In February, Brandon Lewis MP gave a talk to the Reform Think Tank – here (video, 27:51). A supporter has kindly sent me his 9-page document consisting of a critical review of the speech, and a refutation of the Independent Review of the Conditions of Service for Fire and Rescue Staff in England (2015) by Adrian Thomas. We thank him for making his work available to us for dissemination.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Thank you for this. Clearly Brandon Lewis had a political agenda to which any evidence was moulded. Two things are very clear. 1. Adrian Thomas presumes that Firefighters are nasty individuals simply because that is what happens in an all male service. 2. There need be no evidence of 1. or the presumption that women and non white men are uniformly not nasty.
Of course there is no consideration of whether the Fire Services are actually doing their job.
As so often pointed out if “reflecting the population” is a goal, why isn’t that a key concern for the NHS? Teaching? Social Services Local and National Civil Services all far short of the roughly 50% male they’d need to be to be able to “serve the community”. Indeed I can actually see there might be arguments for very “personal” or human services to be reflective of gender, but putting out fires?
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If they are all nasty then of course they should be referred to as “firemen ” not fire fighters .Which is what I call them anyway since women have never been expected to pass the physical tests which used to be required and therefore should not be in the fire service at all.
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The most significant point of concern in Brandon’s corporate jargon saturated speech was, for me, the nationalisation and centralisation of what were once known as fire brigades and the intended amalgamation of the result with ‘The Police’, making fire fighters, who have an absolute right of entry without a warrant to any property should it be necessary, agents of law enforcement not restricted by evidence gathering controls, and police officers part of the national fire fighting effort. That arrangement offers too many unpleasant possibilities: a fire, or any other fire service related emergency, becomes an opportunity to search a property without a warrant and without accountability.
I was reminded when I read ‘fire fighters are now unknowingly guilty of thought crime, or rather, unthought crime’, of Winston Smith’s hapless neighbour, who expressed his gratitude to his children for denouncing him for some trivial slip of the tongue because they had saved him from committing who knew what potential outrage. I think the real purpose of these ‘reforms’ is to expand the scope of uncontrolled and unaccountable policing, and the ostensible need to diversify without objection merely the pretext on which to do it.
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