Conservative leadership bids - Maternity pay comments

[LoobiJee]

The Guardian is quoting Kemi Badenoch using the word “excessive” when talking about tax as ‘taking from one group of people and giving to another’, when questioned about maternity pay.

I mean, the whole point of tax is that it’s about taking money from individual citizens and businesses and using it to pay for things that might not be possible without taking and pooling those funds. Such as, let’s say, pandemic preparations.

She fails to mention that one of the reasons businesses are failing is because of the additional costs of imports and exports post-Brexit.

She also fails to mention that there was a time when houses didn’t costs six times your salary, when rents were lower, when council houses were being built, and when the UK’s economic infrastructure was owned by the tax payer not by overseas multinational corporations.

Quote from the Guardian coverage below.

Badenoch says maternity pay benefits 'excessive'

Kemi Badenoch has said she thinks maternity pay is too high.

In an interview with Times Radio, she was asked if she thought maternity pay was at the right level. She replied:

Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.

Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.

When asked to confirm that she thinks maternity pay is excessive, she replied:

I think it’s gone too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation. We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of those decisions.

The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an enviroment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their own decisions.

When it was put to her that level of maternity pay was important for people who could not otherwise afford to have a baby, Badenoch said:

We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.

Statutory maternity pay is 90% of average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, and then £184 per week, or 90% of average pay, for the next 33 weeks.

Badenoch says she practises what she preaches in this regard. According to Blue Ambition, Michael Ashcroft’s useful and mostly positive biography of Badenoch, when she was head of digital operations at the Spectator, before becoming an MP, and she became pregnant with her second child, she resigned instead of taking maternity leave. “She told me she thought it would be unfair to ask us to keep her job open while she was on maternity leave,” Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor, is quoted in the book as saying. “She would have been within her rights not to have done that.”

Badenoch might have been helped in making this decision by the fact that her husband is an investment banker.

Ah so golden girl is all misunderstood and others are just devious. The depths you have to go to relieve her of any responsibility for her words and actions.

Thats one way of spinning it.

She may not have meant maternity pay was too high, its unclear exactly what she meant but she clearly thinks that regulation, including maternity rights, has gone too far.

So presumably she wants worker rights to be reduced.

Yet another example of politicians saying whatever they think will get them elected.

You only have to watch the interview to know what she meant. Have you watched it in full?

Kemi says what she thinks, not what she thinks will go down well, besides.....that's why she's got into this manufatured media mess.

Who knows. However I can believe that Kemi attracted the same enemies that made life so hard for Rosie Duffield.

There are some men, with their handmaidens who really do not like strong women prepared to stand up for women's rights.

its unclear exactly what she meant

That's the most accurate summation.

Don't talk nonsense. I suspect you didn't watch the interview.

I'm not a Tory voter nor a member - but I appreciate Kemi for her straight talking.

Yes, Kemi gets called arrogant and self centred because she's confident - in a way that male candidates do not.

Just reposting this excellent post from upthread.

IMO Kemi gets called arrogant and self centred because she says arrogant and self centred things.

She has outdone herself recently 😂

She’s been excellent on the subject of protecting women’s rights previously - but she’s let herself down recently.

See I always thought she was awful but parasitised in others hard work on women's rights to make herself popular. See also: Miriam Cates.

Rosie Duffield/Joanne Cherry were out there ploughing a lonely furrow, not to mention the feminist groups getting stick from Theresa May/Maria Miller.

Kemi just took advantage. Then sat on her plans to change the EA to try to use it to win votes, with the result it did not happen.

I don't trust her at all, but there is little damage she can do in the Tories at the mo.

I agree Kemi was an opportunist on women's rights who didn't seize the opportunity to really DO something when she had the chance. Instead she decided to play to the culture war peanut gallery.

She's said what she really thinks, and only later realised it might clash with the Mumsnet vote.

Left and right both need to be watched like hawks when it comes to women's rights. As Kemi's demonstrates, the right just throws us under a different bus when it suits them.

All sensible women understand that vulnerable women and women's spaces need to be protected.

Parasiting is not necessary. Kemi is a woman. She gets it.

Anyway the idea that standing up for women makes you popular is laughable. Why did that avid courter of popularity, Keir Starmer, find it so hard to say that women don't have penises?

She was doing her job as Minister for Women and Equalities and she did it well - and hopefully in one role or other she will continue going forward. She's the one most able to hold Labour's feet to the fire on this issue. And Victoria Atkins, of course.

She didn't do it well in my opinion because she stalled on the necessary legislative change.
She could have left a strong legacy but she preferred to gamble with it at the election (and lose).
She's done nothing concrete at all for "womens rights" other than attach herself to trans issues. Her comments on mat leave and birth rates leave a lot to be desired from a feminist perspective.

You've always been negative about Kemi because she's a Tory party member.
She'll still be around, though, as part of the opposition whose job it is to hold Labour to account. The Tories blocked Self ID and commissioned The Cass Review.

Who else do you realistically see doing that - who has as much grasp and understanding?

I've voted Conservative in the past so it's not that at all. It's because she's a very right wing, brexiteer type of Conservative.

The Tories put self ID on the table in the first place 😂 and it's not down to Badenoch it got taken off. It's down to the feminists that worked on it.

Like I say,if she was that bothered she'd have got the EA sorted rather than keeping it for election fodder.

Who else will stand up for women's rights? Shabana Mahmood. Jess Phillips. Wes Streeting (if you mean "womens sex based rights). Emily Thornberry and Yvette Cooper also very vocal on women's rights even though they are trans inclusive in that.

Meanwhile Kemi is banging on about babies and taking maternity pay off the taxpayer. Don't think she's mentioned "sex based rights" at all. Jenrick specifically says he won't change anything as too divisive.

All hot air which just goes to show how much this actually mattered to them aka not at all.

Kemi was not the one stalling. If you have evidence proving otherwise then cough it up, otherwise admit it's just your (incorrect) opinion.

Evidence for: claimed it needed doing in April 2023. Labour welcomed the review, saying "clarity was a good thing". Huge majority in parliament, no barrier there.

Evidence against: did nothing tangible for over a year while she "mulled". Not in the King's speech for last parliament. Then magically was "ready to go" if they got elected in July 2024.

🤔

Over a year to do nothing isn't very effective is it?

Anyway luckily it's just entertaining at this point because she's in the bin with the other Tories.

Like I said,I want her to win the leadership contest for comedy value.

Tribal?

If only that were true, now it seems that KB doesn't even know what she meant.
She says exactly what she thinks will go down with whoever she is addressing, in this case, the Tory party and its few MPs.

As for her standing up for women's rights?

She couldn't give give a shit, supported de funding of women's DV refuges for starters.

Yeah, I would agree with a lot of this.

To me, this is one of the most significant social issues that affects women and children, and really, everyone.

In terms of politics, I've always looked out for policy approaches that seem more thoughtful, not just toeing the line that is most pleasing to capitalism.

There isn't a lot, but where I've seen it, it seems to come from all over, it's not specific to the right or left specifically. Certain sections of the left talk about it more, certain types of feminism, but also quite a lot of women's movement conservatives which is how I think of the women on the right who have been largely told they aren't allowed to be feminists.

Some of the Green parties, internationally, have been interesting on this stuff in the past, but less so now IMO.

I don't mean the tendency of families to want, or need, two adults in work.

I mean governments and employers want as many adults as possible in work, because it is better for their profits.

Those people have no appetite for a system that allows a family to live decently off of one, or even one and a half salaries. They would much rather both parents work FT and pay for someone else to work FT to look after their children.

Costs of thing like housing have risen in part because two full incomes became the norm.

I can tell you in Canada, that money comes from Employment Insurance, everyone pays into Employment Insurance which is also what covers people when they lose their job for some reason or are in seasonal work.

Some employers top that up to a greater or lesser degree, but you mainly see that in large businesses, not small ones which couldn't afford it.

@TempestTost I did wonder whether some countries had some sort of private insurance plans - I think they do in Japan, for instance. The idea being, on a social level, that people do financially plan when/if to have children. No idea what happens to people without it - to single mothers etc - but I do get the impression that the responsibility for funding your family/kids rests firmly at the parent’s feet.

To do something similar here, just like changing the model of services provided by the NHS to emergency and/or part funded, would require a change in societal attitude that I think would be impossible to bring around in the UK. The welfare state is so embedded within the cultural psyche that I can’t imagine any government daring to insist that people take financial responsibility for their children to this extent.

Not sure what the answer is without appearing completely lacking in compassion… but sometimes I do resent the fact that I’ve never claimed a thing (maternity benefit, housing benefit /UC etc or PIP before my DD turned 18); I wasn’t entitled to child benefit when they changed the rules as we consciously made the decision to only have 2 children because that was all we could afford if we wanted to be able to provide for them and have some quality of life and a decent retirement. As it turned out mine have SEN and we’ve also paid out of pocket for every single thing for that too. Some sort of prepaid insurance plan might have helped with that too, I suppose.