Daily Mail, 13 July 2009 Has there ever been a more preposterous figure than the Equalities Minister Harriet Harman? Scarcely a week goes by when she does not dream up another monumentally irrelevant yet intrusive or oppressive wheeze to make life in Britain that much more unjust and insufferable. Not content with setting herself to eradicate discrimination against women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, disabled or black people as well as all ethnic minorities, she has now discovered yet another form of prejudice — discrimination against Northerners. Ms Harman wants to introduce rules to stop ‘discrimination’ against people from the North and other regions, and has instructed her department accordingly to stop Londoners and other Southerners from ‘lording it’ over the rest of the country. After ‘class war’, we now apparently have ‘location war’. If this idea is allowed to progress beyond Ms Harperson’s terrifyingly one-track mind, hundreds of public organisations will have to have special quotas for Yorkshirepersons or Cornishpersons whenever a vacancy occurs. Could Ms Harman perhaps enlighten us whether it would be merely those currently living in such areas who would be preferred — or everyone with a regional accent, perhaps, or with ancestors from Tyneside or the Wirral? Can outlawing discrimination against people with sticking-out ears, a belief that Elvis has been reincarnated or a penchant for shapeless cardigans be far behind? Ms Harman’s fanatical determination to wield the blade against all who are getting in the way of the egalitarian utopia — such as men, white people, heterosexuals, the able-bodied, the middle classes and now the entire population of London and the Home Counties — would surely have made even Robespierre flinch. She recently caused consternation within government by suggesting that bus services should be targeted at poorer areas and away from middle-class suburbs where people can afford cars. Bus services, however, are but one example of her apparently limitless vindictiveness towards the middle classes in her attempt to eradicate all variation from the human condition. Her Equality Bill now going through the Commons imposes upon public bodies from Whitehall to parish councils a legal duty to address the gap between social classes when implementing policies and allocating resources. That means forcing health or education authorities and other public bodies to skew their funding to help ‘deprived’ people and thus discriminate against the better-off. The Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has managed to see off parts of the bill that would be ruinous towards already stricken businesses, but the main impact of this oppressive piece of social engineering has not been blunted. It is itself but the latest manifestation of this Government’s unshakeable attachment to what it calls ‘equality’ but might more properly be called the imposition of injustice upon groups of which it disapproves. Everywhere, merit is being undermined — and with it, true equality and social justice. Employers are forced to hire or promote inadequate job applicants if they tick the requisite ‘disadvantaged’ box; Labour constituency parties discriminate against men through all-women parliamentary candidate shortlists; and able pupils are refused the university places they have earned simply because they come from the right side of the tracks. Now this manifest and destructive injustice is even being extended to the Queen’s honours list. Measures have been covertly introduced to ensure that more women and minorities are honoured by the Queen, with the Cabinet Office issuing instructions to Whitehall departments to ensure that their nominations lists contain more female, disabled and non-white candidates. At a stroke, this renders meaningless the very notion of being honoured for serving this country. It means people from these designated groups are being honoured for what they are rather than for what they have done. It is patronising, demeaning and insulting to women and minorities. It discriminates against the truly worthy, and blows another enormous hole through the idea of merit, the only fair criterion for reward. It’s part of Labour’s ideological agenda to eradicate all prejudice from the human heart and build the new Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. Now, though, there’s trouble in utopia as the Government’s own equality tsar, Trevor Phillips, reportedly faces a plot to oust him as chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. He is said to be the target of a whispering campaign as part of an ‘organised plot’ by Ms Harman’s deputy, Maria Eagle. Trouble arose after the Equalities Department tried to foist upon the Commission a government stooge as chief executive, a move angrily rebuffed as political interference by the Commission’s board. Mr Phillips has also been hit by a succession of resignations, allegations of financial irregularities and — irony of ironies — of sex discrimination. His crime may simply have been to stand up for fairness against the unjust doctrine of equality. He has made powerful enemies among the ideologues by the positions he has taken against multi-culturalism and saying the police were no longer ‘institutionally racist’. So he may be more sinned against than sinning. Nevertheless, the Equality Commission is intrinsically an oppressive body, since its purpose is to enforce the religion of egalitarianism and stamp out all heresy. To create a new social order, it has to destroy the old. And so Christians in particular are finding that in this Orwellian universe some are definitely more equal than others. Thus Stonewall, the gay rights pressure group whose agenda has been enacted virtually in its entirety by this Labour Government, has not one but two commissioners on this body. And yet despite this loading of the regulatory dice, gay activists kicked up a stink over the appointment of one token evangelical Christian on the Commission — so much so that, at a recent conference on ‘faith, homophobia, transphobia and human rights’, Mr Phillips actually expressed contrition over his appointment. In similar intolerant and unjust vein, under the Equality Bill religious groups will be forced to accept, for example, gay youth workers, secretaries and other staff, even if their faith holds same-sex relationships to be sinful. Existing equality law exempts religious bodies from its provisions. But the Equality Bill restricts this protection of religious rights only to ministers, bishops and their equivalents in other faiths. As the Christian Institute has protested, forcing religious bodies to employ people whose views or behaviour conflict with the principles of such bodies is a bit like demanding that the Labour Party employ card-carrying Conservative members. One of the key tenets — possibly the key tenet — of a liberal society is that it grants religious groups the freedom to practise their religious faith and live by its precepts. Preventing them from doing so is profoundly illiberal and oppressive. Now the biter, in the form of the Equality Commission chairman, is himself being bitten for not biting hard enough. There may be far worse than Trevor Phillips on the equality horizon if Ms Harman has her way. One has to wonder once again just how this person can have achieved and retained the dizzying positions she holds as a Cabinet Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Nothing sums up more devastatingly the state of this Government than the pre-eminence of Harriet Harman. Now she may even be left in charge of the country while the Prime Minister is on holiday. One shudders to think what might happen if she is actually required to do anything. We’ll probably all return to find she has replaced the Order of Merit by the Ribbon of Equality, and the Queen by a transgendered Geordie with a limp. What has poor old Britain ever done to deserve Harriet Harman?
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
July 13, 2009
What has poor old Britain done to deserve Harriet Harperson?
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