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”
David Armitage
Where do you get your ideas from, Trident is a weapon capable of a distance of over 6000nm, designed to take out military installations and so win the war (should it ever be fought) primarily it is a more than capable deterrent and it is actually updated on a very regular basis, so if war break out where will the likes of you be, under your mothers dining table crying or fighting for freedom, liberty and justice, as for the Court of Human Rights, no we didn’t set it up, The Court was established on the 21 January 1950 on the basis of Article 19 of the European Convention on Human Rights when its first members were elected by the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe.[1] The Convention charges the Court with ensuring the observance of the engagement undertaken by the contracting states in relation to the Convention and its protocols, that is ensuring the enforcement and implementation of the European Convention in the member states of the Council of Europe. The jurisdiction of the Court has been recognised to date by all 47 member states of the Council of Europe. In 1998, the Court became a full-time institution and the European Commission of Human Rights, which used to decide on admissibility of applications, was abolished by Protocol 11. We did however introduce the Human Rights Act, drafted and presented by Cheri Blair no less, the thing is that none of those laws are anywhere near as enforceable when we (the British) are trying to implement them, mostly because we are being told what to do by the constant changing of the EU dictat, we are being minimised into nothing, so we have no choice but to fight back, and the only way to do that is stand up for what we believe to be right in the best interest of our Nation, and if people don’t like it, live in Belgium with the rest of like minded people.
Rebecca
Because all of our other parties seem to think its a good thing to allow everyone to immigrate here even when they disrespect all of our laws and change our meat and churches and put poppies in the toilet, UKIP will stop this, what good are womens rights if another religion takes over the UK and we have them removed anyway?
David Armitage
Again we have someone who actually knows sweet sod all about the world and it’s ways, if the third world is producing so much of our food why are the people of those countries starving ??????? most of the food we eat comes from the West, Africa is a pretty wealthy country, yet the Governments there are corrupt abandoning many of its own people to starve or die from drought disease, they do little or nothing to help their own, We hand money over to countries that do not need it, India being one of them, as is China, in fact there are few countries that are actually poor, as for what can be deemed as emerging economies, i have yet to see anything that says we benefit from any of them, The British Empire goes back to the 15th and 16th century, what it did then was trade with many countries, now we’re expected to simply give our wealth away, you might well be known as motormouth, but i doubt that you think before you go off on a tangent, and i suggest that you are one of those individuals who will not let anyone else speak because you believe yours is the only opinion that really matters, my advice is think, then speak.
David Armitage
49 reasons never to vote Labour . . .
Well i can only give you 49, but it is at least a start.
1) Up to 50 thousand ‘excess’ deaths were recorded at hospitals during the last Labour Goverment. (Research by Sir Brian Jarman of Imperial College).
2) The ‘Bedroom Tax’ was part of the Welfare Reform Act 2007 proposed by Labour.
3) Between 1997 to 2010 gas prices rose 133% and electricity prices rose 69%. Why would the public ever trust Labour on energy prices again?.
4) The devastating impact of Labour’s raid on pensions: The tax grab has cost workers £118bn since 1997. (Office for Budget Responsibility).
5) Labour spent £148.7 million on a National Measurements Office which forces traders to measure their goods in kilograms rather than pounds.
6) The Royal Mail is now sold because of EU Postal Directive 2008/6/EC, brought in by the last Labour government.
7) Council Tax doubled under Labour – 105% increase in England, 146% Wales. (The Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy: 26/03/09).
8) In 2012/13 Labour councils employed nearly 23,000 people on zero-hour contracts.
9) £660 million has been cut from Labour run NHS Wales over the last three years according to the Welsh TUC.
10) When Labour came to power in 1997, spending on NHS managers was less than £190m. By 2010 this had increased by 450% to over £1bn per year.
11) Labour wasted £11bn of taxpayers money on a failed IT project which was eventually scrapped by the NHS in 2013.
12) Labour lumbered the NHS with vast PFI repayments – £50 billion worth of loans which are costing £300 billion in repayments.
13) It was the Labour Party who awarded the DWP Medical Services Contract to ATOS on the 15th March 2005.
14) Labour started the privatisation of the NHS. They brought in the 2006 NHS Act that introduced competition into the NHS.
15) Labour introduced competition into the NHS: Competition Act 1998, Enterprise Act 2002 & Public Sector Procurement Regulations 2006.
16) In 2006 Gordon Brown cut the flood defence budget by £14 million.
17) Youth unemployment rose by more than 40% during Labour’s 13 years in office.
18) Total stock of social housing fell under Labour – 421,000 homes were lost from the social housing stock between 1997 and 2010.
19) British manufacturing grew by 28% between 1980 and 1997. Then, under Labour, it shrank by 6%: falling from 20% of GDP to just 11%.
20) Labour left a deficit of £156 billion, PFI liability of £301 billion, EU Rebate loss £9.3 billion, Sold the Gold loss £6 billion.
21) The last Labour government spent so much money on Labour cronies that it had a 5% structural deficit at the height of the boom.
22) The use of food banks went up tenfold under Labour. From 3,000 users in 2005/06 to over 40,000 by 2009/10. (The Trussell Trust/C4 FactCheck).
23) When Labour’s Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, UK public debt was 44.1% of GDP. When he left in 2010, it was 148.1%.
24) Only 6,330 council houses were completed from 1998 to 2010 under Labour, compared with 17,710 in 1990 alone – Thatcher’s final year as PM.
25) Tony Blair gave away a chunk of the UK’s EU rebate estimated now to have cost the UK £9.3 billion between 2007-2013.
26) In 2010 Gordon Brown branded Rochdale voter Gillian Duffy “a bigoted woman” for daring to voice her concern about uncontrolled immigration.
27) Labour are now complaining about gambling. But they were the ones who wanted to build Super Casinos in some of the poorest areas in Britain.
28) Labour closed more mines in 5 years than Thatcher did in 11 years.. 211 mines closed under Wilson 1965-70.. 154 under Thatcher 1979-90.
29) Under Labour zero hour contracts increased by 74% between 2004 – 2009.
30) Since Labour liberalised the law in 2000 to allow postal voting on demand, the number of postal voting fraud in Labour areas has soared.
31) Labour wants to charge patients. Lord Warner said people should pay a £10-a-month fee to use NHS/£20 for every night they stay in hospital.
32) Labour signed the Lisbon Treaty which gave away powers to the EU and reduced UK sovereignty and the power of our Westminster Parliament.
33) Labour were responsible for the rise in payday lenders. Now they are campaigning against them.
34) Labour presided over the slowest growth in 50 years and produced the fastest decline in British manufacturing since manufacturing began.
35) Labour destroyed our border controls then with the help of the BBC denounced anybody who voiced concerns about mass immigration as racists.
36) Labour councils are the biggest users of zero contracts.
37) Under Labour between 1997 to 2010 the gap between rich and poor got wider.
38) The last Labour government doubled the rate of income tax on the lowest paid.
39) Labour claims to be the party of the working man, but they have absolutely destroyed the working class through mass immigration.
40) Labour MPs to remember: Denis MacShane (jailed), David Chaytor (jailed), Eric Illsley (jailed), Elliot Morley (jailed), Jim Devine (jailed).
41) Blair invaded Iraq and Brown invaded the Treasury, both actions crippled us.
42) Labour opposes democracy in Britain by denying the British people a referendum on EU membership.
43) Labour Party Manifesto Pledge 2001: ‘We will not introduce top-up fees’.
44) One of the reasons for high energy prices is EU driven ‘Green Taxes’ brought in by the last Labour government.
45) It was Labour under Blair who handed control of British food regulation to the EU, (Regulation EC no 178/2002).
46) Remember when Tony Blair and Labour essentially traded guns for access to oil with Libya.
47) The Labour Party paid only £14,000 in tax last year on total income of £33.3 million. (The Spectator, 30/07/2014).
48) If Ed Miliband can easily stab his own brother in the back, imagine what he will do to us if he ever becomes Prime Minister.
49) (Illegal?) Wars.
guest
I hate the party as much as the next guy but many of these are taken so out of context and unfairly portrayed that its just flat out lying