A recent interview with Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch sparked outrage for her ignorant and insensitive remarks about business regulation, specifically maternity pay. She claims that maternity pay is excessive, burdens businesses, and suggests women should take more personal responsibility.
I live in London and I’m in my early thirties, which means that most of the women I know are having babies. First babies, second babies, IVF babies, ‘we weren’t quite ready but we’re excited anyway’ babies. And while every child and every pregnancy is different, the one thing that every pregnant friend has in common is worry. But it’s not just worry about becoming a mum or sleep deprivation or having to give birth – it's about how they’re going to survive maternity leave.
This is why I was apoplectically angry this weekend to hear Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch making some spectacularly ignorant comments about business regulation, specifically maternity pay. Badenoch has since claimed that her comments were ‘misunderstood’ and ‘taken out of context’ – so let’s look at a direct, verbatim quote from her interview, during which she said: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive… Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.” She was then asked again if she thought that maternity pay is excessive, to which she replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation. We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of those decisions… The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their own decisions.” When it was then suggested that women would be unable to have babies without maternity provision, she replied: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies
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