Best Of

A rather depressing and free read from the Times. Interview with the head of Reed, a large recruiter, on the current market and the risks to it. Basically it’s a jobs desert at the moment, AI is decimating entry level jobs for grads jn some professions, and the so-called workers rights bill, all 197 pages of it, at the behest of the Unions will not help.

Worst job market for 40 years basically.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/james-reed-graduate-jobs-no-longer-a-given-fhnjk70hp

I graduated 40 years ago when there were over three million registered as unemployed and I couldn't even get into teacher training which was seen as the last resort (sorry, @ydoethur ).

I did my time queuing at the job centre with all the others who couldn't find work. Eventually, and much against my better judgement (but out of financial necessity), I worked in a bookies (which I had through my student holidays) for a year or so and hated it. Marking the board on odd afternoons was a bit of a laugh but as your main employment (apart from the money), it was very different and not pleasant.

As an aside, it would be much worse now given the long hours.

Working in a bookie 40 years ago would be great fun compared to today.

Today you’re basically babysitting the machines on which the lowest in society are losing their rent money, and dealing with a bunch of idiots waving their phones showing better odds then you can give them. All for minimum wage, and with a fair chance of getting robbed for the contents of the safe.

Turf accountancy is probably an extreme example, but it's probably true of most jobs. Captain Mainwaring's successor at Swallow Bank surely has less status and autonomy, even if the Walmington-on-Sea branch still exists. GPs get to do less of the Dr Finlay bit. And so on.

It's happened for a reason, and there's no point trying to undo the process. Things and services are cheaper and more abundant and more convenient, and we have mostly gained more on that side of the balance than we have lost on the other.

But there has been a cost, and I suspect it's one of the factors in left-behind populism. Perhaps we haven't used the gains from automation and tech-enabled management as wisely as we should.

For many solicitors, the direction of travel is the same. Far more time is devoted to box-ticking compliance, and serving as an amateur tax collector, than in the past.

Train stabbing latest: Two arrested after multiple people stabbed | UK News | Sky News https://share.google/MO6eqafkHIJyHOQTI

St Pancras to Peterborough, or the reverse, it looks like. Perhaps there are shorter local routes.

Happened between Stevenage and Huntingdon on the train towards Peterborough, per BBC.

Only on PB would the news of a train stabbing be followed by a discussion of the train route...

It beats most of what is below the line on the newspaper websites. Whilst a few people are expressing concern for the victims, overwhelmingly it is references to boats, immigrants and Starmer failing to keep us safe. Long before there is any indication of who the perps actually are. It rreally is a sewer.

It reminds me of the day of the Norway attacks when most people (with the notable exception of myself and SeanT) were discussing it being an islamic attack.

Yes it may well turn out this is some form of terrorist attack. But the glee with which people declare it so before there is an hint of evidence is pretty sickening.

First we lost the front room...

Now we are losing the lounge...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93063q2lzeo

I always thought they were one and the same?

* The front parlour/front room is where you do special things (eg the man who wishes to court your daughter, or you put the coffin when your mum dies)
* The lounge/living room is where you have the sofa and watch telly

Next: why the meal you have at 5pm-7pm is tea, not dinner.

Don’t you put your mum’s coffin in the chapel?

Why even bother with a coffin? Mine’s been fine in her favourite rocking chair upstairs for years.

I am quite exhausted from last night's partying, therefore tapping out of this thread.

Before I call it a night, I'd like to return to a point I made earlier about how groups with specific agendas want to present the worst of a minority, and use their behaviour to suggest that all members of that group are therefore a threat.

I said: "On the subject of trans people attacking gender critical conferences and the like, I will simply say that this is a tiny minority of very pissed off radicals, and does not reflect the views of any of trans people I know. It's akin to one Muslim being a jihadi and now every other Muslim has to put up with being called a terrorist."

I would like to add -

I think the reasons I am utterly ok with trans people is because I've spent the last decade of my life surrounded by them. They have ranged from dear, sweet, kind-hearted humans like my partner, to annoying, bitchy gossip queens I couldn't bear to be in a room with for a minute, to - and these are absolutely the minority - the radical, "activist" types who go round smashing windows and calling for "terfs" to be "murdered". As I say, these represent a tiny minority of the community I've met. Less than 1%.

And it occurs to me that, the more you get to know people, the less you fear them.

I, for example, have a bit of a fear of radical Islam. Mainly because I have no Muslim friends, and I've spent the last decade convinced that they all think that people like my partner and I should be thrown off a rooftop for being in a queer relationship. If, on the other hand, I had a devout Muslim neighbour called Abdul who invited me and the Mrs over for tea (supper!) once a week my view might be very different.

My point is that once you get to know people, you stop seeing them as a bloc. The real extremists are the ones who want to pick the very worst examples from a community they hate, and use those examples to make people fear the entire community. This is undoubtedly the gender critical / "terf" agenda and it doesn't match my lived experience of trans people at all.

How much can be said for other communities, of which we on PB know very little?

PB often debates blocs - transes, Muslims, etc, as blocs of which most of us have little real world experience. Bad eggs exist in all communities, but if we got to know our neighbours a little better, perhaps we'd realise we're all just human beings just trying to live our lives as best as we can.

Near the end of his life, Aldous Huxley said he was embarrassed that, after a lifetime trying to understand the human condition, all he could suggest was that we should "try to be a little kinder" to one another.

Perhaps this is good advice for us all.

The points I make apply equally to gays and lesbians, particularly the latter, because the SC judgment clarified - to the extent this ever needed clarifying - that sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates. It said clearly in paragraph 206 that the concept of sexual orientation towards members of a particular sex would be rendered meaningless otherwise.

It is typical of TERF rhetoric to make expansive claims based on legal judgements that are, in reality, much more narrowly drawn.

The Supreme Court judgement is indeed very clear & they repeat the same point a number of times: their judgement applies to the interpretation of terms within the Equality Act for the purposes of the legal interpretation of that Act alone. Para 2 of the judgement states explicitly:

“It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.”

The SC has not, in fact, stated that sexual orientation is “based on sex, not certificates”: Cyclefree might very much wish that she could extend their judgement to the entirety of public life in this way, but the SC itself refutes her attempts to do so. The elision between these ideas in the work of someone who sets such pride in their precise legal judgement seems rather telling - Cyclefree writes about what she wants to be true rather than what is true. kyf_100’s comment that “she is a talented writer who has the ability to present *opinion* dressed up in the language of fact” seems to be to be (sadly) accurate.

You are being disingenuous. The SC ruling does indeed clarify that the Equalities Act 2010 reference to women refers only to biological women. Everything else that Cyclefree is writing about stems explicitely from that definition. She is being completely accurate in her claims and it is you who are trying to twist what she has said to make it seem as if she is misrepresenting the SC ruling. Not surprising given you start your fatuous post with an insult.

Cyclefree’s writing clearly extends the SC judgement outside it’s remit. If you can’t see that then I don’t know what to say: it seems clear enough to me. There is no caveat in the paragraph I quoted about “sexual orientation is based on sex not certificates” that points out that this only applies within the interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is there?

I refer the honourable gentlemen, again, to the Supreme Court judgement: https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0042_judgment_updated_16f5d72e76.pdf

Para 2:

2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain
on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman”
other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role
which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses
on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in
legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination.
Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the
EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”).
Cyclefree may (and probably does, I imagine!) wish that the SC judgement defines these terms for the purposes of public debate & for the interpretation of UK law more generally. The SC disagrees with her however.

Indeed. If there is a point to be taken from my ramblings this afternoon, it is that the SC judgement *allows* discrimination on the basis of birth sex, but does not *mandate* it.

So for example, a women's refuge is *allowed* to exclude trans women. But not forced to. The EHCR guidance, which they hope to make law, would *mandate* it.

This is, as I have linked to in the 100 page FOI dump of correspondence between the EHCR and Sex Matters, demonstrates regulatory capture and ideological sectional interests attempting to wilfully misinterpret the supreme court judgement to push a much more exclusionary agenda that would in effect push trans people out of public spaces altogether.

And the reason why the government is trying to kick this into the long grass is because they will have taken legal advice that this is not compatible with human rights law (See Michael O'Flaherty's unequivocal letter to the UK government on this matter), and don't want a culture war imbroglio on their hands.

I am of the opinion that individual institutions should be allowed to choose. Permission to discriminate does not equal a legal mandate to do so.

In response to @gallowgate and @kyf_100

I don't need to speak for all women. The law is clear as is biology. Whatever people may choose to believe (see @kyf_100) no-one can change sex as a matter of fact. They can modify their body to what they would like to be & if that makes them (& those around them who care for them) happy, good luck to them. But it does not make them a member of the opposite sex - either in biology or in law.

Given that, the question to be addressed is how to deal with those people who are dysphoric. This is partly a matter of the appropriate care & how the law should deal with them. On the latter, the law has made gender reassignment a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, giving such people the same rights as other groups & allowed recognition of their position with the GRA. But neither the GRA nor the Equality Act ever gave - or were intended to give - such people the right to remove rights belonging to another group. And that is the point. Unisex facilities provide all the facilities necessary. Laws against discrimination do the same.

But what is being demanded is that women lose what they also need. What I find very odd & troubling is how so many men who claim - often loudly, aggressively & virulently - how they are women, demonstrate so little, zero, in fact, empathy for actual women & no understanding of why women might worry about having a large bloke watching them getting undressed. In fact the behaviour of so many of these is very very male - aggressively so.

I will leave you with this example. Hampstead & Highgate Ponds have 3 ponds: one for men only, one for women only & one for both men and women - unisex or, if you prefer, inclusive. Everyone - whatever sex or gender they were could get what they wanted. But no: the trans-identified men insisted on going into the women only pond so that there were now 3 ponds where men could swim but no pond where only women could go. Women lost out. Women were excluded. There was no need for this. It is hard to see this as anything other than a determination to take away what women want & need rather than a claim for something that trans people needed - because they already had that.

Trans people have not lost anything they were entitled to. They have lost what people told them wrongly they could have. They have all the rights that everyone else has. Losing something you are not entitled to is not oppression, no matter how much those who had a financial & other interest in lying about the law scream & shout about it.

All of this could have been avoided if (a) activists had concentrated on improving facilities & necessary care & (b) they had been much more rigorous & scrupulous in not inviting in all sorts of creeps, perverts & sexual offenders to shelter under the "trans" umbrella. It has done dysphoric people no good at all. I feel sorry for the latter group. But I have zero time for the former & those enabling them.