Thinking of voting for UKIP tomorrow? If you care even a jot about the rights of women, think on.
Thinking of voting for UKIP tomorrow?
If you care even a jot about the rights of women, think on.
Here are 15 reasons why women (and men who believe in equality of the sexes) should sooner drink poison than vote for the Kippers tomorrow.
1. Nigel Farage on women: “Godfrey’s [Bloom, former UKIP MEP] comment that ‘no employer with a brain in the right place would employ a young, single, free woman‘ has been proved so right. With this lunacy, that if you have children you get three months paid leave off work, or six months paid leave off work – he absolutely got it spot on.”
2. UKIP want to scrap paid maternity leave (in line with Lesotho, Swaziland, the US and Papua New Guinea).
3. UKIP want to make it legal for employers to discriminate on the basis of gender (as well as race).
4. This would also entail the scrapping of employment regulations against sexual harassment and safeguards for part time and irregular workers, the majority of which are women.
5. Nigel Farage informed City high flyers that they are “worth less” to employers if they become mothers or that motherhood is a lifestyle choice.
6. Patrick O’Flynn, MEP Candidate, also say that pregnant women in the workplace are a “disaster”.
7. UKIP’s MEPs have consistently failed to represent the interests of women. They have voted against or simply not turned up to key votes in the European Parliament on ensuring equal pay, combating violence against women and ruling out FGM, to name but a few.
8. Since the 2009 European Election UKIP’s only two female MEPs, Nikki Sinclaire and Marta Andreasen, have both left the party. Andreason said Farage “doesn’t try to involve intelligent professional women in positions of responsibility in the party. He thinks women should be in the kitchen or in the bedroom”. Nikki Sinclaire won an Employment Tribunal claim for sex discrimination against the party.
9. Roger Helmer, UKIP MEP and candidate in the Newark by-election, said, “Rape is always wrong, but not always equally culpable.”
10. Godfrey Bloom, a former UKIP MEP, was not reprimanded for hugely sexist statements such as, “[feminists are] shrill, bored, middle-class women of a certain physical genre” and, “Women, in spite of years of training in art and music – and significant leisure time in the 18th and 19th Centuries – have produced few great works”
11. Stuart Wheeler, the party’s treasurer, said that women were “absolutely nowhere” when they compete with men in sports where they are not physically disadvantaged. He said, “I would just like to challenge the idea that it is necessary to have a lot of women or a particular number on a board… Business is very, very competitive and you should take the performance of women in another competitive area, which is sport where [men] have no strength advantage.”
12. In November 2013, UKIP MEP, Stuart Agnew said (in a debate on women in the boardroom) that “Women don’t have the ambition to get to the top, something gets in the way. It’s called a baby… Those females who really want to get to the top do so”.
13. David Chalice , a senior party official in Exeter, has voiced his belief that women should stay at home and that “cash-strapped Moslems” should have multiple wives.
14. Demetri Marchessini, the party’s sixth-largest individual donor in 2013, said there was no such thing as marital rape, arguing: “If you make love on Friday and make love Sunday, you can’t say Saturday is rape.” He also claimed women should be banned from wearing trousers because they “discourage love-making”.
15. Need I go on?
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James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
512 Responses to “15 reasons women shouldn’t vote for UKIP”
helvegen
Only 15 reasons???
greg
“Did you also know that Maternity leave can now be split between the father and the mother? There are plenty of men deciding to take longer paternity leave so the woman can go back to work. Especially in cases where the woman is the higher earner.”
That’s not true.
It’s proposed by a Lib Dem policy advisor (and should be implemented) but is neither law nor even policy of any of the main parties.
Eventually people will realise maternity or long term paternity harms careers overall in the same way being off sick or being unemployed for long periods of time does. I’m not sure there is any way around it and it might just be if you want both kids and a long period off work father or mother you’ll have to realise it has an impact. There really isn’t much of a gender gap in pay until motherhood anymore and there isn’t really one between men and without children (when comparing people in the same industries). There are consequences to having long periods off work, working part time or in flexible jobs whether for childcare purposes or not.
We can and should do all to change that equalise the genders so men can take more time off etc but it’s just something you can’t ignore.
Leon Wolfeson
That’s right, wages are far too high for you, right. Keep talking about how you need to raise the poverty premium by smashing the tax tax such that basic services are dropped, and hence you make more from the poor, and they are more poor.
And of course you want there to be far fewer jobs for the poor by smashing trade and isolating the UK – gotta get the middle classes assets for yourself as usual, etc.
You keep talking about how now having pensions and JSA makes people richer, how not being able to eat unless you can slave away for illegally low wages makes you free. End result, you don’t get even more of their work for your money, and they still have no assets. You win, the British people lose. Your plan, foreigner.
Caroline
Men are entitled to 26 weeks additional maternity leave currently if the woman chooses to return to work early. check out direct gov
LB
The result of taking people’s money (NI) that they contribute for their pensions, and spending it will be that the poor won’t be able to eat, heat or house themselves in their old age.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf is an out of date publication by the ONS.
The bottom of page four should make you shit your pants.
In summary, the estimates in the new supplementary table indicate a total Government pension obligation, at the end of December 2010, of £5.01 trillion