I’m with Sir Alan on pregnancy

11:51am Friday 4th April 2008

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ACCORDING TO the front page of a so-called newspaper this week, a lady newsreader called Natasha Kerplunsky is three months pregnant.

I bet her bosses are really pleased, seeing as she's just five weeks into a million-pound contract and is now looking forward to a year off.

That cuddly old teddy bear Sir Alan Sugar got some serious flak a few weeks back for criticising the daft laws that stop employers asking prospective employees whether or not they intend to get pregnant. The fact that his new TV series was looming on the horizon must be acknowledged, but he was right.

Let's be honest. If you are a small businessman employing three or four people, you'd have to be barking mad to take on a woman of child-bearing age. There you are, trying to be all progressive and modern, when suddenly the key sales manager you employed three weeks earlier announces she's up the duff and will shortly be departing for a year on the couch scoffing Jaffa Cakes and watching Jeremy Kyle, and all at your expense.

Worse still, she knew she was pregnant when she took the job. So where's the fairness in that? It's only one step away from fraud. I can't believe we're prepared to put up with this nonsense.

No doubt the hairy-armpit brigade will already be composing their letters of complaint, but let's turn it around. What if I, as a man, applied for and accepted a job and then announced a couple of months later that I had a bad back and would shortly be clearing off on the sick for a year or so?

Yes, of course I knew I had the bad back when I came for an interview, but you weren't allowed to ask me about it. So if you don't mind, you can pay me for most of that time off as well. It's madness.

The stupid thing is legislation designed to promote the equality of women is now actively working against them. I was at a lodge meeting last week and conducted a quick survey amongst my fellow used car-dealers and near-bankrupt estate agents. Not a single one of them will now contemplate taking on a woman of child-bearing age. They'd rather employ a passing Pole or an itinerant Uzbekistani. Male, of course.

• AND HERE we go again. New sex discrimination laws mean that landlords who allow drinkers to crack sexist' jokes or indulge in racy' banter can now be taken to a tribunal and sued for hundreds of thousands of pounds by their barmaids.

(I'm not sure what sexist' and racy' means, but I'm sure there are legions of government-funded lawyers gagging to argue the toss.) Restaurant managers or hoteliers also risk action if staff object to backchat from customers asking for a date.

The frightening thing is that the burden of proof will be on the employer, not the employee. So the minimum-wage teenager that you take on to shift alcopops to her fellow 17-year-olds can whisk you off to court claiming that a passing Darren looked at her breasts and said "You don't get many of them to the pound" and you'll have to prove that he didn't. So where's the justice in that?

• RARELY DOES a day pass without some new health care surfacing in the national press - usually in the pages of the Daily Mail. And that so-called advice is so contradictory that it's often difficult to make sense of it.

First you are warned that a sip of alcohol will result in your liver dissolving in a pit of acid; three days later you're told the occasional glass of red wine is good for your health. Similarly meat.

Now we all know that a vegetarian diet is a recipe for disaster: constant sniffles, chronic wind and some dodgy bowel movements. And last week that prejudice was confirmed by research that suggested that an element of red meat in your diet was good for you.

Then what's this? "Eating a single sausage can kill" bleat the headlines. Well, yes... if you've bought it from a burger van outside Villa Park, maybe. (I only mention Villa Park because it was there I bought a beefburger at the height of the BSE crisis from a van displaying the notice: "Guaranteed - our burgers contain 100 per cent no beef.") So here I sit in front of a plate of bacon, sausage, fried egg, fried bread, baked beans, mushrooms and tomatoes. I know just one mouthful might kill me stone dead. Do I care? Bring on the hash browns, the black pudding, the kedgeree. We're all going to die anyway. We may as well go with tomato sauce on our chins.

• BUT THEN, maybe not. The latest loony Government initiative suggests we should all have our own personal health care budgets, to be spent as we want. So if you've got a nasty case of piles, you can take yourself off to the nation's best pile care clinic, which I suspect is somewhere in Wales. If you're suffering from chronic wind, then the Geoffrey Boycott Clinic in Barnsley will be the place to go.

It all sounds sensible, doesn't it? But wait what happens when you've spent your budget? That nasty bout of terminal cancer turned out to be not so serious after all, and the prospects of recovery are good, but you've spent all your health care cash - there's no money left in the kitty for further treatment.

That's it then, mate. You've cashed in your chips. Kindly go way and die quietly in the corner.