Equality Commission being starved into surrender

Just when you thought the economy could not get any worse, that the duplicity exposed by Lord Chief Justice Leveson had already caused record levels of sewage to back-up in the rose gardens of Downing Street, and that the corruption in workfare programmes had required ever more grotesque dissembling by government ministers to pretend that they and not their grubby, greedy business friends were in control of things, the awesome power of government to gag any organised or formal dissent can be revealed.

Some of you will be aware that my passion in life is equality and human rights.  Not the theory, not the policy, and not the law, but the practical reality of how all of these combine [or more often, don't combine] to stop the daily discrimination hundreds of thousands of people encounter in this country - just because they are different.
The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] is a relatively recent creation of the previous Labour government and was given a lead role in guiding, empowering, persuading and if necessary enforcing the changes necessary to eliminate that discrimination.
Sadly, the current Westminster government has come to the view that the EHRC and its work  is nothing but a mass of red tape which holds back business growth and so is bad for the economy.  From that voodoo-style analysis, government has butchered EHRC funding by over 30% this year and more blood to be spilt in the years ahead.
When I was checking this week on the progress the EHRC was making with Codes of Practice on various elements of the Equality Act 2010, I found their web site offering this chilling posting:

Our intention was to produce a statutory code for the public sector duties in Scotland and codes for the Further and Higher Education (FEHE) sector and schools in Scotland.  Unfortunately, we are no longer able to proceed with this plan.  The Westminster Government is keen to reduce bureaucracy around the Equality Act 2010, and feels that statutory codes may place too much of a burden on public bodies.  Although the Commission has powers to issue codes, it cannot do so without the approval of the Secretary of State, as we are reliant upon the Westminster Government to lay codes before parliament, in order for them to be statutory.It is the Commission’s view that, rather than creating a regulatory burden, statutory codes have a valuable role to play in making clearer to everyone what is and is not needed in order to comply with the public sector duties.  However, as this is no longer an option, we feel the best solution is to issue our draft code as a non statutory code instead.  This non statutory code will still give a formal, authoritative, and comprehensive legal interpretation of the PSED and will make it clear to everyone what the requirements of the legislation are. The draft Scotland PSED non statutory code will be published in May for review and we will be looking for feedback on the draft texts so that we can make sure they fully meet the needs of public bodies and other potential users.

Government is hell-bent on ignoring laws which do not fit with their voodoo economics model, and will simply ignore [the rights of prisoners to vote in elections] international obligations or tear up domestic laws [parts of the Equality act 2010] which they see as an impediment to their unhinged lust for making yet more obscene amounts of money for their friends and family.  They are wilfully starving the EHRC of the resources needed to do its core job.  If the EHRC were a dog and the government its owner, people would be clamouring for action to stop this offence to humanity.  If our government are allowed to de-claw the EHRC in this way, it will not be long before we see the Job Centre+ signs replaced with 'Arbeit Macht Frei' and the mobile Dignitas vans doing the rounds of care homes and long-term geriatric wards in what is left of our NHS.