All loyal TCW readers know that Woman’s Hour is the programme I love to hate. On Sunday morning once more I waded into the quagmire to catch up on MP and former Cabinet Minister Maria Miller explaining what the new fan-dangled ‘Women and Equalities Select Committee’ will be doing to make our lives more miserable.
The first subject the committee chose to investigate is of course (of course!) the fashionable transgender movement and their woes. This impacts on (I am guessing) 0.01 per cent of the population. My co-editor Kathy Gyngell dealt with this last week.
Maria (fresh from fiddling her expenses – she made a profit of £1.2 million on a London property part of whose mortgage was paid for by the taxpayer) waxed on about the importance of this new committee that no other high profile MP wants to be on.
Something caught my ear, when asked what her greatest achievement was as a minister other than gay marriage, Maria said it was introducing parental leave and ‘getting rid of maternity leave.’
Did you hear that folks? Do you remember being consulted on the abolition of maternity leave? No, thought not. We know that the word mother is not to be spoken on Woman’s Hour unless you are bigging yourself up as a ‘working mother’ and now we know that the Government did indeed abolish maternity leave to replace it with paternity leave.
I wrote about this at the time but no one seemed to care.
Onwards and upwards we march. Perhaps the committee chaired by Maria will recommend abolishing maternity wards and replacing them with ‘the place where people give birth’ ward. Can’t wait.
Anyway, Maria managed not to capitulate on her view that legal limit for terminating the lives of unborn children in the womb should be reduced from 24 to 22 weeks. She probably calculated that this would make her appear like a complete surrender monkey and political drone.
So along with the transgender issue that impacts on so many families, what is the other issue the committee will tackle? Ah yes – there are not enough wimmin in executive roles. It must be – this is all that bothers the elite feminists who drive this agenda in the first place.
I have some other suggestions for the committee:
- Tackling the under-representation of women, particularly university-educated wimmin who read gender studies, in roles such as refuse collection and sewage disposal. We must tackle the ‘barriers to entry’ for these jobs. It is not right that mostly men do them.
- Tackling the under-representation of orthodox Jewish women in BBC dramas. I mean where are they all? From Eastenders to Sherlock Holmes I don’t think I have seen a single orthodox Jewish woman represented by our national broadcaster. It is a disgrace.
- Tackling the under-representation of women in prison. Men are far more likely to be imprisoned than women – I trust the committee will seek to challenge this great gender inequality.
- Finally and most importantly, I hope the committee will tackle all examples of everyday sexism, including of course benevolent sexism.
In particular, any acts of heroism such as men taking bullets for their fiancée and children in the face of terrorists, should be stamped out as shocking examples of men behaving as if women need their help. Outrageous!
Here Matthew James explains how he protected his fiancée during the Tunisia beach massacre: ‘One bullet sliced open his lower stomach; another lodged in his chest, just above his heart; a third went clean through his upper left arm.” His fiancée was lying under him unhurt. She called him her hero. This has set us back years.
