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

[AliasGrace47]

Found this out very recently, I'm just thinking now about potential implications.

I think this is probably the desired endgame for Brexit, get out of the EU and then erode employment and environmental protections. Sell it as sticking it to the man who insists on basic care for the most vulnerable and an attempt to keep the planet liveable.

It’s utterly depressing and of course won’t improve life for the working poor, quite the opposite.

It could be in practice Reform and the Conservatives would seek to scrap elements of the EA2010, such as the Public Sector Equality Duty (which requires public bodies take action to actively promote equality), rather than the scrap the central anti-discrimination elements.

I think the Equality Act in its current form was probably a mistake as it’s just one piece of overarching legislation that is vulnerable. We’ve seen this before when “trans rights” were in the ascendant and women’s rights as a sex class were treated as mostly outdated and irrelevant.

Without the equality act

• no protections for pregnant women from employment discrimination
• no protections for those who become disabled
• no protections from race discrimination
• no protections from religious discrimination
• no protections from age discrimination
• no protections for gays and lesbians against employer / provider discrimination
• no protections for women against predatory men in their spaces

remember that all the preceding legislation has been repealed. It would need to be reinstated once by one.

Reform do not care about vulnerable groups.
Tice lives in Dubai FFS

Related to this, Reform have pledged to increase birth rates.

Perhaps they are outliers among right wing parties and plan to do this by increasing maternity pay and provision for parents, but as they seem to get most of their vibes from across the Atlantic, I wouldn't get my hopes up. I suspect trad wives is more their thing.

We could 'just' leave the Refugee Convention, but that could endanger the TCA with the EU. Everything is connected.

Or we could make all rights contingent on citizenship. That could work.

Only kidding. These are nightmarish proposals.

How can birth rates be magicked upwards in an ageing country.
The birth rate has just fallen to a historic low.
Most of our population growth is down to ageing.

The Equal Pay act was superseded by the EA2010.

I don't think that is true, certainly not on this forum.

Reform are pretty much a one issue pressure group rather than a political party. And Farage's main hobby horse is 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of the individual'. He views women's rights through this lens; but also views trans rights through this lens.

Not that he's given that much thought to it.

Polls this morning show 30% intending to vote for Reform in a general election. It’s therefore not surprising though unpleasant that MN is showing an uptick in Reform style rhetoric, as well as the fact that it’s relatively cheap for all political parties to try and build a social media presence, as well as allowing them to evade legal spending limits.

The average Reformish poster on here finds or pretends to find the fact that there is some pushback on those views here a terrible shock and proves the ‘lefty dominance’ of MN. I guess it’s not like that on the average FB group.

I HOPE that's what this is about....have my doubts though

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

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

It's not just Reform, sadly. Robert Jenrick wants to boot out the Equality Act, as does Suella Braverman. Jenrick also wants to scrap the Human Rights Act & the Climate Change Act

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.

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 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.

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.

This

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

Thank you for this.

Archive

archive.ph/5tNH5

I've seen quite a few. Generally they seemed to support Reform due to immigration concerns esp & sometimes other issues : I strongly agree with most of their concerns, but I do not think Reform are a good idea at all.
A lot of the people posting support didn't seem to have considered other ramifications., I can see why if the other issues are v tough in their area....

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.

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.

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.

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?