If you haven’t been following the story of Birmingham City Council going bankrupt, you need to pay attention. I’d assumed it was a simple case of a Labour-run council running out of other people’s money – perhaps because it’d hired too many busybodies or thrown too much cash at some boondoggle. What actually happened is much more intriguing, and worrying.
In short, the council was sued into bankruptcy by its own former employees. Thousands of them who’d worked in traditionally female professions (such as cleaners and lollipop ladies) sued on the grounds that they’d been denied bonuses that were available to some traditionally male professions (like bin men and grave diggers).
Already by 2010 such lawsuits had cost the council £200 million. But then in 2012, a landmark Supreme Court decision ruled that ‘equal pay’ claims could be heard in the High Court – which has a six-year deadline for launching claims, rather than the six-month window in the employment tribunal. Consequently, thousands of additional workers who’d left their jobs more than six months ago brought claims against the council. As of 2024, Birmingham’s total liabilities from such claims may exceed £1 billion.
After declaring itself bankrupt last year, the council announced earlier this month how it plans to foot the enormous bill: by dimming street lights, selling off assets, raising burial costs, laying off up to 600 workers, hiking council tax by an eye-watering 21%, and reducing the frequency of waste collection to once a fortnight.
I don’t know about you, but the whole thing strikes me as a farce.
Women signed up to work for the council at a particular wage (no one forced them to work at that wage and they could have taken another job). Now, several years later, Birmingham residents face a huge hike in council tax, along with major cuts to public services, all because a court ruled it was ‘unfair’ that men in completely different jobs were getting paid more at the same time.
I work on a computer. An investment banker at Goldman Sachs works on a computer. Therefore we should get paid the same.
This isn’t how wages are determined in a free society. They are meant to be determined by supply and demand. If bin men or grave diggers are in short supply, their wages need to rise to attract more people into those professions. What people in completely different jobs are earning is irrelevant.
If I were a resident of Birmingham, I’d be furious. In fact, I’d probably move. (An unintended consequence of this ‘equal pay’ racket is that Birmingham’s tax base will be further eroded as savvy residents flee the impending tax hike.)
But it gets worse. Dozens of other councils across the U.K. could be facing bankruptcy for the same reason. And it isn’t just councils. Six of the country’s biggest retail chains are currently being sued on ‘equal pay’ grounds.
You’d assume it would fall to the ‘Conservatives’ to put an end to this nonsense. But no, they’re doubling down. Rather than rejecting the whole notion that wages can be determined by what seems ‘fair’, and duly scrapping or rewriting the relevant legislation, they’ve made it easier for men in female-dominated professions to sue for discrimination!
The West supposedly won the Cold War, but we’ve somehow been saddled with wage communism.
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In New Age the equivalent term to this “manifesting” is “visualisation,” and on the Christian fringe, the “word-faith” movement. I’m no fan of either.
But what is it that sports psychologists drum into elite athletes, apparently with significant results, if not the power of positive thinking? And is it not self-evidently true that what causes armies to succeed is largely belief that they will, and the loss of that belief is the beginning of a rout?
What doesn’t seem to work so well is governments screwing up things in practice, whilst “manifesting” beliefs in economic growth, cheap energy and so on. This rather suggests that confidence only aids the competent.
“confidence only aids the competent”
Brilliant.
Event 201 was part of the Corona Coup and plandemic.
Their agenda in October 2019: How to manage the media, online platforms and the messaging.
This is really what the Americans are good it. Marketing and information manipulation.
There is no ‘bat virus’. You don’t ‘spread’ a ‘virus’ by sneezing.
Your diaper is anti-health.
Your stab is poison (but highly profitable).
It was a test pilot.
Almost everybody lives in fiction, by narratives, by stories. Money works, car drivers will drive on the correct side of the road, my loved ones love me, and so on. We might call these useful fictions because the stories help us live in the world. They guide our actions. In the pleasant sense ‘manifesting’ is like Captain Pickard issuing a command ‘to make it so’. But even though the fiction of Captain Pickard’s competence is ‘useful’ he cannot command or manifest a friendly fleet to appear out of nothing.
And now the Dark Side. As Richard Dawkins says when we communicate with others we are trying to influence their brains (including our own). But if we convince ourselves that we can manifest to fly unaided we may plunge to our deaths. If we convince ourselves that we can manifest social prestige by following some social trend we may do health threatening things. These are dangerous fictions.
Governments used to be (mostly) aligned with useful fictions, trying only to manifest useful outcomes. Now they make a virtue of being able to manifest only useless or dangerous fictions because achievement is beyond them. Government bureaucracy initially helps manifest useful fictions, but bureaucracy grows until it smothers enterprise and manifests only harmful fictions. I guess the poison is in the dose.
Not sure “covid” was much to do with manifestation. It was mainly based on evil and lies. I suppose some people wanted to believe it was real, for their own weird reasons, but a lot of it was achieved by a combination of carrot (pay people to do nothing) and stick (fine people for breaking lockdown rules).
My earliest memory of using ‘manifest’ comes from a hymn whose first verse, being appropriately seasonal, is as follows:
Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar,
Branch of royal David’s stem
In Thy birth at Bethlehem:
Anthems be to Thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.
This is positively the worst article The Daily Sceptic has ever had bordering on verbal diarrhoea
I beg to differ. Articles by Alexander and McGrogan make my day and this one is ‘up there’