The Sunday Telegraph reports that there’s a backbench rebellion brewing over the Worker Protection Bill, a private members’ bill sponsored by a couple of Lib Dems that would massively extend the Equality Act 2010 and which is being supported by the Government. Will Hazell and Edward Malnick have more.
Rishi Sunak is facing a Tory revolt over “draconian” laws that will allow shop assistants, bar staff and doctors to sue their employers if a member of the public offends them at work.
New harassment rules on the brink of becoming law will enable medics to sue the NHS if a patient insults them, allow bar staff to take legal action against landlords if they are offended by drunk punters, and let baristas take coffee shop owners to a tribunal if they overhear offensive remarks made by customers.
Senior Tories warn the proposed law will lead to an explosion of litigation and force business owners to run their establishments like a “police state”.
A Whitehall source said ministers were “sleep walking” into a “big expansion” of the Labour-era Equality Act, which Mr Sunak had previously blamed for enabling “woke nonsense to permeate public life”.
The row will come as a major embarrassment to the Prime Minister, who has been seeking to position the Conservatives against “woke” policies that are unpopular with many business owners and working-class voters.
Tory backbenchers accused the Government of “taking their eye off the ball” by supporting a “mad” Private Member’s Bill, sponsored by two Liberal Democrat parliamentarians, on course to become law within weeks.
The Bill was waved through the Commons without a vote during a Friday sitting when most MPs were back in their constituencies.
Ministers are under pressure to ditch or gut the legislation, with backbenchers warning that purported “freedom of speech” protections added into the Bill will do little to save employers from crippling litigation.
The Worker Protection Bill will make employers liable for staff being harassed by “third parties” such as customers or members of the public. It introduces a legal requirement for companies and public bodies to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent this.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, said establishments that “serve the public can expect to run a police state in their business”, while Sir John Hayes, the chairman of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, said it had “sinister implications”. Another Conservative MP, Craig Mackinlay, said he believed the change was “draconian”.
Lord Frost, the former Cabinet Office minister, described the Bill as a “woke, socialist measure” that would “have a chilling effect on every conversation in a workplace”.
Lord Strathcarron, a Tory peer who runs a publishing firm, said bookshops could be put off inviting authors such as JK Rowling to give talks, “on the off chance that one of the author’s fans might be wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘Woman Equals Adult Human Female’, knowing that an employee could sue for hurt feelings – real or vexatious”.
Other scenarios, he added, could include “somebody going into the Dog and Duck … then insulting the barman, and the barman suing the landlord. Or someone going for an MOT, the car fails, and they slag off the mechanic and the mechanic sues the garage owner. It’s mad and no one’s thought it through.”
While a separate clause in the Bill putting a duty on bosses to prevent the sexual harassment of employees commands broad support, peers are demanding the Government drop the introduction of a new obligation on employers to prevent harassment by third parties that relates to a “protected characteristic” such as sex, gender reassignment or age. Critics fear this will lead to companies having to expel clients over trivial incidents and facing costly litigation by staff.
Worth reading in full.
The Free Speech Union has been campaigning vigorously against this bill, but it hasn’t attracted nearly as much scrutiny as it should. Let’s hope this article changes that. You can read the FSU’s briefing on the bill here.
Stop Press: The Sunday Telegraph has published a strong leader urging the Government to rethink this bill.
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The question is.. Where does one go to avoid this beyond utter nonsense, I refuse to be subjugated like this.
Anywhere outside rich world “liberal” “democracies” I.e. outside the US sphere of influence
All part of the evil and idiotic notion that it’s the job of the state to make sure nobody is ever “offended” and to police “hate” and indeed that when you’re offended it’s not a character flaw. Offence is taken, not given.
Of course the types of “offence” that this is aimed at are predictable and do not include much if anything that people who post here might find “offensive” – offending white people will be fine, as will offending Christians, covid sceptics, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, far right conspiracy theorists.
This is simply just another form of totalitarianism – no different to persecuting and prosecuting people for heresy against the church or against the Communist Party or whatever group has seized power. All done under the guise of “niceness”.
How is it even possible that grown adults consider any of this a good thing? Why is it necessary to explain how bad it is? Not many decades ago it would have been self evident that proposals like this are bad, in the extreme.
My Mother and Father were both born in 1915, were lifelong Labour voters, believed in individual responsibility, paying your way, doing a good job as well as finishing your jobs, owning your own house, and being just to others. In addition they used useful descriptive words to mark out people that you needed to be aware of – the self-righteous, self important, jobs worth, and then those who had inferiority complexes or superiority complexes. In particular, my Mother had no sympathy for self-pity or feeling sorry for yourself. It was expected that you had to stand on your own two feet.
They are not grown adults mentally
Then we have become like the book, ‘The Lord of the Flies’, except now the adults are not horrified with the behaviour of the children and dare not criticize. In fact they put up statues and give honours to the loudest.
A Lib Dem private members’ bill.
If the government (or the backbenches) were Conservative, the source of this dangerous nonsense should have been enough to ensure that it fell at the first hurdle. And was then promptly despatched by a man with a revolver.
I was brought up, as a child, and told always to realise I was as good as other people. Of course, as I have got older, I am no longer as good as much of society: I am male, white and straight – how can I ever be as good as them again.
But at least your skeleton will be gender neutral (see yesterday).
If this doesn’t exactly spell out what preciselsy constitutes reasonable steps under which circumstances, it’s another crap law which ought to be thrown out on the grounds of technical shoddiness. The same is true for the offences: It must be possible to determine exactly what is or isn’t an offence by reading the text of the law, because otherwise, no one can possibly comply with it. In an ideal universe, people coming up with proposed laws whose exact meaning they can’t even spell out themselves also ought be held responsible for mindless waste of public funds.
I expect the vagueness is deliberate – in theory the law might sound appealing to people who wish the world was a “nice” place, in practice it will be used to enforce norms dictated by whoever is in power – currently the “woke”.
This is feelgood legislation proposed by some imbecile because it makes him (more likely, her) feel really good about himself. I mean reasonable … doesn’t that sound really reasonable? How’s a judge with absolutely no applicable expertise and no idea of the actual situation supposed to determine what’s reasonable in a crowded pub on a Saturday night? That’s nothing but shoddy work whose proponents should be ashamed of themselves because of it.
“It’s mad and no-one has thought it through.”
Sound like the perfect regulation for our modern society. We should be throwing this out into the bin along with the Equality Act. They seek only to cause division in our society, and we don’t need them.
The only ‘winners’ will be the lawyers.
Winner winner insect dinner.
Wow! There’s a Tory MP group called the Common Sense Group? Presumably they’re highly vocal in calling out the jabs that don’t work and cause more harm than good, the corruption of the MHRA and other pharmafia quangos and the rather inconvenient excess deaths currently unexplored and unexplained. I’m sure too that they’re very vocal about the ongoing lemming idiocy of Net Zero. That Common Sense Group? Perhaps they should consider renaming themselves something else? The Common Purpose Sense Group?
Answers on a barcoded postcard please.
“Next Round of Covid Booster Jabs to Start Within Days” – The latest round of Covid boosters will start on Monday. Five million high-risk Brits will be eligible for a spring vaccine, reports the Sun.
When ever have we vaccinated against flu in the Spring? It should be common knowledge that nearly all respiratory infections fade away in the Spring as the Sun gets higher and the weather warms. This latest wheeze is a great way to ensure the ‘vaccines’ look like they work – vaccinate a load of people – the colds and flu all naturally fade away and you claim responsibility by saying look what the vaccines did. And people will fall for it.
I was looking for some medication on the shelves in Tesco today and they were selling test kits for flu. Who tests themselves for flu? You have to be barking mad.
Getting rid of the surplus mountain of Covid tests. It’s all about rebadging after all.
They had “covid tests” too. Maybe people buy and use both. Wonder what they think if they test positive for both? What in God’s name would you do with the information?
Don two masks would be my guess. One for each kind of dangerous virus.
🙂
The local M&S has recently again started selling COVID tests.
Lib Dims – says it all. Barking bloody mad the lot of them.
Now it’s a an absolute certainty that some malevolent woke-tard employed within a sector of public service will see this as an opportunity to scam some money out of their employer, but will we hear about such cases? I very much doubt it. Any grievance cases raised under this legislation will be bought off. Talk about handing back power.
Once this gets off the ground the unions will be triumphant.
Off the scale madness. Pretty much par for the course these days.
Woke, socialist ideas are never thought through. They are no more than hazy feelings that one individual has that ‘something must be done because this offends me’ which is dumped on social media and amplified by other offendables
During my time as a junior doctor I spent many hours in A&E, dealing with the drunk and drugged among others. I was verbally abused many times and physically assaulted once. Such things are commonplace and impossible either to predict or avoid; the person who attacked me had taken a barbiturate overdose and lashed out without any warning.
So – how can a hospital stop such things to avoid being sued by their staff? It can’t, except by preventing access, which by reductio ad absurdism would require the closure of its A & E.
The lesson here is that the proponents of such ridiculous legislation should consider the law of unintended consequences.
As a fully paid up subscriber to the DS. There is obviously a lot of “clickbait ” articles on here that now are classed as “alternative comedy”
But in actual fact no one can be “offended” without their consent.
It should not be possible to put a bill through the house when it is empty. There should be a minimum attendance requirement.
Likewise when MPs such as Mr Bridgen wish to speak.