More Fool Us

Spotting the April Fool story in the day’s papers was always good sport, but these days you might be excused for imagining that every other report, on any given day, is just taking the piss. Very much so with the Wera Hobhouse sponsored Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill which appears to have been waived through Parliament while the government was too busy applying sticking plasters elsewhere.

The amendment would impose a legal duty on employers to protect their staff from harassment by other employees and now also by members of the public. In law such harassment means “unwanted conduct relating to a protected characteristic” (i.e. age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation) where that conduct has the purpose or effect of “creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”. This would include being offended by overheard remarks.

The idiots really are winning. This ‘Sneaks Charter’ would bring about a rash of actions without merit to further clog up the already overburdened legal system. And how hard would it be for two colleagues to arrange some specious insult, witnessed by other staff as a basis for suing their employer for damages? This is the sort of nonsense that should have its proposers put in stocks for judgment by the public, who are never currently consulted.

Critical Race Theory, the idiotic insistence that people who have never owned slaves owe anything whatsoever to people who have never been slaves, the notion that one can change gender by a simple declaration, child-centred teaching practices, recruitment for diversity… all of these are symptoms of a grand madness that has afflicted the developed world and will bring about its downfall. Are our leaders just fools now?

 Take that diversity in recruitment issue; a recent report decries the finding that fewer than 20% of  engineering undergraduates are female. So what? Do we see similar wails and gnashing of teeth when we discover that hardly any ‘men’ give birth? And isn’t that the very point? While there are some exceptional women in engineering and the sciences – and hurrah for them – why get all pissy about something which the supposedly uneducated populus can explain in a very short sentence?

 Naturally, the report authors also seem unduly concerned that in a country with a white majority population our engineers seem to be predominantly white males. Outrageous, they seem to say, we thought we were well on the way to eradicating this toxic species. It is almost as if they have never encountered an actual human person; that they have never considered asking them what they think; that they believe polls designed to elicit pre-ordained results are the only source of truth.

It has often been said that MPs should not only live in their constituencies, full-time, but that they should have held an ordinary job for some qualifying number of years. Not a think-tank internship, nor a special advisorship (And how come so many spads are so very young? It’s like the cult of management consultancy whereby actual experience is trumped by having gone to the right university.) I’d go further and ban graduates with an Oxford PPE degree from entering politics until at least the age of 40, with those years spent grafting in the dirt among the rest of us.

Not just April...

That such stupendously worthless legislation spouts like vomit from the over-indulged mouths of the monumentally privileged and feted suggests that the overhaul of Westminster is long overdue. The House of Lords is, likewise, crammed ever more full with useful idiots. And the media aids and abets their vandalism of the national psyche at every turn. It is little wonder that popular revolutions often begin with the slaughter of the intelligentsia. For all their supposed learning, they would be fools indeed to think that time is not coming.