Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be forced to apologise
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Dear Yasmin Alibhai-Brown,
Oh dear. I know that the latest unemployment figures showing that it has passed 2 million stole the headlines yesterday, but you should be extremely grateful for this. I wrote to you back in January of this year to explain why your assertion that women were being discriminated against because they were losing their jobs faster than men was complete rubbish. Sadly, yesterday’s unemployment figures complete the humiliation for you, Harriet Harman and the rest of the Equality Brigade.
Your manipulation of the statistics a couple of month back was truly amateurish. “As vastly more men than women are in full-time work, female job losses are calculated to be happening at twice the rate of men’s”, you declared. As it happens, more women had lost their jobs than men in the three months to November 2008. You went to suggest that the “bad times are good for sneaky practices [and] bosses are using the recession to push out child-bearing women, those pesky breeders who will insist on working”. Naturally, your pitiful analysis failed to include any mention of the other factors at work that had nothing whatsoever to do with discrimination, such as women making up a much higher proportion of employment in vulnerable sectors such as personal service, administration, secretarial and sales/customer service, or the fact that the number of unemployed men rose 87,000 in the three months to November while the number of unemployed women only rose 44,000, or the fact that over the previous 12 months male working age employment had dropped by 1% but for women it has only fallen by 0.3%. None of this fitted with your agenda so you ignored it. However, this month’s unemployment figures leave you with nowhere for you and your Equality Brigade to run.
According to yesterday’s official ONS data release, the number of people in full-time employment was 21.83 million in the three months to January 2009, down 48,000 from the three months to October 2008. Of this total, 13.94 million were men, down 38,000 over the quarter, and 7.89 million were women, down 10,000 over the quarter. To translate, four times as many men have lost their jobs in the past three months than women, and even if you take into account the fact that just under twice as many men are in employment, men are still losing their jobs at twice the rate of women. What have you got to say about that, then? Hmmm? To rub salt in your gaping intellectual wound, the number of unemployed men was 1.22 million in the three months to January 2009, up 113,000 from the three months to October 2008. The number of unemployed women was 811,000 in the three months to January 2009, up 52,000 from the three months to October 2008. Yet again, even if you take into account the different levels of unemployment between men and women, men are falling into unemployment around 30-40% faster than women. It’s also worth mentioning that the number of people in part-time employment (where women outnumber men by 3:1) was up 50,000 in the three months to January 2009, despite the economic downturn.
All your accusations of male employers pushing out the “pesky breeders” aren’t looking so good now, are they. You and your feminist buddies have a real problem when it comes to dealing with the evidence and yesterday’s unemployment statistics show how fundamentally flawed your arguments are and how you consider the facts to be nothing more than an inconvenience. At the very least, you should apologise for your gross misrepresentation of the reality that we all face in this financial crisis. To claim that women are being disproportionately affected by job losses is factually incorrect and you should be ashamed of yourself for peddling this myth in such an arrogant and dismissive manner.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
“At the very least, you should apologise for your gross misrepresentation of the reality that we all face in this financial crisis.”
Heh! We’ll get an apology from the other Brown before we get one from this deranged bint…
Perhaps there’s something in the genes of everyone with that surname which prevents the incorporation the word ’sorry’ into their vocabulary….
What’s the betting that the Harpy et al are planning to use this as a great opportunity to level things out. If men lose jobs at 2 to 4 times faster than women, sooner or later there will be equal numbers. Not that its like socialists to bring about equality by cutting down the tall poppies…
I trust someone in Parliament will use Harman’s earlier accusations of discrimination against her?
It would give me vast pleasure to see someone ask if government should step in to protect mens jobs, due to the unequal levels of job losses between men and women, expressly mentioning the previous justifications of Harman and Alibhai-Brown as support…
I’m not holding my breath however.
But have you sent a copy to her?
It is no use hjoping the imbicilic cow happens to sumble upon this site. You need to shove it up her….nose.
Von Brandenmburg-Preußen.
Nice number crunching!
It appears you put about ten times as much effort into making sense of the figures than Harpy or Alibi-Brown. Add my signature to that.
I share your distaste, but a forced apology would not be sincere as I’m sure she will never agree with you – so what’s the point?
What is EVER the point of writting letters to people?
If everybody that said “what’s the point” actualy got off their ass and WROTE, then at least her post bag shows her for the idiot she is.
Von Brandenburg-Preußen.
Mark, it doesn’t take much effort at all, which almost makes what she did even more annoying!
I don’t want a ‘forced’ apology, I want her to admit that her use of data was incredibly biased and if she’d checked the months before and after her accusations, the alleged trend of women being forced out faster than men was inaccurate to say the least.
Your basic problem with people like that is that ideology does not go well with reality, but ideology is all they have.
People clinging to an outdated ideology that rarely matches reality….. Sounds a bit like socialism to me.
Sounds a bit like socialism to me.
In all fairness there are closed-minded doctrinaire morons on both ends of the political spectrum. There are still people who believe in hands-off regulation of the Financial Services industry, they are just a tad quiet at the moment but they are still there.
My bone of contention is with the doctrinaire per se for the same reason that I oppose religion for stultifying intellectual inquiry – the religious will stop at ‘God’ (why does the sun rise, why do people die, why is the grass green? OH coz God did it) and ideologues stop asking questions because their faith in a belief structure, be it marxism or ‘capitalism’, tells them that it MUST hold the answer. The problem, evidently, is that when their belief system is itself at fault, they lack the capacity or tenacity to look outside their self-imposed box and see the problem for what it is.
I was always attracted to the Conservatives because they eschewed such artificial choices, no matter how ‘pro Capitalist’ they appeared during Thatcher’s rule…
Good work Letters. Excellent analysis.
LFAT @ 9, if it took you relatively little effort, that makes things worse, not better!
It shows that once you remove the intellectual dishonesty of those crusaders of women’s ‘equality’ they are in reality little more than misandrists.
This Labour government are incredibly sexist. Fancy letting incompetent male ministers have safe seats up north (Scotland, Burnley etc) whilst poor Jacqui will struggle – they are so unreasonable
I dont really care what she says, she should be forced to go back to Uganda.
Anywhere but here.