Ken Livingstone’s campaign team has produced a useful and interesting document ‘A Mayor for Equality’ which sets out the actively discriminatory nature of the public spending cuts.

• Women are more heavily affected by cuts in housing benefit and the switch to Consumer Price Index of the additional state pension and public sector pensions.
• Even if the cuts in child benefits and family-related tax credits are discounted, women are still paying for 66 per cent of the cuts compared to 34 per cent for men.
• Women are particularly concentrated in certain jobs and sectors, making them particularly vulnerable to targeted cuts in sectors and jobs. They also represent the overwhelming majority of part-time workers and even before the latest spending proposals the TUC estimated that, across the economy as a whole, 600,000 women were facing involuntary part-time work and 250,000 were in involuntary temporary work.
• The law on equal pay is under threat: when the Equality Act 2010 was going through parliament the Conservatives said they would not implement provisions to create greater pay transparency. In London pay transparency is particularly needed as the gender pay gap is wider: research in 2008 showed that women in London then were paid an average 23 per cent less than men.
• Women continue to take the greatest strain for care of children and other family members, more women are carers than men, many women work time to try to juggle childcare or care for parents with paid employment and women are far more likely than men to be single parents. The pressure on women will grow if social, care, education and health services suffer from cuts. A Unison/TUC commissioned analysis estimates that public spending cuts, excluding benefit cuts, will fall hardest on the poorest tenth of households: ‘All households are hit considerably, but the poorest households are hit the hardest. Assuming these cuts fall evenly across non-ring-fenced departments, the average annual cut in public spending on the poorest tenth of households is £1,344, equivalent to 20.5% of their household income, whereas the average annual cut in public spending on the richest tenth of households is £1,135, equivalent to just 1.6% of their household income’.

Read the full document here.