Oh dear, it’s official (nearly): a belief in man-made climate change grants you the same anti-discrimination protection in the British work-place you’d get if, say, you were a Muslim and your employer forced you to eat pork, or you were a Christian and your boss insisted you sacrifice a big black cock at the stroke of midnight on the Winter Solstice in the middle of a ruddy great pentacle, or you were a Rastafarian, and your boss wouldn’t allow you to pop outside for your statutory religious reefer-break.
At least that’s the maddening situation that one Tim Nicholson, 42, of Oxford is striving to engineer with the help of our crazed, activist-lawyer-riddled legal system.
Nicholson has been given the go-ahead, on appeal, to sue his former employer Grainger plc for unfair dismissal under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003 which cover “any religion, religious belief, or philosophical belief”.
Nicholson, formerly Grainger plc’s head of sustainability, said he had tried to set up a “carbon management system” for the company. Yet for some mysterious reason we can only guess at, Nicholson says staff refused to give him the necessary information which would have enabled him to calculate the company’s carbon footprint. Grainger claims it got rid of Nicholson for “operational” and “structural” reasons. Nicholson, however, believes it was a form of discrimination against his sincere, deep, heartfelt and passionate views on AGW.
His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”
I do hope he wins, for it will only serve to bolster the suit I’m currently planning to launch against my own employer UK plc. Under this new belief system I have invented – Delingpolism (currently with only one known adherent – but the rest of you are more than welcome to join) – anyone who proselytises on behalf of AGW, carbon capture, Cap & Trade or wind farms without being able to demonstrate with at least 95 per cent certainty that their cause has any scientific foundation whatsoever, must be exiled immediately to the Arctic Circle, there to dwell among the still surprisingly large population of ravening polar bears until such time as they are gobbled up, digested and excreted into the Arctic oceans ready to pass through the food chain and end up in the beauteous gullets of the mighty blue whale (or similar).
So far, my religion’s precepts have been completely ignored by my employer. I feel sorely discriminated against. Got to be worth a couple of million in damages, at least, wouldn’t you agree?
I agree. Where do I sign and do I get a badge.
I liked the picture of the ’still surprisingly large population of ravening polar bears’.
Another useless band you might post up to the Arctic are NHS Breastfeeding Bullies who go round scaring new mothers. I have one daughter whose baby was seriously undernourished because she had been brainwashed into believing that Breast is Best. Other brainwashed young mothers I know have persisted in breastfeeding through terrible pain, nipples nearly dropping off, repeated mastitis infection because the alternative is rising sea levels, guilt, floods, hurricanes etc.
I have four beautiful daughters, two of whom I hardly breastfed at all and two who were fed almost until they started school. Well, if I am absolutely honest, one of them had started school. These days I would be arrested for child abuse. No difference in health, brains etc between the bottle fed and the breast fed. When Mr Cameron has to cut public spending by 20% because the IMF insists on it, perhaps he can start with breastfeeding counsellors.
Please sign me up.
Annie is admirably off the topic but absolutely right. Breastfeeding nazis are if anything worse than the Manbearpig worshippers. Key to it is the blatantly preposterous assertion that any new mother, regardless of size, state of health, size and appetite of baby, diet etc. somehow magically produces sufficient milk. That, plus the idea that the exact composition of the milk makes any long-term difference to anything at all.
Like Manbearpigworship, this originates from an anti-capitalist notion, in this case that bottle feeding is all a big conspiracy by Big Milk. It’s part of a wider theory that birth has been “medicalised” by Big Medicine and that we need to get back to a happier more natural time (but presumably not the one where we had 50% infant mortality).
So it may be off topic but the parallels are eerie.
The law is absurd, I agree. But why grant Abrahamic religions privileged status? There is less rational, scientific basis to those belief systems than there is for man-made climate change. What is the evidential basis for believing the Koran or the Bible is the literal word of God? None whatsoever, of course. So why should these patently nonesensical belief systems be afforded protection in law by an overwhelmingly secular, rationalist society?