Reform plans threaten maternity leave and job security for half a million pregnant women, analysis shows

[IwantToRetire]

In February, the party’s equality spokesperson Suella Braverman unveiled plans to repeal the act “on day one” if it wins the next election, claiming that Britain is being “ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion” policies.

The Equality Act 2010 – which replaced previous anti-discrimination laws with a single act – legally protects those with protected characteristics, including pregnancy and maternity, from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society. It makes it unlawful to fire, harass, or disadvantage women because they are pregnant, have a pregnancy-related illness, or are on maternity leave.

Losing protections from the Equality Act would remove the legal requirement for employers to treat pregnant women and new mothers fairly, likely leading to discrimination.

Protected characteristics under the Equality Act also include age, disability, gender reassignment, marital status, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

Ms Braverman described protected characteristics as being “pernicious” and “divisive”.

Full article https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-uk-nigel-farage-equality-act-pregnant-women-maternity-b2967253.html
and https://archive.is/foM0D

Well alll that bother, money and women's time, to get the Supreme Court ruling about sex being biological in the EA,will be pointless as Reform thinks to have sex as a protected characteristic is pernicious and divisive!

This.

you are being willfully difficult.

"day one" means starting the process - it does not mean repeal day one and replace in 2 years time

You seem to be blinded by bias, the core problem in our polarised political world.

The core Reform gist - is around those positive discrimination areas of which there are a huge amount in this country.

I have not seen the slightest shred of evidence that disabled people are going to be shafted.

As I hope I have said - there are a lot of reasons to put the boot into Reform, please do, but this is obviously not the one.
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf

Link should work now

And from the article

Reform said it would introduce a new “Workplace Fairness Act” to “restore fairness, protect women, and rebuild public trust in the law”.

Most of the people who vote for Reform don't care about protecting basic rights because they are too thick to realise that it is their own rights which are being protected as well as those of other people.

They do not see that their rights are protected. Until the SC ruling women’s rights had ceased to be protected in law and even now nearly all the public sector still ignore our rights. Even the courts were trained to ignore our rights and female prisoners are still locked up with male rapists. The most deprived demographic in the uk - white working class boys - don’t see their rights protected when DEI schemes prioritise other people over them and the government call any objection ‘far right’. When St George’s flags are taken down but Palestinian flags are left to fly. Why white British girls are raped in vast numbers and their perpetrators get away with it. When pregnant women are still sacked in large numbers. Their ‘lived experience’ is not one of experiencing these rights.

Not to mention the fact that every time I have returned, it's been on a plane, a pretty damned secure airport. No passport control on Hasting beach is there?

You say: "The core Reform gist - is around those positive discrimination areas of which there are a huge amount in this country."

What are these "positive discrimination areas" of which there are "a huge amount"? Please list them.

I'll tell you some of the things that piss Reform and some of their core supporters off:

• women having the right not to work for a year when they have a baby, and getting paid even though they're not working. Having to keep their job open for them for a whole year - why can't the employer just move on with a new employee?
• employers not being allowed not to offer young women jobs, when they know there's a high risk those women will become pregnant and will then take time off, expect to be paid for it, and be less reliable because they'll be responsible for childcare.
• all the whingeing and demands from women who want flexibility because they're responsible for childcare.
• women making a fuss because their male colleagues joke about porn or compliment them on their cleavage or put up sexy calendars.
• employers not being able just to offer jobs to men, and preferably white men like them, who they feel comfortable working with. Everyone knows that men are better employees than women.
• having to pay women the same as men for the same work - see the previous point.
• having to make fucking annoying and sometimes costly adjustments to working practices and equipment to make it possible for disabled people to do the job.
• not being able just to immediately fire someone who develops a long term health condition or is injured - having to spend time investigating and trying to find a way of enabling them to stay in the job.
• not being able just to make people retire when they get to 60, so you can get some new blood in.

This is the kind of stuff that Reform wants to get rid of, and will get rid of. Their complaint isn't about "positive discrimination" (which barely exists in UK law). It's about employers not having the right to discriminate against people.

If you care about single sex spaces (and I do too), then I should remind you again that currently employees can and do successfully sue their employer if they're dismissed because of their gender critical beliefs - because they believe and say that a transwoman is not a woman. That's because of the Equality Act. That protection disappears when the Equality Act is repealed.

Please cite reputable sources for each and every one of your assertions - thank you.

And again. in one single simple sentence. I do not support repealing and NOT REPLACING the Equality act, and neither do Reform.

I'm not even voting for bloody reform I just hate simplistic reasoning.

“I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!”

then I should remind you again that currently employees can and do successfully sue their employer

Or you could vote for a party that has not spent a year trying to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, including by refusing to remove unlawful guidance to employers that tells them to break the law.

In the end, all you can say to women who blindly trust Reform to do the right thing - the right thing for those individual people, which in the case of young women will include maternity rights and in the case of disabled women will mean protection against disability discrimination and in the case of older women will mean protection against age discrimination and in the case of gender critical women will mean protection against discrimination on the grounds of gender critical beliefs - is wait and see. They don't have the knowledge, intelligence or imagination to see what is coming their way. They will only learn when it happens to them and to their family.

I think that anyone who can will be emigrating.

And personally I'd like to know what Nigel Farage has agreed to do, if and when he becomes Prime Minister, in exchange for that £5 million. It's got to be something big, something that will transfer a great deal of money from the UK to that billionaire and his friends. A lot more than £5 million.

I presume it is indeed a choice between blind hope that Reform will do something to protect women’s rights versus the knowledge that Labour who seek to destroy them.

Farage lied and lied and lied about brexit. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. I lament my loss of EU citizenship.

I'd rather have literally any other (major) party in power, from tories to the greens than Reform.

Farage is just one MP, Reform MPs have proven they are a disloyal lot with two already independents and many having jumped ship from the Tories. It is one of the things I do think is positive about Reform (and I still wouldn’t vote for them) - they are made up of independently minded individuals that cannot be relied on to vote any specific way. Whipping them is more likely to cause a revolt than prevent one.

Saying Brexit would enable something does not mean it would happen. Under Brexit politicians could have chosen to stop immigration, politicians chose not to. Though it probably wasn’t helped that the civil servant in charge of implementing the Rwanda scheme turned out to be a open border fanatic who is now standing for the Greens.

I think you're talking about the "transwomen v women" issue. I'm completely with you on the importance of that. That is one issue. One very important issue. If the Equality Act goes, women lose everything. Including the Supreme Court judgement in For Women Scotland (because the judgement related to the interpretation of the Equality Act). And including the rights gained by Forstater in her discrimination claim against being dismissed for believing that transwomen are not women, and all the cases that followed hers, because they were brought under the Equality Act. If Farage wanted to make it clear that transwomen are not women in law, which is in fact already the law, he could clarify that by getting the Guidance sorted, or he could make it even clearer by making a very small amendment to the Equality Act. Absolutely no need to repeal it.

Does Farage intend to get rid of the Equality Act and bring in new legislation saying that transwomen are not women? Who knows, but I personally don't think he actually gives a toss about women. Anyone who did would not be talking of repealing the Equality Act. Women are the main beneficiaries of the Equality Act and will suffer most if and when it is repealed. If anything is eventually put into law to replace it, there is no chance in hell that it will provide anything like the protection provided by the Equality Act. It has taken decades for that law to be developed.

Farage obviously lies all the time, will do anything for money and power and can't be trusted on anything. But I'd just mention that the views he has expressed on the transwomen issue aren't even consistent:

"In 2025, he deferred to a Reform UK adviser who supported case-by-case assessments for housing trans women in women’s prisons rather than an automatic ban."

UK voters gave Cameron's government a kicking when they voted for Brexit. But guess what - it's not Cameron who's suffering for it.

I note that in their manifesto, Reform promise to repeal the "Equalities Act". That sort of lack of attention to detail doesn't fill me with confidence that they know what they are talking about.

They also greatly simplify job seeking. Back around 1980 I was offered a job heaving around heavy items at a builders' merchant. I was physically capable of working, but I doubt I would have lasted two days in that job. Reform would insist on people accepting job offers that they are totally unsuited for, and I don't think they have a clue about the practical outworking of their populist ideas.

Better just add that the same applies to the Greens – they have always had some lovely ideas, but an impractical manifesto, and now they've added a load of simplistic foreign policy, and all the genderwoo, and are on course for a big split if they don't make a deliberate choice between conservative Islamism, far left identity politics, and actual green concerns.

I have some bad news for you in that case.

I know I sound like a broken record, so I will stop, last one on this.

But I am certain in this case repeal means replace and generally does as there is so much in the equality act (as shown earlier).

Anyway - some very clear statements from them would clear that up :)

And yes Reform and the Greens have promised all sorts, thats populism! Will come back to bite them as it always does

Yet another reason we really don't want Reform being elected at the next general election. Bad enough that they're talking about privatising the health service and cracking down on disability benefits.

Yes, there is "so much" in the Equality Act and it's very complex and tied up with a huge amount of case law, which is why repealing it would be like throwing a large hand grenade at the UK population. Nobody who gives a toss about UK citizens would dream of repealing it. They might, very carefully and with expert advice and consultation, make amendments to it.

I think of Reform as a small group of individuals with a get rich quick plan. They have no concern whatever for the population. However, they do want to make money out of them. Farage has already made an enormous amount of money, including the recent personal gift of £5 million pounds. He's sold something very valuable. It could be to do with getting rid of employment rights, it could be targeted more specifically at putting women in their place, it could for the NHS to be privatised and someone getting a sweet deal on that privatisation. We will find out soon enough, because a large part of the UK is happy to risk everything on this chancer.
He's a big Trump admirer. Trump is out for himself, himself and himself. Trump and Farage have that in common.

The fact that they repeatedly talking about repealing and replacing the Equality Act and the HRA, rather than amending them should ring alarm bells.

As was posted by @SingleSexSpacesInSchools above, the EA replaced and amended huge amounts of prior legislation, including the entire prior body of law around sex, disability and racial discrimination and equal pay.

It seems to me that if Reform's ambitions were simply to get rid of the whole gender nonsense, they would simply amend the EA to remove the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, and repeal the GRA. I suspect their ambitions are much, much more than that.

Expenditure on the poor cut
Tax benefits for their rich mates.

You're clearly right on that, Fernandosor

White British girls are raped with impunity in the majority of cases by a close relative, who is also white. Sorry to burst your racist bubble.

So she DIDN'T say that protected characteristics were 'pernicious and divisive'?

What IS very very clear is that Reform, like any other party very much at the right end of the political spectrum, is no friend to women, no friend to feminists, no friend to children and no friend to the vulnerable.

I haven’t seen reports where white rapists were systematically not investigated and cases were pushed under the carpet to maintain community cohesion. Can you provide the link please?

Are you unfamiliar with the pitifully low conviction rate for these crimes?!

All rapes are systematically not investigated, charged and prosecuted.

The only thing special about the gangs is that these victims made it into the right wing press. But not because the press cares about the victims, it's because they are staffed and owned by racists.

One obvious example that fits your criteria would be Jimmy S.