Archive for category Political Correctness

The Macpherson Mindset

Adrian Hart has written an insightful piece about the Macpherson report and its aftermath at this link.

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Misleading claims about economic benefits of Equality Act are endangering jobs

Contrary to government assurances, new equality rules will have no economic benefit and questionable impact on real inequality

As unemployment continues to grow, a new Civitas report reveals that new equality regulations threaten further job losses. The Equality Act 2010 introduced new duties on employers to protect disadvantaged groups from discrimination in the workplace and combines existing anti-discrimination law into one act. The Government’s official Impact Assessment of the Equality Act claimed that it would produce net economic benefits of £25-£87 million annually and increase access to jobs. But Assessing the Damage, by Nigel Williams, finds that the Government’s Assessment relied on a series of spurious assumptions, and that the more probable outcome is job destruction.

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Equality law’s billion pound paper-shuffle

‘Equalities industry’ undermines true equality

As youth unemployment rises to record levels, a new Civitas report reveals that British workplaces spend up to a billion pounds a year complying with clumsy equality legislation. The costs put particular strain on public sector organisations, as well as making it more difficult for businesses to create and retain jobs. Furthermore, these policies have made jobs less accessible to disadvantaged, marginal workers.

The Rise of the Equalities Industry, by sociology professor Peter Saunders, examines the operation of Britain’s equality laws and concludes that they are seriously flawed.

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EHRC refuses Britain a fair hearing

The Equality and Human Rights Commission contributes very little to meaningful equality in Britain today and should be abolished, according to a new Civitas report. Added to the Government’s much trumpeted ‘bonfire of the quangos’, the EHRC would save the Treasury tens of millions of pounds at no obvious cost to the general public.

Small Corroding Words, by Jon Gower Davies, is a systematic critique of the philosophy, research and practice of the EHRC. It reveals serious flaws in the EHRC’s ‘triennial review’, How Fair Is Britain?, that was used to demonstrate unfairness in Britain. What the research actually shows are the statistical differences between some groups. This line of thinking entails, for example, taking the fact that men are more likely to die in work-related accidents than women as a sign of unfairness. (pp. 8-9) The EHRC inaccurately blames Britain for differences of this kind.

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Rewriting History

In 2008, MEPs gave the green light to a new museum, designed to showcase the “common historical memory” of the European Union and “bring Europe’s history alive”. Set to open in 2014, this Brussels-based “House of European History” (HEH) will sprawl over an acre and has an expected price tag of several million euro. However, while its construction has yet to begin, the project is already riddled with controversy.

House Museum

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Equally Wrong

In October last year, the Equality and Human Rights Commission suggested that progress to close the gender pay gap was grinding to a halt. That December, the Office of National Statistics inconveniently noted ‘the biggest fall in the gender pay gap since the measure was first produced using the ASHE methodology in 1997’. This renders the EHRC’s predictions as reliable as the Met office’s in recent years. Curiously, this tremendous news has yet to penetrate very far into the consciousness of those calling for more Government intervention and legislation to close the gap. Could it be that our relatively flexible labour markets are already doing a great job at breaking down barriers to employment, at the very least for those women who want and choose to engage in full time work?

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