David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, Baywatch

Source: NBC Universal

A new, updated version of the “classic” 1990s series Baywatch, about the lives and loves of a series of well-sculpted female lifeguards whose chests act as dangerously overinflated flotation devices, is due to be excreted onto our screens next year. Being a 21st-century reboot, it is almost certain to feature any number of more “modern,” more “diverse” aspects to it. No longer will all the lifeguards involved be unacceptably pulchritudinous young blonde Caucasian women like Pamela Anderson, but persons of all shapes, sizes, colors, textures, tastes, dimensions, and smells. How far will the diversity drive go, though? Will one of the lifesavers be confined to a special marine wheelchair fitted with Jet Skis?

An old episode of the U.K. TV comedy series Mid Morning Matters, in which terminally tactless fake radio host Alan Partridge chaired a pathetically desperate listener call-in session about a hypothetical new eugenic practice called “Forced Celebrity Breeding,” suggested this outcome could well happen:

Alan Partridge: Today we’re talking Forced Celebrity Breeding. On line 2 we have Duncan from Beccles. Hello, Duncan.

Caller: Hello, Alan. I’d go for Stephen Hawking and Pamela Anderson. Then you’d create a beautiful genius!

Alan Partridge: Or a disabled lifeguard… And I’ll tell you something, you wouldn’t be able to sack them, not these days.

Partridge may have had a point here. In Alan’s relentlessly overgoverned and overregulated homeland, it really is becoming increasingly impossible for employers to sack disabled staff for being unable to do their jobs properly anymore. If Pamela Anderson did end up wheelchair-bound with mammary-induced spinal problems while patrolling British beaches on behalf of a new spin-off show, Baywatch U.K., there is a genuine probability her services could not easily be legally dispensed with.

The Blind Lack Vision
A governmental review into U.K. workplace sickness conducted earlier this year by businessman Sir Charlie Mayfield was commissioned with the noble aim of identifying ways in which employees with disabilities could be aided to remain in the nation’s active workforce, rather than retiring onto a life of expensive and unsustainable welfare benefits.

As 8.7 million active workers, or almost one in four, have a registered disability, it is in the government’s interest to keep them all gainfully employed in their factories, shops, cafés, and brothels. The preferred solution the government envisaged would be to give disabled employees more rights; but Sir Charlie’s conclusion was that it may counterintuitively be better to give them fewer rights.

Gifting disabled employees lots of rights sounds good at first, but to a businessman in a failing economy like Britain’s, it all sounds very expensive and time-consuming. As Sir Charlie argued, “[A] lot of employers see it as risky to employ disabled people” today, not because they necessarily can’t do the job, but because it would often be legally impossible to make them redundant if it turns out they unfortunately can’t. Thus, well-meaning theoretical attempts to get the disabled into work only end up keeping them out of it, in practice.

And yet, still British politicians go on acting like this regardless, even though it is demonstrably just making a bad situation even worse. Ironically, the self-styled “disability champions” themselves must be totally blind.

Boob Jobless
Plus, there is the ever-expanding, ever-elastic definition of what even now constitutes a “disability” anyway. What about not being able to stop thinking about Pamela Anderson’s tits, for example? If David Hasselhoff had ever thought of that one, he could have been taking his employer for a ride for decades now. As it is, the first recorded case of the above severe medical condition has just been recorded afflicting a 45-year-old Englishman named Mark Bryan, who says he has begun constantly hallucinating realistic three-dimensional images of Pam’s breasts all day long as a hitherto-unknown side effect of his diabetes, making it impossible for him to continue in his former work as a teacher.

Apparently, Pamela’s paps would inexplicably “superimpose” themselves on the bodies of those he was talking to whenever he entered his local branch of Burger King—which, given a good proportion of his old ordinary working day would once have involved talking to underage schoolgirls, would technically have rendered him what is legally known as “a bit of an Epstein.” The phantasmal breasts were “very animated” and wobbled about, although they later deflated in size until the point it was more like was looking at “a topless man,” Bryan complained; even hallucinations are going transgender in the contemporary, DEI-infested British workplace.

Bryan had already retired from his job, I would guess due to his diabetes being so severe he felt unable to continue in it. The thing is, though, disability-friendly U.K. employment law specifically mandates employers must make “reasonable accommodations” to those many millions of workers with diabetes like Bryan.

Traditionally, this has meant little more than keeping a spare Mars Bar on hand to ram down someone’s throat if they faint due to lack of sugar. If Bryan had decided to keep on working, however, what “reasonable accommodations” might he have felt empowered to demand to cope with his own rare diabetes-related symptoms? Hallucinatory bras to cover over the hallucinatory breasts, perchance?

ADHD: Absolute Dick-Head Disease
Being disabled used to just mean having no arms or legs. Now it also means simply being shit at your job. One recent U.K. employment tribunal ruled that a worker at the technology consultancy Capgemini, Bahar Khorram, was entitled to sue her employers because they had failed to properly accommodate her alleged ADHD, otherwise known as “I Can’t Be Bothered to Sit Still and Concentrate Properly Syndrome.” In Khorram’s case, ADHD manifested itself via the following very specific symptoms: “I struggle to maintain focus in environments that lack structure, clarity or routine,” whereas “Conversely, when clear guidance and expectations are provided I am able to focus, and get high-quality results.”

This sounds suspiciously like Khorram actually meant, “I am a total child who can’t just be told to go away and deal with something independently like a normal adult would, but who needily requires my boss to draw up a big long bullet list of step-by-step instructions for me to follow, like I was a 2-year-old reading a cookbook.” Shockingly, Khorram was tasked by her manager with completing “multifaceted tasks with tight deadlines,” which just wasn’t right for someone on a mere £120,000 salary.

Confronting bosses with her ADHD diagnosis, Khorram requested via an “occupational health therapist” that, rather than her simply being quiet and doing as she was told, the entire company should adjust all their own customary working practices instead, by providing “a three-hour neurodiversity awareness training webinar for staff and bosses and a one-hour session in ADHD awareness” (it would have been longer, but you couldn’t expect anyone with ADHD to sit still long enough to complete it).

Providing a judgment in Khorram’s favor, the presiding employment tribunal judge awarded her compensation and said all U.K. employers in future should be considered “negligent” if their middle managers did not properly understand the supposed medical issues “suffered” by their neurodiverse underlings.

The average cost to a U.K. business of defending an employment tribunal case is £8,500—and, given that stupid rulings like the above demonstrate they will almost certainly lose, many employers ultimately just cave in and pander to their whining employees as if they were the true bosses here, this being thought the lesser of two evils.

Rigging the Sack Race
I remember an old children’s comic book character called Hiram N. Firam, who would repeatedly hire and then fire employees immediately for the first available trivial reason, like them needing to use the toilet, but clearly the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. Employees in Britain can now effectively “fire” their employers, in the sense of making them go bust by threatening to take them to an expensive tribunal if they don’t reconfigure their entire business to their own personal liking, regardless of inconvenience, cost, or practicality.

Recent tribunal cases have included a judge’s ruling that “calling the boss a dickhead is not necessarily a sackable offense,” and that one woman fired for doing so deserved £30,000 in “free” (not to her boss) money. Another judge ruled it is wholly unreasonable to dismiss a worker for sending a customer an email calling him “a twat,” and that this “wronged” individual should be doled out £5,500 to make her feel all better.

When an employer called an autistic employee a “weirdo,” however, it was a different matter, with the aforementioned weirdo successfully suing for £17,000 in damages. This is despite his boss specifically saying he had some “sympathy” with his employee’s difficulties in the workplace, as he had always been “something of a weirdo myself”; i.e., he was just trying to deliver friendly criticism in a nonconfrontational, self-deprecatory manner, not abuse him.

The worker did seem a bit weird, though; he complained he didn’t feel comfortable with music being played in his workplace, due to his autism. But his workplace was a disabled children’s play area, where children with competing neurological disorders came to listen to music as they played.

So, in order to satisfy the employee, the actual customers now had to be disadvantaged by explicit order of a judge. Is this not a bit like a bus driver complaining he has to drive a bus, that roads make him nervous, and therefore demanding all his passengers walk behind him to their destinations in a big long line along the pavement instead? The weird worker felt accused by his boss of “wanting to spoil the children’s fun.” But he was spoiling the children’s fun, wasn’t he?

The rulings just keep coming. One sacked warehouse worker was awarded £10,500 after he kept making “Michael Jackson hee-hee noises” and “stupid orgasm” sounds at a colleague and expecting him to just put up with it; a judge ruled he should have been warned about his conduct first before being dismissed, as obviously there was no way he could possibly have been expected not to have known this was in any way abnormal behavior.

An estate agent made to sit at a new desk in the middle of his office, not his usual favorite one at the back, got £21,500. Using the word “lads” to address a room that also included some ladies was deemed to somehow constitute “sex harassment.” A nurse who was left out of a tea round got £41,000. Using sighs and “exaggerated exhales” when listening to a subordinate’s litany of excuses for regularly being late to work was legally labeled “discriminatory.”

What will happen to a society so overburdened with employee rights that not even a postman can be given the sack? In the end, mass business collapse, and therefore consequent mass unemployment. Congratulations, British government, another great job well done.

I think I must be diabetic. Like Mark Bryan, whenever I observe the average know-nothing politicians telling me how very well they understand the business world, despite all apparent evidence to the contrary, all I see are some absolute massive tits wobbling around there on display, too.