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.

On the culture thing, not all cultures are equally valid though, afghanistan for example, fucking appalling to women and girls. I don’t think thats valid at all. If someone said to me it is equally valid as a country that provides equal rights to women I’d think they are insane.

Looking forward, there seems now to be no guarantee of future generations receiving a state pension ( even Labour have floated the idea that in future the state pension may have to be means tested) - unless people start taking out additional savings. Maybe this is where maternity pay will end up too.....a bit like with health insurance. Something you have to factor in yourself..

I think what she was trying to say was that maternity pay is funded by general taxation - and with more and more women working full time the burden of maternity pay falls on the tax payer. So, in order to fund maternity pay either taxes have to go up - or else people have to take more personal responsibility for accumulating/building up their own insurance/pension/maternity pot.

Sounds pretty consistent with a conservative economic ideology.

Of course cultures are valid in and of themselves, but when it comes to cultural integration - which is required for stable and cohesive society - then some cultures are just not as acceptable as others . Multi-culturalism cannot work when some of those cultures go against the host culture. Multi ethnicity is different to multi-culturalism. Culture is about practices, laws and so on - not just about different food dishes and clothing styles. Ethnicity is more about origins.

In British culture, women's rights and protections are honoured ( just about.... still) and guaranteeed in law. There is no legal right to rape in marriage as in some cultures, and girls cannot be subject to genital mutilation. Wives have equal rights when it comes to divorce and access to children and so on.......

Female teachers have as much authority as male teachers.....and so it is not acceptable for a father of a pupil to refuse to speak with the female teacher, and so on......and teachers cannot be forced into hiding because they showed an image of the Prophet Mohammed during a religious studies lesson.

and teachers cannot be forced into hiding because they showed an image of the Prophet Mohammed during a religious studies lesson.

This has happened though hasn’t it? This isn’t British culture but it is present here in the UK.

“I think what she was trying to say was that maternity pay is funded by general taxation - and with more and more women working full time the burden of maternity pay falls on the tax payer.”

With more women working, more tax payers are women - which strengthens the argument that that those aspects of tax policy, pensions policy and benefits policy which disproportionately favour and benefit men should be looked at.

For example tax relief on pensions disproportionately benefits men, but politicians don’t seem to be making a big song and dance about how that is a “burden on the tax payer”.