Still under the thumb
Why doesn't Rishi drown himself in a bucket?
Your Armchair General finds himself once more apoplectic on a Sunday morning, after reading of yet another piece of treachery from the useless Sunak: the short-arsed bell-end has unnecessarily implemented a bunch of judgements from the European Court of Justice, relating to the Equalities Act 2010.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering Brexit freedoms after quietly introducing sweeping EU equality rules into British law.
New regulations, driven through Parliament without fanfare, “gold-plate” judgments by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and create a “carte blanche” for companies to be sued for “unlimited damages”, Conservative MPs have warned.
During his (failed) leadership bid, Mr Sunak made much of how he was a dedicated Leaver — and Truss a Remainer — but he has, once again, demonstrated that he wouldn’t know what a “principle” was if it punched him in his stupid grinning face. Furthermore, he has also expressed his opposition, such as it is, to the Equalities Act.
The changes amount to a significant expansion of New Labour’s Equality Act, which Mr Sunak once claimed had “allowed every kind of woke nonsense to permeate public life” and “must stop”.
We now know, of course, that Mr Sunak believes in nothing other than the righteousness of Mr Sunak being Prime Minister. This unprincipled charlatan:
suddenly found the Magic Money Tree and then presided over a ludicrously generous “pay to sit on your arse” scheme during Covid;
conspired with other deeply unpleasant Minister (yes, you, Javid) to undermine his boss, in an attempt to grasp for power himself;
failed to convince anyone in the Conservative Party that he was a suitable leader;
then actively briefed against Truss — who, amongst other things, threatened his power base in the Treasury — and swiftly defenestrated her;
and is now comprehensively fucking our country further into stagnation and decline through his incompetent technocratic flailing about and deeply unconvincing social “skills”.
In order to be crowned leader, he had to gain the support of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, i.e. the MPs. And now we know what the price of that support was: continue to keep Britain subservient to the European Union legal system — e.g. through the new Northern Ireland deal — and European Court of Justice.
Ministers say the changes brought “necessary protections” from EU case law into domestic law, before ECJ judgments ceased to apply in Britain this year following Britain’s exit from the EU.
But Tory MPs have criticised the Government for adopting the measure and say it goes further than some ECJ rulings.
Lawyers believe the laws could, for example, allow workers who care for disabled family members to sue firms for “indirect discrimination” on grounds of disability if they are barred from working from home.
I have discussed, elsewhere (and here, later today), how Sunak and Hunt are making us all poorer by destroying the engine of economic growth in this country — business investment and innovation. Hunt has already massively disincentivised the former through huge increases in capital returns taxes; Sunak and his malign regime are doing their best to murder the latter through the loading of yet more costs and liabilities onto businesses.
Sir Jacob [Rees-Mogg] said: “Not only people who voted for Brexit, but people who didn’t, would think that implementing ECJ judgments in any form is simply weird. We have left the EU.”
He added: “I cannot understand why the Government wishes to put more burdens on businesses and add to the Equality Act’s damage to our economic vibrancy.”
It’s because neither Sunak nor Hunt have actually ever been involved in building a business: a banker and management consultant respectively, they have spent their lives interfering in and profiting off the hard work that other people have put in.
The new laws took effect last month, four years after Brexit, without any debate in the Commons or Lords chambers. No announcement was made to the media.
Par for the course for European legislation then. But wait…
The Equality Act 2010 (Amendment) Regulations 2023 were approved by MPs on Dec 13, the day after the rebellion over Mr Sunak’s Rwanda legislation. Ten Conservative MPs voted against the Government.
Addressing MPs before voting against the legislation, Miriam Cates, a prominent Conservative MP, said it would “undermine our understanding of discrimination rather than to strengthen it ... by gold-plating an obscure piece of foreign case law that essentially allows someone without a protected characteristic to piggyback off someone who does”.
It could create “almost a carte blanche for individuals to bring indirect discrimination cases on almost any grounds and with unlimited potential damages”, she added.
The Equalities Act 2010 is a deeply pernicious law, yet another ticking time bomb left by that fucking idiot, the one-eyed Goblin King himself — Gordon Brown. It does not simply say, as one might expect and, indeed, approve of, that everyone should be treated equally regardless of race or sex, etc. That would be a reasonable proposition — even if totally unnecessary under a Common Law legal system in which everyone is supposed to be equal under the law.
Oh no, it’s far worse than that. Because the Equalities Act actually breaks and undermines that fundamental principle of our legal system.
The Equalities Act does not simply say that all people, including “minorities”, should be treated equally: it says that organisations (and most especially the public sector through the Public Sector Equalities Duty) must actively promote the “inclusion” of minorities — through positive discrimination in favour of minorities, if necessary.
This promotion does not include simply in hiring practices, of course: which is why, if viewing any kind of media in this country (including, notably, adverts), one might almost believe that straight, white British people are, in fact, the minority.1
Rishi Sunak is a useless, deceitful, technocratic little shit who deserves to be celebrated as being the most useless prick ever to be British Prime Minister. Honestly, I thought perhaps we had reached our nadir Gordon Brown: but, although we still carry the legacy of the colossal damage that the Goblin King did to our social and economic fabric, the Tories have had fourteen years to undo the damage. Instead, they have presented us with a series of rank incompetents like Theresa May — who thought that we could sink lower than her, eh? — and, now, the egregious Sunak.
And, although the Tories are absolutely fucking terrible, their recent bye-election defeats show that no one is enthusiastic for Labour. Starmer and his merry men polled the same as in the previous election in Kingswood, and 5,000 fewer votes in Wellingborough. The Tories lost — catastrophically — because no one can bring themselves to vote for Sunak and his brand of fucking uselessness. The prick.
The best hope for progress now is that Rishi goes home one night, quite soon, and drowns himself in a bucket, like an unwanted puppy. After a suitable period of mourning — about 30 seconds should do it — someone with determination, balls and principles might emerge to pull us from the doldrums.
Admittedly, I’m not sure who that might be. But it certainly isn’t Sunak.
This is, of course, only true in parts of our largest cities, currently. Although, given that the Tories seem to be replacing the native population at a rate of knots, this might not be true for long. Immigration was not 775,000 last year; that was the nett figure: immigration was actually 1.4 million — it’s just that about 625,000 British people fled.