Fire Brigades Spend £17,000 of Taxpayers’ Money on Painting Engines in Rainbow Colours
Fire brigades have been told to “fight fires not culture wars” after it was revealed they spent over £17,000 painting fire engines in rainbow colours. MailOnline has more.
The colourful paint jobs were approved by several fire and rescue service chiefs across England since 2017 in inclusivity and recruitment drives.
The rainbow flag has been used a symbol of LGBT pride since the late 1970s.
The highest spending fire brigade on rainbow painted fire engines was by Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, who spent £4,320.
This expensive paint job came from the service’s annual budget which was £23.2 million in 2020/21.
Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue spent around a thousand pounds less, paying £3,390 in the last few years.
The service has an annual budget of around £61 million in 2022/23, rising from £58.5m in 2021/22.
Spending on rainbow-themed designs on fire engines was £2,284 at Suffolk Fire and Rescue, according to a Freedom of Information request by the Sun.
Suffolk fire brigade’s annual budget for 2019/20 was around £21.5 million.
Across the country, around £35,000 more has been spent on rainbow items including flags.
Tom Ryan, from thinktank the TaxPayers’ Alliance slammed the spending saying that taxpayers “are being ripped off in the rush to be right on”.
He said that fire chiefs need to recognise that “expensive rainbow wrappings” do not help deliver “heroic life-saving” fire fighting services we all need to save us in crisis.
Fire services should “fight fires not culture wars”, he said.
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It’s been said that many fire
menpeople are also arsonists. But now they’ve moved on to stoking the fires of gender politics.A bit like doctors making people ill. Oh wait –
Wasn’t there a study (perhaps Israeli) that revealed when there was a doctors strike, maybe even a few consecutive strikes, and during that period the death rate went down? I’ll have to look it up but a rather stark anomaly to interpret.
Plumbers have saved more lives than medical doctors, for sure…
Please, what fire is more fatal than the literal fire of discrimination and hate? And what better remedy for a house on “fire” than hosing it down with whatever sparkling equity juice this tender (are they still called tenders?) squirts out.
‘Tender’ is sex discriminatory and transphobic. It stereotypes women who are now also men who might not be ‘tender’.
I just fail to see what the purpose of this is. If there is a fire, you don’t have to fill in a survey of your sexual proclivities before they attend. Every fire or emergency is treated equally, is it not..?.
As for ensuring that they have diversity in the role of firefighter, surely what we are looking for is competence and ability to meet the physical rigours of the job? If I need saving from a burning building, a 5ft female isn’t going to be able to do the job as well as a 6ft 2 male, sorry.
I saw today the situation seen in video from Notting Hill Carnival of a man who pinned a Woman PC to some railings and simulated a sex act, and she wasn’t strong enough to push him away, and didn’t have the authority to pepper spray him and no-one came to her assistance. Police Officers shouldn’t have degrees, they should have big muscles and be happy to ‘apply the law’ without fear or favour. Our public services are a bad joke.
Oh great! Let’s start painting battle tanks, destroyers and aircraft the same colours!
Perhaps in future when one rings 999, there’ll be an extra option to choose which colour of fire tender to attend – at a premium of course.
Thinking of all the ‘rainbow wrappings’, I’m surprised that the syringes they use for the jabs aren’t rainbow coloured – yet.
They do like to push for inclusivity, don’t they?
The ultimate irony of which is that Heterosexuals don’t get a colour. If they were truly being ‘inclusive’ LGBT would start with a ‘H’.
Or – a quick additional gender check to see what letter of the post-Pride alphabet soup you identify with to see if you actually justify sending help and/or estimate a suitable response time? Time-graded response for TERFS and CIS perhaps? How would they distinguish between pregnant ‘persons’ with ovaries as opposed to none? And to think how many lunches seventeen grand would provide poverty stricken kids. Utterly nauseating.
Mis-use of public funds; using public property to convey a political message.
Why is nobody in Court?
Shouldn’t be allowed, they are red for a good reason, Safety, which is the ultimate agenda
Is there any emergency service left in the UK that hasn’t turned into a national source of cringe and shame? Will ambulances and coast guards’ boats be ‘rainbowed’ next?
And I did happen to note recently that easyJet planes have a “Proud to support Pride” logo on their planes! LOL I especially found the new bit in their safety demo about removing your face mask before you put on your oxygen mask ridiculous. I can totally see some mask junkies now as the plane starts to plummet and they have to don their oxygen mask…”Hmmm Covid or O2 deprivation, Covid or O2 deprivation..” as they wonder which to prioritise, like a scene from Airplane!
I don’t care what the tenders look like but I resent paying for free publicity for political groups. We should withdraw all public funding for all 999 services’ vehicles and let them be bought and maintained by sponsors/advertisers. The situation at the moment is that they are getting publicity from the public purse.
This has been going on for a while now, fire services also hold recruitment stalls at Pride events