woman due to pregnancy or childbirth in some way is to be ignored. Nowhere in either of these documents does it say that white men must be put to the back of the cue, ignored, not given the same rights as others.

The racists casually drop in…

To enforce compliance with that provision, the Equality Act will also order companies with more than 250 employees to have “gender pay audits.”

In effect this means that any company which does not actively discriminate against white males will be in contravention of the “gender pay audit” section of the act. In effect it means that any large company must discriminate against whites in order to comply with the law.

What the hell does that mean? A ‘gender pay audit’ doesn’t discriminate against males, white or otherwise. The idea is to shame companies into paying women the same as men. To stop discrimination against women. In reality, this will probably mean that companies will drop the pay of men rather than raise the wage of women, y’know, what with the mindset of the capitalist, but it’s still not discrimination. The second ‘in effect’ is just a complete non-sequitur. It doesn’t make sense.

The BNP article also says that Roman Catholic Bishops are warning that Christmas could be banned by the Equality Act. They make use of Andrew Summersgills, the General Secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, appearance in the racists favourite comic, the Daily Mail, where he states Christmas is already being banned, using the Oxford Winter Light Festival as an example. Five Chinese Crackers debunked this on 3rd November 2008. Where he shows that Winter Light Festival lasted for one night and covered lots of events including swithcing on the Christmas lights and various other stuff with Christmas in their names all going on. 5CC has done the same to the myth that Dundee has banned Christmas this year.

Now, the Bishops wouldn’t have a vested interest in seeing the Equality bill fail, would they? After all, Catholicism is such an exinclusive religion and doesn’t demonise whole sections of communities that don’t fit with their world view… what? Oh.

This is classic bullshit from the BNP, take something that is supposed to help bring equality to people, and because it is removing the white males advantage, not putting him at a disadvantage, they lie about it.

They lie about it because they have no arguments. They haven’t linked to anything, which is nothing unusual, the press don’t normally either, and they haven’t even quoted the offending parts of the bill to back up their case. They use the Daily Mail, with it’s agenda driven scare stories, removing themselves from the responsibility of fact checking because something has appeared in the mainstream media.

The BNP are supposed to be a political party, this article of theirs proves many things, among them i) they lie ii) they are racist ii) they are sexist. But we all new that anyway. There’s no couched language here just lies. Lies that’ll get repeated and passed around and you’ll eventually hear it from your non-racist mates, if you haven’t already.

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