Peers in the House of Lords will attempt to block the ‘banter ban’ in Labour’s workers’ rights bill when it returns to Parliament later this month. The Times has more.
Lord Young of Acton, the founder of the Free Speech Union, has tabled a number of amendments that would stop pub and university bosses having to ensure their staff were not subject to harassment by overhearing opinions they did not agree with.
The Times revealed in January how pubs could ban customers from speaking about contentious beliefs such as religious views or transgender rights over fears of falling foul of Angela Rayner’s workers’ rights reforms.
Ministers have proposed that employers must protect workers from being harassed at work by “third parties” such as customers or clients. If they fail to do so they could be sued.
Young is hoping to tweak the laws so that opinions on political, moral, religious or social matters are exempt from the law as long as that opinion is not “indecent or grossly offensive”.
The Conservative peer said the way the law was drafted would mean an employee could take offence on behalf of another employee even if he or she did not hear the comments made.
For example, if a male bartender overheard a conversation between customers that was potentially considered as harassment towards women, the business owner would be expected to take action.
Young said the issues could even extend to sports venues. For example he said shouts of “are you blind?” were often levelled at referees.
He told the Times: “It’s not clear exactly what reasonable steps publicans and public business owners will be expected to take.”
The Times previously revealed how the Government was warned by the equalities watchdog that rules could “disproportionately curtail” freedom of expression and be applied to “overheard conversations”.
Ministers admitted in a human rights assessment that there may be issues around freedom of expression “particularly in areas of legitimate debate which are carried out in a contentious manner”.
But the Government said: “The Employment Rights Bill will not affect anyone’s right to lawful free speech, which this Government stands firmly behind. Upsetting remarks do not fall within the definition of harassment. We are strengthening workplace protections to tackle harassment and protect employees from intimidating and hostile abuse as well as sexual harassment.”
Luke Johnson, the hospitality entrepreneur behind the success of Pizza Express and The Ivy who is now executive chairman of Revolution Bars, told the Times he feared that would not play out in reality.
He said: “The unintended consequences of ill-thought through legislation like this could be very damaging, not just to the pub trade who will have to restrict speech and police it and all the rest of it, but to our very way of life.”
He added: “For hundreds of years people have been able to meet in the pub and have a good old ding dong about whatever it is. Anything from animal rights to the latest tyrant who’s in power in Westminster. I cannot believe this is the purpose of it. But knowing how litigious employment law is these days, I’m afraid litigation and then restrictions feel almost inevitable.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Telegraph has covered the story as well:
Speaking to the Telegraph, Lord Young said he is concerned that the Bill will place a huge burden on certain businesses to monitor potentially offensive conversations.
He said it is unreasonable to expect bosses to “ask every customer to sign some kind of waiver whenever they enter a pub or restaurant”.
He added that including sports venues in the Bill would mean saying “no chants”, just in case what they say upsets a member of staff.
“The only way football clubs could comply is to insist on complete silence at football games,” he said.
He added that universities were also a concern because it could mean that “woke activists” could block certain speakers.
Stop Press 2: Toby tells Guido:
I don’t think Angela Rayner has thought this through. If the banter ban becomes law, members of her staff could sue her for ribald remarks made by her friends that they happen to overhear if they accompany her to a pub or a curry house.
Stop Press 3: The Free Speech Union has set up an email template whereby you can write to a random peer and ask them to vote for the amendments Toby has tabled. Only takes a couple of minutes to fill out. Click here to send an email.
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Those 2 look like characters from a Le Carre novel.
Yep, just before they are stretchered off the scene – an eminently desirable next step!
“ On the other hand, when you mitigate the impact of an epidemic and end up at herd immunity by default you are not aiming for it because you are not deliberately infecting people to make them immune, it’s just what happens because there is no practical way to prevent it that does more good than harm.”
Also, though I am very vaccine-antagonistic, I do like this turn of phrase.
This is, finally, correct.
HI is a possible, eventual outcome.
It can’t be actively pursued, neither naturally nor through vaccination.
The HIT is unknowable and will differ from region to region, delaying and interrupting the process ever further, to the hundreds of years.
And no one in the world, not even Tanzania or Belarus let alone Sweden, pursued deliberate infection- that would have meant asking people to go clubbing and putting plenty of known sick people on the dancefloor.
What they denounce as HI strategy is actually the world’s and the UK’s pre 2020 Covid madness pandemic plan, and it would have been the best approach and will continue to be the best approach.
But only if public health was the key concern, which it obviously ceased to be in March 2020.
All based on wildly exaggerated assumptions about c19 that were known at the time to be exaggerated
Indeed. Cummings saying 100s of 1000s choking to death is herd immunity.
Sweden
It looks to me that the government is playing with semantics and Cummings is doing his damnedest to paint them as evil. I say a plague on both their houses and one without any mitigation.
I don’t see why so many people now seem to be taking Cumming’s seriously. This time last year, after his Barnard Castle exploits, a lot of people, or at least the liberal/left wing media, branded him the world’s worst lier and the embodiment of pure evil. Now that he’s criticizing the government it suddenly seems as if he can do no wrong. He’s nothing but a selfish self publicist who should be ignored until he crawls back under whichever rock he’s been hiding under for the past 5 months. He’s just in a tantrum cos he was kicked out of Downing Street and would say anything to try and get revenge.
“Prof Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease expert”
If only there really had been an infectious disease expert involved in the government’s response.
Ferguson’s only expertise is alarmism.
Gravity was never considered in government policy making, our action plan always relied on homeopathy and magic to prevent buildings falling down.
God save us from the insufferable Righteous Brothers in the picture. They are secretly loving every minute of their fame while doing their best to put on an air of being very serious and strict followers of “the science”. Yet both have murky associations with Big Pharma: I don’t see much possibility of independent science there
Roll on the charges for crimes against humanity.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-citizen-data-systems
And Vallance is also involved in setting policy for government ‘big data’ systems such as Digital Ids, Health passports etc. See his Preface in this document.
“This report highlights the importance of having a clear vision for what we want to achieve with citizen data”
Anyone who can’t join the dots is burying their heads in the sand.
Anyone else not care? I actually couldn’t care about the strategy or lack there of now. This is what the enquiry will be fought over. This, and why didn’t we lock down in 2015.
Very biased questions, still, let them know what you think of the governments handling of the pandemic and what support was needed etc.
https://lse.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9B4Eq1JUMymHJTU
I let them know. By the living God that made ne, I let them kmow.
Were ministers lying?
Did their lips move?
Can’t tell if they’re hiding behind a cloak; they might just be playing back a pre-recorded script on their iphones.
It’s banal “when you mitigate the impact of an epidemic and end up at herd immunity by default you are not aiming for it because you are not deliberately infecting people to make them immune, it’s just what happens because there is no practical way to prevent it that does more good than harm.” Who gives a hoot? Herd immunity is a good thing, if they aimed for it they should boast, if they did not aim for it it happens anyway. So why suffer the stink of a cover up over ‘did nothing, it happens anyway’?
Well that ain’t my recollecion.
They now claim going into lockdown saved tens of thousands of lives, maybe 100s of thousands…
So if it’s that easy why didn’t they effing do it straight off and save EVEN MORE lives.
They didn’t because they knew then it was not a good policy. The policy then was to reach herd immunity without saying “we are aiming to reach herd immunity”. Vallance simply spoke frankly, out of turn. Initially they hoped to reduce the spread through voluntary reduction in social contacts.
It wasn’t his normal job, and spoke too frankly. He’s been learning how to be a politician since then.
Why is it that if we lie to the government, it’s a crime, but if the government lies to us it’s politics?
The same reason for why it is a crime for oridinary people to fiddle their expenses, but totally acceptable for politicos.
Rules and Laws are for little people.
This is symptomatic of the MSM. ‘he said, she said’. Personality politics. Never get below the surface, write about personalities, confuse the punter.
The facts are that by March everyone knew about Drosten and PCR, everyone knew about the lies. Well everyone who was paying the slightest attention to the underlying issues.
Its a fallacy that the UK or anyone else had reason to panic, that is just a story to cover up the initiation of what followed. S. Korea put out very informative information that made it very clear what was happening. It was only after the signal was given by people in the US in March that the world reacted as it did. Probably the motive was a combination of opportunity, power , money and politics. But I doubt they realised how easy it was going to be to cower so many people so quickly and so easily.
The UK is an important side-show, but that is all it is. The two major centres of focus were the US and Germany. The centres of economic power in the west.
The aim was to introduce a biosecurity totalitarian regime which would make it so much easier to control the populations as zero carbon was enforced. Why? A combination of economic disruption that would enrich the first movers, and enslavement of the population in a web of biotech that keeps the elite in power for the forseable future. Why now? because brexit and the election of Trump scared the elite sufficiently to bring forward their plans.
Will they succeed? probably the only thing that will stop them is paradoxically the vaccines. They don’t work, and are killers. Its terrible to think that the one thing that might save humanity is the death of millions.
It is still too early to be certain how many movers there behind these events, and what was chance, and who exploited opportunities. But China, with its Wuhan lab and soft power control of Who looms very large.
What are the links between Fauci and China? When did he begin to get so close to them? Exactly how close is he?
Why was the CIA not watching and warning against the defence risk from gain of function research being funded in China with US dollars?
Is it a coincidence that Neil Ferguson, creator of so many imaginative models destructive to the UK’s economy is a WHO man based in Imperial College, said to be Communist China’s favourite university?
And why do countries under the will of a web of WHO loving scientists seem to turn into copies of Communist China under their influence?
It’s a nonsense argument.
‘Herd’ immunity is just what happens with a virus. Trying to advance it with a vaccine is useful – if the vaccine is well tried and tested – unlike the current snake oil. Other NPI measures provoke inevitable harms that require unusual justification.
Herd immunity was first identified as a mechanism in 1927. The herd immunity effect is a result of the variability person to person of immune response to a pathogen (assuming the pathogen isnt sufficiently lethal to kill everyone). The greater the variability in immune response of a given population, the lower the level of exposure needed to stop spread of the disease. Somewhat paradoxical, but so are many things.
Kermack, W. O. and A. G. McKendrick. 1927. “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A 115 (772): 700–721. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1927.0118.
Load of ballcox.
Cummings is just another sideshow, doing his job, following his brief, to make it look like he’s on Joe Public’s side in bringing the government to task.
Herd immunity or not? – it’s twaddle, to keep people occupied, to argue what could or should have happened. The government of the U.K., like several others, do not care about the people either way. They do not care about the health and well-being of anyone. They have their own ‘brief’ to fulfil – by force, fear and fraud – to subjugate the people into mindless puppets.
The ‘beloved’ NHS has been complicit every step of the way.
We must not forget.
…and neither should we forget it was and continues to be, based on lies.
“Boris Johnson was very clear that the only thing that mattered was that we make sure that we saved lives and we keep our NHS safe and able to function, not only to protect those who might get Covid but also everybody else.”
As they and their policies then failed on all those counts, she must be taking the p*ss out of us.
The steps this woeful inept government took worsened the situation by isolating people, and wearing face masks. The Diamond Princess cruise ship was the model to follow NOT Neil Ferguson’s computer modelling. Nothing will change my opinion of events other than this was and still is a deliberate attack on the British people by puppets of the WEF and UN, and don’t get me started on this insane vaccination programme!
We need to ask, why did the WHO change its definition of herd immunity in November 2020?
WHO website June, 2020: “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”
November,2020: “a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” and “Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”
I read this comment elsewhere and it makes an important point: The WHO not only chooses to ignore one of the main methods of achieving herd immunity, it also asserts some deceitful claims, if not flat out lies. For example:
Vaccines train our immune systems to develop antibodies, just as might happen when we are exposed to a disease but — crucially — vaccines work without making us sick.
As we know, this is not entirely true.
The question is why? Why after the Swine Flu scandal of 2009, when the WHO were accused of being too influenced by big pharma corps. are not more questions being raised on this issue? The hours of nonsense and discussion around the ravings of DC are a smokescreen to distract from what we really should be challenging.
WHO changed the definition again 31 December 2020.
I think they combined the June and November definition.
I haven’t checked again since, their constant lies are sickening.
…proving that the hindsight of these charlatans is no more acute than their foresight.
The reason for the ‘confusion’ is simple. Shortly before ‘vaccines’ were ready for use, the WHO changed its definition from ‘immunity can be gained via natural immunity or vaccines’ to ‘immunity can be gained via vaccination’ (or words to that effect). A whole realm of medical knowledge erased at the stroke of a pen. Stalin’s airbrush crew had nothing on this lot. WHO is now unambiguously just a PR agency for Big Pharma’s ‘vaccines’.