Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, agreed that the result risked leaving Birmingham “ungovernable”, adding: “There was the hope that there might be a chance for strong and sensible leadership. But I’m afraid that is not the result that the electorate has delivered.
Perhaps the electorate prefers not to have strong leadership?
Now, if I had just been elected there I would have one and only the one constant refrain. Abolish the Equality Act. That binmen’s strike is cause by the insane insistence that the dinner ladies and classroom assistants must be paid the same amounts as the binmen. Work of equal value, see?
So just hammer away at that. We cannot solve this problem while national politics insists upon this. Thus this is something that has to be solved by national politics. And just keep shouting that. Just say it to local newspaper reporters, the local TV station, interviews with anyone, every speech in the council chamber. Go all very boring and Cato on them. Delenda est equalitas.
Sure, it doesn’t help much with everything else but politics is about using the issues available to make the point.
Genuine question. If this situation is caused by a law passed at national level, why is it only a problem in Birmingham?
Regarding the OP, you are right, it’s a pretty stupid law, not all jobs are the same or of equal value. Just another examples of politicians thinking that their decrees can alter reality.
You have to fight the case through the courts, the courts decide what is equal value. Tesco and Next have both lost cases on cashiers/warehousemen. I assume the union for the dinner ladies fought this one.
My guess here is that most local authorities outsourced the bin collections and the school catering. You get in Veolia or Biffa for the bins, but you get a school catering company in for dinner ladies. At which point, 2 different employers. No legal case to fight.
That makes sense. Use law to make some employees arbitrarily more expensive and, shazam!, they ain’t your employees any more.
But… privatisation!
But on the other hand…PRIVATISATION!
Goes back a long way AIUI.
Massive simplification but:
Birmingham wanted to increase the salaries of the bin men to retain them but as they were on the same pay scale as the cooks and assistants they couldn’t for example uprate a Grade IV truck driver without also doing it for all else on the same grade.
They managed this with bonuses for the male dominated job
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/council-bonus-schemes-may-be-scrutinised-after-birmingham-equal-pay-case/
Councils that outsourced waste collection and running the tips don’t seem to have been in the news for having this problem.
But now even Next and Tesco are being sued. It’s ridiculous. They’ll have to outsource warehousing to another company or something, or raise prices. Or the public vote to repeal this schit as Tim says.
Having some judges who weren’t barking mad would seem a possible solution.
Good luck with that one.
I think we should look at all the cases boasted about on the Leigh Day website, then at least consider repealing all of the legislation they relied on to win.
Followed by piano wire and lampposts.
Nah, lampposts first; it’s quicker. Then take the time to do the analysis and repeal.
One of the cretins determined to inflict equality, welfare and multiculturalsim on the nation doesn’t understand the foul poison the concoction has produced. Planning and foresight, or was he just obeying orders?
I don’t think it matters what the local or national issues are, Brum seems to have voted along ethnic lines.
I suspect plenty of the electorate wanted strong leadership bearing in mind they’ve elected a lot of people with very strident views, the people just couldn’t agree what flavour administration they wanted to deliver it.
With 2 seats yet to declare and 51 needed for a majority, what do you do with 22 Reform, 19 Green, 17 Lab, 16 Con, 12 LD and 13 independents? Green + Lab + LD falls just short. There’s a very energetic 18 year-old Gaza Independent who won a seat there and is clearly in no hurry to partner with Labour:
It’s not a national government. It doesn’t need tp look like Westminster. No overall control is not a disaster, it may stop them doing stupid things. Like borrowing money to spaff anf going bankrupt. You don’t need a majority government to fix potholes and run care homes. Perhaps you do in order to hand out contracts to yor mates.
Speaking of which, get the binmen to buy out the contract, have an employeee-owned company doing thr bins which doesn’t have dinner ladies.
But that’s privatisation!!!
Whenever I see Cato I can’t help thinking of the Pink Panther.
Probably be a better councillor than most of the loons in Brum.
“Best you learn your fucking place. You don’t run this fucking government…You’re fucking plebs“.
Andrew Mitchell = cunt.
You’re not wrong about Mitchell who is smug and sanctimonious. But the Met Police involved in ‘plebgate’ behaved shockingly.
Equal pay for equal work would be fine.
Demanding the same pay for utterly unequal work is not.
Tell the kids to bring a packed lunch until it’s sorted
Prof Travers said that the “six party system” that has been created in the city was “here to stay” in Britain,
Doubt. The Tories have further to fall into regional party irrelevance and will soon fall out of the national conversation. The MSM can barely remember that they’re supposed to be the official opposition these days. The Greens are in the process of cannibalising Labour, not cosying up.
This isn’t a six party “system”, it’s a temporary artifact of what you see when both wings of the Uniparty are curling up and dying. By the next election, many of the people who voted Tory last week will be dead or no longer looking to vote Tory because it’s a wasted vote. Same goes for Labour. Reform and the Greens are here to supplant them, not sit beside them.
warning that the splintering of Birmingham’s politics was, in part, the result of sectarian voting, with Gaza being prioritised over local issues.
It’s not “sectarian politics”, it’s just typical Paki behaviour. This is why we are taking our country back – we have no intention of living in Cold Pakistan with all the rats and rubbish.
So this,
Among the successful pro-Gaza independents was Mansur Ahmed in Nechells ward, an 18-year-old who posted campaign videos in another language, and Harris Khaliq in Ward End in the north-east of the city, where three quarters of the population is Muslim.
is effect and cause. Import huge local supermajorities of largely rural Pakistani peasant origin, get Pakistani tribal politics including Gaza innit.
Mr Mitchell said it was alarming that “Palestine infiltrated an election about local services and effectiveness and value for money”.
No, the time to be alarmed was when your party allowed the British government to promote and subsidise mass scale Muslim migration to Britain. Can’t now turn around and blame Muslims for being interested in Muslim things, instead of what you think they should care about, bigot.
But what a gloriously joyful cautionary tale of cousin marriage and its consequences:
Speaking after his election and responding to accusations of sectarianism, Mr Khaliq said: “We will not ignore the people of Palestine because there are no local issues, there are local issues and we face them in everyday life and it’s time we talk about both of them so free Palestine and free Ward End from Labour.
Innit.
Agree that privatisation of school dinners and bin collection is the answer (although have things now gone so far that TUPE would just bring the problems over? They need to abolish that too).
But I always thought the alternative answer to this sort of nonsense is to have a reorganisation, merge the two departments with ‘equal work’, put the employees into a pool and rota them to alternate weeks; a week of serving dinners, then a week of bin collection.
If they complain, well, they did spend years claiming that the two jobs were equal.
Doubt if the bin men’d be much good at cooking!!