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”
Jaime DeGrae DeMeneses
The reason is social responsibility – that’s it. So many people with similar views to yourself will shout about the destruction of our communities without realising that the community has control over itself, whether it binds or whether it explodes. Yes individually you may lose out a tiny degree, but (to use a cliche) it’s for the greater good. If the community is more successful then it encourages more business, and creates more jobs. By not paying the woman for maternity leave, it will push more people onto benefits out of necessity which in the long run costs the country, and by extension your community more. You argument of “If women are equal to men, prove it” can be flipped around to justify why women get the children in most parenting cases. Men aren’t equal to women as they can’t have the kid or breast feed so therefore the mum gets priority almost regardless of who the better parent is. Every social decision has far reaching consequences and those should be considered before the decision is made.
Leon Wolfeson
1. Right, to you there will be no more taxpayers, and you’re laying claim to everything the government own, to loot it. Got it.
2. You’re making up crap, as usual.
I quantify you should pay tax.
Leon Wolfeson
I answered the question, you are refusing to accept it because it does not mean you get to have all the wealth.
There is NEGATIVE cash after they’ve paid for unemployment insurance, since business simple keeps their side of NI if they don’t need to pay it. Hence, they have nothing in your world, and lower take-home pay.
And you get to make cash selling the insurance.
1. I am not proposing your strategy. Thanks for admitting you are wasting the public’s cash.
2. I am not proposing your strategy. Thanks for stating you will raid pension funds.
3. I am not proposing your strategy. Thanks for admitting you’re running a Ponzi.
4. I am not proposing your strategy. Thanks for admitting your “solution” is to abolish pensions for the 99%.
5. Unemployment insurance is not “real” investment. You are proposing boosting profits and ending pensions, no more. And yes, I propose “investment”, a foreign concept to you (literally).
6. Brown? What about Thatcher’s raid? No surprise you are talking about rich people’s pensions, and only those, not the occupational pensions Thatcher smashed.
Thanks for that call to abolish pensions, again.
alex
never seen such a pack of lies in all of my life. the smear campaign against UKIP has just gone too far to the extent that nobody is listening anymore.
Yes they are a one issue party….. that has largely SCRAPPED THEIR DOMESTIC MANIFESTO until October 2014 when they plan to bring out a new one. UKIP is not rascist, UKIP is not sexist, they’re simply shaking up politics exactly in the direction it needs to be shaken
alex
women shouldnt bloody have half the parliamentary seats you idiot. all we want is that there is equality of opportunity in politics as in all other areas of life. anyone with half a brain cell knows that equality of opportunity doesn’t equate to equality of outcome. or should we start dividing up parliament seats to represent exactly the ethnic composition of society, oh and while your’e at it why don’t you start dividing up parliament seats according to little finger length too?