In July 2007, a Government ad campaign urging more women to become firefighters was launched with the message, ‘To be part of our team you don’t have to be one of the boys’. But after a few years of working alongside fire-totty, it seems quite a few of the boys themselves are not entirely on message.

In classic pc cliche-string style, the fire service at the time said it ‘wanted to emphasise the shift away from the traditional and stereotypical firefighter image’ – as in, nearly all of them being men.

“There’s a bloody good reason most firemen are men,” said one Essex firefighter to The Slog last week, “pumps weigh a ton, require lots of muscle to unroll, and then need somebody seriously strong to hold on to them once the water starts gushing out”.

This seemed to us a reasonable point to make. And in Wales (where the drive to recruit women was largely focused) another volunteer fireman made an even more telling point:

“What’s happening is that a lot of the women can’t reach the training standards men can” he asserted, “and so the standards are having to be lowered. It’s just like the Universities…all this feminist crap and positive discrimination means the quality is reduced. In a big fire, the last thing you need to be fretting about is whether your mate is OK to bash a door down. It’s just more bollocks from the pc crowd. They want shooting, that’s my view.”

So as The Slog is all about bollocks deconstruction, this seemed an apposite way to start today’s edition.

The Fire Service had less than 1% ethnic minority and women firefighters in 1999. By 2007, however,in Essex this had ripped ahead to 2%. Largely useless quango The Audit Commission noted in 2009 that:

‘The service is making some progress on improving equality and diversity. The service
has changed the national recruitment approach and as a result there have been
successes in recruiting both female and applicants from different backgrounds. As a
result the percentage of female fire-fighters employed has risen from 2 per cent to
2.3 per cent, although the target of 2.5 per cent set by the FRA has not been achieved resulting in the service remaining in the worst performing 25 per cent.’

Note the total absence above of any reference at all to effectiveness during a blaze when plonking Essex in the ‘worst’performing 25%. These people are truly, deeply mad – and our tax monies are keeping them in a job, the main result of which is to make the average fireman’s job more difficult.

Vote for Gordon, and more of this.