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”
Nikki Smith
How do you deduce thats its very well researched? Just because its ‘quoted’ doesn’t mean its factual. Things can be taken out of context. Are we forgetting a lot of the other parties have had affairs, degrading their wives in public? Not to mention a lot of exsisting sexist attitudes towards women that have been in place, in the work place, for many years before Ukip ever exsisted. Open your minds people. The other parties are running scared, as the european vote showed they should, and will put out scare tactics to put off voters.
Illidan Stormragge
Women are meant to compliment men, not compete with them. It’s odd that people think women, especially pregnant women, can do all the jobs men could do or do them at the same level, and then get offended when they find out the pay is different. Women should focus on the family and be a bedrock for future generations rather than try to pursue material wealth at the level of men.
And women typically have fundamental different interests; there is a distinct lack of women in computer science or engineering fields even though this is the forefront of the modern labor market and what people actually need. Google only has 30% of its workforce as women, or 70% men, and I seriously doubt the women there get paid nearly as much as most of the men. This isn’t from discrimination.
Calum Weir
UKIP aren’t a perfect party yet but if you iorn out these sexist and raciest polices UKIP aren’t so bad, sure some of there polices are ridiculous but up until now they haven’t been taking themselves seriously and as more and more people show interest in what they think is right and wrong about the party the more UKIP will push forward.
Leon Wolfeson
Huh. never did get a reply.
Guest
I am not you, your constant accusations that I am are both creepy and at this stage downright libellous.
You are demanding the state genocide it’s people, no more, to remove it’s assets. YOU want to kill us, every last one.