Alex Deane: The unreality of European "justice"
By Alex Deane
As Jonathan discussed on this site yesterday, the European Court of Justice will rule later today on whether offering young women lower rates of car insurance than that offered to young men is sexual discrimination.
I can save you all the hanging on tenterhooks I'm sure this otherwise would provoke - they'll rule that it is. Because it is.
But it's also quite reasonable discrimination in the increasingly forgotten sense of the word - distinguishing between things, accurately. It is desirable "discrimination" - a notion entirely alien, it seems to the thinking of our European masters.
The verdict we're about to get demonstrates the perversity of modern political correctness that underpins this Court. Women drivers receive lower insurance rates because, providers say, they pose a lower risk - because they have fewer accidents. And the thing is that that's true. Nobody disputes that - but the court doesn't care. Equally, in another aspect of "sex discrimination" surely to be ended by the same "logic", men have always received larger pension annuities than women, on the basis that we die sooner. And, again, on the whole, we do. Again, nobody disputes the reality - but that "discrimination" seems equally likely to be abolished, too.
As I say, the Court, and those responsible for the twisted thinking behind its position, simply don't care what is true in reality. Rather, you must focus solely on what is true in approved thinking: you must insist that we are all equal, that we are all the same, even though it is screamingly obvious that we are not. Indeed, increasingly you're not allowed to say what the reality is (don't ask a man to move a box at work because he's stronger, don't try to identify Alex Deane by saying I'm "the white one" when I'm standing with a black man - instead, we must go through bizarre contortions of language rather than stating the obvious - contortions which, by the way, I was interested to see didn't exist in Sierra Leone or Kenya when I visited last year). When a society insists that you adhere to a doctrine explicitly based on ignoring the reality in front of its nose, that society is demonstrating some very worrying symptoms. Time to check for lead in the waterpipes, perhaps.
Which brings me to the Big Brother Watch book, in which the eminent lawyer Martin Howe QC sets out how we could have a British Bill of Rights. When faced with inevitable verdicts like the one due to come crashing down on us from abroad today, contrary to reality and sense, in my view the need for such is plain.
And by the way, not that it matters for the principle under discussion, but: don't dream that men's premiums will come down as a result of this verdict. Women's will go up - of course.
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