Thursday 20 July 2017

Theresa May's hypocritical outrage over BBC pay disparity


Theresa May has waded into the row over pay at the BBC to spew a load of faux outrage about gender inequality, but in doing so she's simply confirmed that she's only bothered about gender inequality when it affects the wealthiest people in society.

Of course BBC pay is ridiculous, not only for the fact that there's a huge gulf between the pay of the BBC's top earners, but also because a number of incredibly untalented people are earning absolute fortunes at the public expense.

Of course people have every right to complain about gender inequality amongst the BBC's highest paid employees, but they're clearly opening themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy if they've got a personal track record of discriminating against women.

Theresa May and the Conservative party have spent seven punishing years enforcing ruinous austerity dogma, 86% of the burden of which falls onto female shoulders.

It's an absolute disgrace to see Theresa May take a short break from 
her seven year campaign of loading the overwhelming burden of austerity dogma onto the shoulders of ordinary women, suddenly crying rivers over the fact that the likes of Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding's six figure salaries are less than some of their male colleagues.

Boo hoo hoo, privately educated establishment-insider Claudia Winkelman has to subsist on a salary of less than half an million quid for whatever it is that she does that's so important, and meanwhile millions of ordinary women have suffered wage repression, tax credit cuts, child welfare cuts, closed maternity wards, Sure Start centres and domestic abuse refuges.


Fuck them though. Somebody has to pay for the mess the bankers made in 2008, and Theresa May isn't going to make the rich pay their share is she? After all the Tories would go bankrupt without all their donations from the City of London, the private health lobby and the landed gentry.

Then there's the WASPI women that Theresa May's Tory party are intent on robbing blind.

Nobody is arguing that the pension age shouldn't be equalised so that men and women retire at the same age, but forcing the change through so quickly that one group of 1950s -born women have to work six years longer than they were told they had to is manifestly unfair. Not only are six years of pension payments being nicked from these women, they're also being made to shell out an extra six years of National Insurance contributions too for their significantly reduced state pensions.

Still, the story is the same from Theresa May. She's crying rivers for Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding because their bulging pay packets aren't big enough, but not for our wives, mothers, grans, aunties, neighbours, and work colleagues that her government is busy totally shafting.

Theresa may apologists might try to argue that she's somehow exempt from blame for these appalling policies because she didn't devise them, and that she's only implementing them because she's too weak and directionless to change direction away from these legacies from David Cameron's rotten leadership.

Of course they'd be right that she's far too weak and directionless to change direction (she's had a year to bin austerity dogma and do something/anything to help the WASPI women) but they'd be absolutely wrong to claim that she's just some passive bystander.

Not only did she repeatedly vote in favour of austerity dogma (even after it became very clear indeed that austerity was hurting poor and ordinary women a lot more than poor and ordinary men) she also devised one of the most sexist and discriminatory bits of legislation of the entire Cameron era while she was at the Home Office.

In 2012 Theresa May introduced a set of arbitrary income rules for British citizens wanting to bring their non-EU spouse to the UK. The rules are discriminatory in two main ways.

The first way the arbitrary rules discriminate is against people who live in poorer regions of the UK. The result is that 58% of people in London earn enough to sponsor a foreign spouse and two children, but just 36% in the North East 34% in Yorkshire and Humberside and 30% in Northern Ireland earn enough.

Arbitrary rules that discriminate against northerners, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people by taking no account of the cost of living are bad enough, but when it comes to gender disparity the situation is even worse.


72% of males have a salary high enough to sponsor a non-EU partner under Theresa May's arbitrary rules, but just 43% of females earn enough, which means that Theresa May's draconian spouse visa rules women are far more likely to be forced into exile from the UK for the "crime" of falling in love with a non-EU citizen than men.

The fact that Theresa May has deliberately forced tens of thousands of couples to make the choice between living separate lives or living in exile from the UK is sick enough in its own right, but when it's more than twice as likely to affect women as men too, it just makes her rivers of tears for Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding shockingly hypocritical.

Theresa May doesn't give a damn about ordinary women because her government has been actively and deliberately attacking them. But not only does she discriminate against them, she despises them too, and imagines that they're such gullible halfwits that they'll completely ignore her political track record and imagine her as some kind of feminist because she hasn't got a penis, and because she's making a fuss that Claudia Winkelman isn't paid enough by the BBC!



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