HARRIET HARMAN'S EQUALITY BILL HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FAIRNESS

It is outrageous that a politician who continually blathers about "equality" should be pushing for such blatant bias to be written into the statute book. Discrimination does not become acceptable simply when it is practised against a sector of the population which Harman, with her puerile theories of radical socialist feminism, happens to despise.
Absurdly, she said when introducing the Bill in the Commons that "everyone has the right to be treated fairly". Yet she refuses to apply that logic to the treatment of white men.

The Bill's scheme for state intervention is just as Orwellian.

There will be a massive expansion in the Big Brother machinery of public bureaucracy as socialist commissars gain frightening new powers to investigate companies and organisations to ensure compliance with Harman's creed of diversity.

Firms will have to undergo gender pay audits and equality assessments, with Harman warning that she intends "shining a spotlight on the problem workplace by workplace". Every public body is to be given a statutory duty to take action "to reduce socio-economic inequalities", thereby providing more opportunities for officials to indulge in social engineering over everything from university admissions to the award of grants.

All companies bidding for work in the lucrative £200billion market of goods and services in the public sector will be required to show that they are actively promoting Labour's twisted version of equality. This process of checking out the politically correct credentials of every supplier is known as "contract compliance" and was first used in the Eighties by hard-Left local councils led by Ken Livingstone's GLC.

Then it was seen as another example of the Loony Left in action. Now it is has been elevated into a principle of governance by Harriet Harman.

The Equality Bill is a recipe for perpetual social conflict.

Rather than promotin g harmony it will create a climate of fear and resentment in the workplace. Furthermore, the endless legal demands will impose a huge burden on businesses big and small just at a time when Britain is struggling to remain competitive in the global economy.

But while the wealth creators of the private sector are hectored and harassed the bureaucrats, such as those in the £70million Equality and Human Rights Commission, will do well out of this culture of permanent socialist revolution.

MS HARMAN'S whole concept of equality is fraudulent. Even the independent Office of National Statistics has criticised her for peddling dodgy figures on women's pay. But what is really morally repugnant is her hypocrisy. For the past 12 years Harman has been a key member of a Labour Government that has allowed militant Islam to flourish in our midst through uncontrolled immigration and the official state doctrine o f multi-culturalism.

As a result, we now have a huge number of Muslim women in Britain who are treated as second-class citizens. Their rights are undermined by the spread of sharia law; their wellbeing is threatened by forced marriages, domestic violence and honour killings. Yet Harman and her Labour colleagues have colluded with the growth of this vicious misogyny, partly because they are increasingly reliant on the votes of Britain's two million Muslims.

Given the blind eye she has turned to Islam's oppression o f women, none of Harman's utterances on equality deserves to be treated seriously. But tragically for our society, her Marxist dogma is about to be enshrined in law.