President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is set to address the House of Commons by video link at five o’clock this afternoon.
It comes as Ukrainian civilians continue to suffer appalling causalities. Reporting from the Polish border, our Campaigns Editor David Cohen has been speaking with exhausted and hungry refugees – ordinary people – enduring sub-zero conditions on their journey to safety.
Two million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homeland, half of whom are now in Poland. Not many have made it to the UK, however. While the EU has handed all Ukrainians visa-free access for three years, as of Monday evening, Britain had granted visas to just 300. Today’s leader column calls on the Government to sort out this embarassing mess.
It is natural to want to find traces of good news. There is the 11-year-old boy who travelled 600 miles – on his own – to Slovakia with only a plastic bag, passport and phone number scribbled on his hand. But it is also another immensely sad story – a boy separated from his mother, herself a widow, who needs to stay behind to look after her own mother. It is what people are forced to do to escape Putin’s war machine.
Elsewhere in the paper, bots aren’t all bad. On International Women’s Day 2022, the Gender Pay Gap twitter bot has appeared with a warning to employers: if you tweet about IWD, they’ll retweet your gender pay gap.
When Young’s Pubs tweeted ‘Raising a pint to International Women’s Day’, the bot claimed that in the chain, “women’s median hourly pay is 73.2% lower than men’s.“ Young’s are of course far from the only ones. Emma Loffhagen has more, plus the solutions to bridging the gender pay gap once and for all.
In a statement, Young’s said:
“The gender pay gap figures referred to in the media and social media are very misleading and in no way are a true reflection of the Young’s business and our people. This was due to a mandatory change in reporting due to furlough.
“COVID-19 forced us to close all of our pubs and in order to protect our business, we had to furlough the vast majority of our staff. This meant our gender pay gap figures were significantly distorted as the sample size taken for the report was only c.40 people compared to c.4,600 staff we employ.
“Our figures adjusted for furlough are a more accurate reflection of our business, which shows our median gender pay gap is 5.6% and our mean is 10.9%, substantially better than the national median of 14.9%. This is more in line with the figures we achieved in 2018 and 2019.”
In the comment pages, Mayor Sadiq Khan says Londoners deserve a city free from toxic air, as he makes his case for the expansion of the Ultra-low emission zone (Glulez?) to the whole of Greater London.
Meanwhile, Scary Spice, Camilla and me - Nimco Ali says we are blessed with amazing women to celebrate on this IWD 2022.
And finally, meet the bachelor who put two huge ads of himself at Oxford Circus Tube station in search of a wife. Jeevan Bhachu spent £2,000 on ‘find Jeevan a wife’ advert which carries the slogan: ‘Best Indian you’ll takeaway’ (once he was able to convince TfL it wasn’t an ad for junk food).
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Update: This article was amended to include a statement by Young’s.
