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”
Linzi
I am a British emale business owner and I will be voting For UKIP despite all the crap that os spread about them
I have not found any of the other parties to represent me or my needs in business or otherwise
Does anyone honestly think that the other main parties are here to represent the common man let alone women!
Nothing about Ukip says a woman should not vote for them
To suggest otherwise is small minded scaremongering and pathetic
Tracey coleman
I shall be voting ukip keep the migrants out
Morag Lennie
I am sure that Farage and company will approve of the fact that I AM FAR TOO LADY LIKE TO ARTICULATE WHAT I THIN K OF THEM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Graham Crosse
Why would anyone vote for UKIP is an equally valid question. I am male and support this aniti-UKIP view. Anti women and I feel their anti-Europe stance is also pro-conflict.
Rational Thought
All in all, this is as much propaganda as anything else. You paint something to look worse than it is to suit your own selfish needs. As stated by the quote on this very page “those females who really want to get to the top do so”… in short if women are truly as capable and challenging as they so claim then why do they need prop-up laws?
I as a UKIP supporter agree and actually really enjoy the company of strong women that don’t want to be pandered to. This page does nothing to truly provide an argument other than make assumptions, false claims and twist the reader’s perception. Equal pay is context based and is full of rubbish, there is no “equal pay” amongst men so why would you standardise it to make the average female pay equal to the males? If you choose to work part time in a super market then you’re the reason the average female wage is much lower than a man’s. Statistics by every account show that men work more hours, more overtime, more unpaid hours and aren’t at risk of being pregnant so on all accounts in a logical world it’s a pretty sound argument.
You don’t have to like him or his policies, you don’t have to be polite but to anyone who really has a mind of logic and reason would know that this type of manipulative journalism is what the people who vote UKIP hate and what the general population hates. You’re doing yourself a greater disservice by slagging him off.
Marital rape is full of crap but if it’s just a opinion held by an individual of the party then it’s not party policy. It is inevitable that at least a handful of high ranking individuals in the party you highly regard would hold distasteful opinions also.
Rape is always wrong but not equally culpable. Logically speaking, what is the definition of rape? Forced sexual penetration. If you get taken advantage of whilst drunk and physically did not remember a thing and so call it rape then i’m sorry but you’d classify as a class A moron for drinking too damn much and losing self control, if you can charge someone with manslaughter whilst drunk then you need to take some responsibility for being that damn drunk in the first place. He might mean something I disagree with but unless he clarifies my assumption is an adequate display of how you might be just over-reacting.