Labour fails on wage equality for women

Harriett Harman has failed.  Although she is feted by various organisations, such as business support agency PROWESS, and even by key ‘experts’ on gender equality, she and her Government has failed.  Harman’s attempt to legislate, via the Equalities Bill, has failed.  Here’s what the Fawcett Society has to say:

Government efforts to narrow the pay gap between women and men are not working; bold new measures are urgently needed.

Figures released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) today show that the mean hourly gender pay gap for full-time work has increased by 0.1% over the last 12 months from 17.1% to 17.2%.

This year, the Government has chosen to focus on the median pay gap figure – masking the real extent of the problem. Fawcett believes the mean pay figures better represent the true nature of the gender pay gap. Many women are clustered in the lowest paid professions and the median figures underplay this fact. Furthermore, international comparisons use mean earnings.

So if you’re a woman and you’re paid less than a man in the same job (maybe even in the same workplace), should you vote for Labour for more of the same?  Do you trust Labour’s lies?  I would hope not.

One simple way to ease the pain – cut taxes

Mr Boom (Brown) and Mr Bust (Darling) have achieved the recession that their Labour economic policies were always going to deliver – as Merv ‘the Swerve’ and Mr Boom admitted in the last few days. Now, having created a bad situation for the country’s economic and financial position, can they perhaps ease the pain?

Alas, no. Their economic policies have very much been about government intervention – the bank bailouts, nationalisation, the ‘spend our way out of the recession’, and Keynesian (a swear word if ever there were one) spending on public works.

There is one way by which this gutless Government could ease the pain. It is quite simple. They should cut taxes.

But unfortunately that is beyond the leftwing ideologues who run the country. Their socialism has been revealed, as the only way they know how to respond to an economic downturn.

How much longer people in the UK have to suffer from Labour’s policies is anyone’s guess. Tax cuts are the only way to ease the pain, but this lot aren’t going to deliver those.

Will anyone?

Watch out – Mandelson’s spinning

Tim Montgomerie reckons Cameron understands the current financial meltdown.  I write the following as a friend of the Conservatives and an enemy of Labour.

Cameron doesn’t write his own speeches – and the speechwriter-cum-adviser in question has probably left to work in PR or the City or somewhere (hopefully not in a Bank, although these are the safest Government-backed jobs there are any more). Hence, neither Cameron nor Osborne really understand the current crisis, otherwise they would not have reacted in the way they have.

The Conservatives’ biggest strategic error has been to go bipartisan at a time when they should be criticising the Government’s economic record. This is only likely to give Labour a better opinion poll rating – a get out of jail free card, if you like.  And, what happens, but Labour improves in the polls.  If Cameron had attacked Labour robustly at his conference two weeks ago, the news agenda would not have been allowed to shift in this way.  Despite the Tory pseudo-strategy to attack Brown on the ‘real economy’ later when they should have opposed the Bank nationalisation now, Brown is likely to go for a Spring 2009 election if he thinks the Tories have lost it and he can narrow the polls further. 

Also this is at a time when Lord Mandelson has been brought back into the Government, and is responsible for all the spin – why else has the media narrative changed from Brown-and-Out to Brown the Great Leader?  Even Paul Krugman has fallen for Brown’s socialist nationalisation of banks – which proves that you can be intelligent and be a Nobel Laureate, but not necessarily have any common sense or judgment!

No one had the guts to stand up to Stalin either.

What I would like to know is : Has Brown agreed a Faustian pact with Mandelson?