What would be the implications for feminism if the Equality Act, Human Rights Act & EHCR go, as Reform apparently want to get rid of them? if

Most of what you are talking about is interpretation and enforcement rather than the law itself. As the SC judgment has shown, however far interpretation veers away from the law, it can be dragged sharply back.

What is written in the Act matters. The nine protected characteristics are not treated exactly the same (because they obviously are not the same) but there is no hierarchy in the law itself.

The police do not enforce the Equality Act. It's civil law and so it will always be mostly up to individuals to bring cases to enforce their rights.

Separately there is hate crime law, which adds an aggravating factor to other offences, as well as specific laws around inciting hatred. These are criminal laws and are not based on the nine protected characteristics in the EA. Hate crimes apply to race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity. The law against inciting hatred applies to race, religion and sexual orientation.

How did the Equality Act reverse the Disability Discrimination Act?

'breeders'

While I agree with you about the behaviour of some parents with pushchairs in wheelchair spaces do you have to use such dehumanising language? Pregnancy and maternity is also a protected characteristic.

I work under the Equality Act 2010 every day in a small LA. Generally, my colleagues forget about Equalities and it's an afterthought, to tick the legal box. We do Equality Impact Assessments but generally they're useless. Either there were never any negative impacts on people with Protected Characteristics or mitigations are wishy-washy and potentially never implemented. To say we are driven by "EDI" is laughable in my experience.

However, as people have said, it is the only anti-discriminatoon legislation we have. I would not like to see it repealed of even amended, other than strengthened.

For your reference, the 9 Protected Characteristics are:
Age
Disability
Sex (often confused with gender)
Race
Religion or Belief
Sexual Orientation
Gender Reassignment
Pregnancy and Maternity
Marriage and Civil Partnership

Court cases have confirmed that the Protected Characteristic of Race also covers Roma and Travellers.

The other way round surely, many Labour posters now surprised they’re seeing pushback on mn.

Brain blip
They would be an ethnic minority in the UK

I've come to think there are some fundamental differernces between things like disability, and things like racism. In the latter case, there are actually no real functional reasons reasons that prevent people working in the same kinds of roles. It is entirely possible to conceive of a world where race in the way we think of it doesn't exist, because there have been societies like that, it's an abstract concept.

In disability there absolutely can be functional differernces, differernt needs, and effects on others as well which need to be balanced. We see this in classrooms for example where the needs of the students who need a quiet orderly classroom seem to be pitted against the needs of students who can't be quiet or orderly.

Disability, sex, age, "gender (whatever that is,) sexuality, religion - all of these things are really quite differernt and I wonder if they are in fact too differernt to treat as a group. I'm not convinced that the same kinds of principles work with these different areas.

Can I ask where or when did Farage say he wants to scrap the Equality Act? I was unaware of this but can’t find anything online that backs this up. I’ve read about the idea of replacing HRA with a UK Bill of rights but nothing about the EA.

Hmm... there is a misunderstanding about U.K. equality law: It Is Not Equal.

Ageism is never protested about, universally accepted and practiced,and institutionalised to the point it is virtually an official government policy.

Disablism was covered by the brilliant, beautiful, Disability Discrimination Act, which was never enforced, and then was theoretically absorbed within the single Equalities Act, but in fact, reversed.

It is normal to find over-entitled aggressive breeders refusing to allow wheelchair users onto public transport. Sir Trevor Phillips wrote that discrimination against disabled people "is universally practiced... socially accepted... normalised... institutionalised.... and in it's effect on people's lives, is, in many ways, far worse than racism" He was at the time Chair of EHRC.

Sharmi Chakrabati (sp?) was far too effective, in making racism the single equality anyone knew or cared about. (The bitter irony is that what started her interest in equality was observing a fellow law student whose studies, and participation in student life, was made virtually impossible, merely because of being a wheelchair user)

Equalities from then on meant only one; Racism, much "more equal than others", and the only one enforced by police.

In recent years, and without Parliamentary approval, the Stonewall ideology has achieved the same status, of eager enforcement for a non-law, i.e. that males can transform themselves into women, and are entitled to enter anywhere they can access naked women and children.

'Rights' are only enforced if there is money and will to do so. Unions, having always been shockingly sexist, will at least fund some legal advice on any case, even sex discrimination, as an affordable exercise in power. But only in relation to employment law.

Although this isn't so linked to feminism, it's worrying imo that Reform chairman wants to bring back death penalty.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-david-bull-death-penalty-burqa-ban-farage-b2767946.html

I know that w so many truly evil people, some might be tempted, but I firmly believe that it would be wrong and dangerous to bring it back.

I'm not sure what your point is here. There are lots of EU citizens in the UK who have the right to remain and to work here for the rest of their lives. So that's a legal framework, yes, but so what? If you have a team consisting of 5 people with UK passports and 5 with French, German and Italian passports (who have all gained the right to work in the UK), and those 5 are all dismissed because they don't have UK passports, they are being dismissed because of their nationalities and could claim race discrimination. Those dismissals would be unlawfully discriminatory and would almost certainly be unfair dismissals under unfair dismissal law too.

Reform are Tories on speed and believe in unfettered free-enterprise which means no unions and no employment protection, no protection for marginalised or disadvantaged groups, nothing but emergency healthcare etc because 'rights' interfere in the operation of the market. Neo-liberalism, which we already have and has ruined many of our institutions, on roller skates.
Don't vote for Farage and co. They are not the friends of ordinary people esp women.

Without the UK citizenship an employee can be only be employed within a legal framework which allows them to be employed in the UK.

Interesting thought process if a business decided to only keep employing UK citizens (of any race/ethnic) and "lawfully" reorganised dismissing all of its non-citizens no matter the race or ethnic have they been discriminated against under EA?

Do you know of any case law where non-citizen was sacked only on the basis of passport holding?

The Equality Act protects people from being dismissed or otherwise treated badly because of their nationality (among other things). Plenty of working people in the UK are not British, or have dual nationality.

In my opinion Reform would be like having our very own Trump. They're occasionally right, but only in the way a stopped clock is. I hope the political landscape changes before there's another election, I'd even rather have the Tories back.

And Labour haven't been the car crash for women's rights we feared they might be. Perhaps because they're pragmatic and what trans 'rights' advocates are demanding is actually absurd and would be deeply unpopular. The polling on this is clear. Transwomen in women's sports, refuges, prisons, changing rooms is deeply unpopular with all segments of society.

It seems to me that it's more likely, more workable, that you would have this kind of approach, tweaking rather than repealing as such.

In which case it would really depend on what kind of tweaking it was. I do think it is the case that we are now starting to see how some of these kinds of laws are playing out after some years and it may be that deficiencies are more evident. I could see some kind of differerntiation or clarification made around employers obligations around disability, as you suggest. I think there are emerging questions around how much it is possible for employers to sustain productivity for example and that's something that is going to have to be dealt with one way or another.

I could also easily see movement to create British versions of laws or organisations that don't rely on European institutions.

How far would reform get with this sort of thing, I don't know. Some could be theoretically positive imo but would require some really good policy work and I don't think they have the depth for that now. That might change though if they get defectors from other parties or they can build bridges.

Thank you for this.

Archive

archive.ph/5tNH5

This

same as on the main boards…i dont see ‘lots’ of people

With reference to equal pay I suspect what Reform, Jenrick etc want to get rid of is 'work of equal value' and go for a more explicit definition of equal pay.
So it will still be illegal to pay a female binman (binperson?) less than a male binman. But it will be legal to pay binmen a lot more than say care workers; or to pay janitors a lot more than school secretaries, whereas now that work could be weighted as equal value. Overall, women will lose out from that.

I'm not an expert on the HRA, the previous conservative government talked about repealing it but it proved too onerous to get any kind of agreement on a replacement 'British Bill of Rights'.

I think Reform tend to appeal more to men than women from the polling I've seen, I think they would pass some anti-discrimination legislation to replace the EA, but it probably wouldn't be as strong, and you would see pandering to the Fathers 4 Justice types.

I also think areas such as reasonable adjustments might be scrapped as too onerous for business, or they might be pared right back especially for 'woke' disabilities like Neuro divergence or mental health conditions.

Equally, there was very little previous legislation that protected gays and lesbians, so I think lesbians would lose out- possibly there'll be little to no replacement legislation for them or possibly big holes of exemptions if you can show you personally disapprove of homosexuality because of a religious or philosophical belief- meaning in practice that your boss could suddenly develop religion if they wanted to sack you.

I think employment protections in general will be pared back though, so even straight white men will have fewer employment rights.

Good luck selling dependant housewife to senior level/college educated women (and men) who have been taught that even with the growing babies bit that they must work for pay to be of value to society🙃

I’m purely speculating. If they go down that route it would still mean public and private sector cannot discriminate in employment or provision of services on the grounds of a protected characteristic. The PSED is an additional duty on top of that, to have ‘due regard’ of the need to promote equality, prevent discrimination and promote understanding between different groups. So a more pro-active ‘stop it before it happens’ duty. It would be dreadful to lose it, but the less nuclear option.

So private businesses could no longer discriminate
but councils and the NHS could
that will go well ......

Like most of Reforms proposed policies it would be a clusterfuck.