[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
That's why we're struggling for student accommodation despite the best housebuilding figures anywhere in Scotland. And it's not like Edinburgh is an unpopular place to live in the first place...
The locals have clocked that PBSA does nothing to reduce housing pressure, because it's just used by the Universities to increase revenues.
Prankster who used fake credentials to access pitch and line up with Aussie Rugby League team arrested for fraud. Sounds a bit of a stretch to consider that fraud, especially if we think our courts and police are already too stretched.
It's funny, no harm has been done, and the authorities can simply kick him out of the ground.
He’s mugged them all off, made them all look foolish. Of course he will be subjected to some sort of payback. The punishment is the process.
* 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.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
* 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?
The chapel of rest in the undertakers, and thence to the funeral and the ground.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Edit: and IIRC the judges commentary explicitly said that it was determining the law as it was and it was entirely within Parliament’s remit to change it if it saw fit. But Parliament is too frit to go near the topic, hence things like sitting on the draft guidance and playing for time. They don’t want to enforce the law (because they don’t agree with it and they don’t want to be seen to be against a vocal group of their supporters / potential supporters). But they don’t want to change the law because it would burn up all their remaining political capital
* 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?
The chapel of rest in the undertakers, and thence to the funeral and the ground.
I meant the chapel attached to you home. Doesn’t everyone have one?
Sir Keir’s weasel words are about to catch up with him
In the make-believe world of Labour’s promises, experienced nurses, police sergeants and deputy heads of primary schools lie around all day eating peeled grapes.
This is the trouble that politicians get into if they try to make words mean what they say they mean. The term “working people” was slippery from the start. It was meant to send a signal to the working class that Labour would stand up for them, without offending the party’s middle-class support. But it was not so much a dog whistle as a battle trumpet of the class war – and thus sounded the wrong note for a party whose voters were, at the last election, just as middle class as those of the Conservatives.
It offended pedants because it excluded retired people and those on out-of-work benefits. And it was meaningless because the actual number of people of working age who do lie around all day eating peeled grapes is quite small.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Absolutely, but they also explicitly stated that their resolution to this conflict only applied to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to the rest of UK law, which is still subject to the interpretation placed on it by the GRA.
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
* 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.
Sir Keir’s weasel words are about to catch up with him
In the make-believe world of Labour’s promises, experienced nurses, police sergeants and deputy heads of primary schools lie around all day eating peeled grapes.
This is the trouble that politicians get into if they try to make words mean what they say they mean. The term “working people” was slippery from the start. It was meant to send a signal to the working class that Labour would stand up for them, without offending the party’s middle-class support. But it was not so much a dog whistle as a battle trumpet of the class war – and thus sounded the wrong note for a party whose voters were, at the last election, just as middle class as those of the Conservatives.
It offended pedants because it excluded retired people and those on out-of-work benefits. And it was meaningless because the actual number of people of working age who do lie around all day eating peeled grapes is quite small.
Nothing wrong with advancing the interests of working people - we are a section of society after all, indeed, the but which keeps it all afloat. But that's not really what Labour meant, is it?
Arguably a party advancing the interests of working people would be looking to cut NI, at the expense of benefits paid to pensioners and the out of work, and would be looking to protect wages by opposing immigration.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Absolutely, but they also explicitly stated that their resolution to this conflict only applied to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to the rest of UK law, which is still subject to the interpretation placed on it by the GRA.
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
May be the government should publish guidance then?
* 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.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Absolutely, but they also explicitly stated that their resolution to this conflict only applied to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to the rest of UK law, which is still subject to the interpretation placed on it by the GRA.
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
May be the government should publish guidance then?
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Absolutely, but they also explicitly stated that their resolution to this conflict only applied to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to the rest of UK law, which is still subject to the interpretation placed on it by the GRA.
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
May be the government should publish guidance then?
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Alex Salmond died penniless after expensive court cases
The former Scottish first minister ran up big debts while fighting to clear his name
Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, died virtually penniless after defending his reputation in two court cases, it can be revealed.
Lawyers instructed to wind up his estate confirmed they would apply next week to have a “trustee in sequestration” appointed, a process equivalent to declaring the estate bankrupt.
Over the course of 18 months from 2018, Salmond faced two court hearings. He won a judicial review of the Scottish government’s handling of complaints against him and was then cleared of 14 charges of alleged sexual misconduct after a High Court trial.
The legal actions left the former leader of the SNP on the verge of financial ruin as he “lost almost all of his income” from directorships and speaking engagements, according to his lawyers.
At his death, in October last year, he was still pursuing a claim against the Scottish government for malfeasance — the wrongful exercise of lawful authority — which remains active.
Levy & McRae, the firm instructed by Salmond’s widow, Moira, to wind up his affairs, identified the expense of his legal defences as the primary reason for bankruptcy.
* 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.
"It's sad, when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son."
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.
The design and construction of Liverpool's Roman Catholic Cathedral. The co-operation between artists John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens and the architect and engineer is shown, and also the use of an industrial epoxy resin to bond the glass. This film was used as a BBC2 Trade Test Colour film.
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Textiles and weapons. The UK played a similar role in the Napoleonic wars to the USA in WWII. Mass production of weapons played a huge role in driving industrialisation.
That's why we're struggling for student accommodation despite the best housebuilding figures anywhere in Scotland. And it's not like Edinburgh is an unpopular place to live in the first place...
The locals have clocked that PBSA does nothing to reduce housing pressure, because it's just used by the Universities to increase revenues.
And yet they still seem to be making a loss, and still seem to be paying their Principals 100s of thousands. So many mysteries.
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.
Pace The Last Leg - Dont be a dick. You are right that often it’s extremes banging on about extremes. The issue I have is how the extremist trans women have somehow enabled a situation where a man who is trying to get his partner pregnant can still insist on changing in the womens changing room at a hospital. Or where presumably intelligent people can declare that the6 don’t know if they are a woman as they haven’t had their chromosomes tested. It’s the response of society trying to be nice to extremists that has led us into a very strange place.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
The Supreme Court judgement has not redefined sex for anything, it has clarified it but it was always the definition even before the judgement.
Interesting watching PMQs back - there was a very conscious decisions taken by Sir not only not to reaffirm the manifesto pledges on tax, but to rule out a return to 'austerity', that is apparently responsible for our lack of growth (not the sharpest knife in the draw our Sir), and 'reckless borrowing'. The implicit message here is no borrowing, no cuts, so we're in for tax rises.
As someone said on the Times podcast, it means one of two things:
1. Income tax will be put up. 2. It's an elborate ruse, so when it doesn't go up, Labour can bask in a nation's gratitude.
Labour must know that raising income tax will kill their chances of returning to office, but right now I think the battle is to survive the next election as a parliamentary party, which means being the progressive choice that most will vote for to try and defeat Reform. You can sort of see why going tax and spend makes sense. It shores up their client vote and their left flank.
I think I am 70% thinking they will do it, 30% on the clever ruse side.
That's why we're struggling for student accommodation despite the best housebuilding figures anywhere in Scotland. And it's not like Edinburgh is an unpopular place to live in the first place...
The locals have clocked that PBSA does nothing to reduce housing pressure, because it's just used by the Universities to increase revenues.
And yet they still seem to be making a loss, and still seem to be paying their Principals 100s of thousands. So many mysteries.
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Textiles and weapons. The UK played a similar role in the Napoleonic wars to the USA in WWII. Mass production of weapons played a huge role in driving industrialisation.
To an extent - go to Portsmouth to see the first mass production line, complete with some of the original machines. For making wooden blocks (pulleys) for the Royal Navy.
Arguably, the next big step in mass production (interchangeable parts) was the fallout from the Government giving Charles Babbage the price of a couple of battleships to not build a calculating machine. All the money ended up funding Clement and Whitworth…
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.
Pace The Last Leg - Dont be a dick. You are right that often it’s extremes banging on about extremes. The issue I have is how the extremist trans women have somehow enabled a situation where a man who is trying to get his partner pregnant can still insist on changing in the womens changing room at a hospital. Or where presumably intelligent people can declare that the6 don’t know if they are a woman as they haven’t had their chromosomes tested. It’s the response of society trying to be nice to extremists that has led us into a very strange place.
“Pace” is for when you disagree with a source. You want “cf.”
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Textiles and weapons. The UK played a similar role in the Napoleonic wars to the USA in WWII. Mass production of weapons played a huge role in driving industrialisation.
To an extent - go to Portsmouth to see the first mass production line, complete with some of the original machines. For making wooden blocks (pulleys) for the Royal Navy.
Arguably, the next big step in mass production (interchangeable parts) was the fallout from the Government giving Charles Babbage the price of a couple of battleships to not build a calculating machine. All the money ended up funding Clement and Whitworth…
The block line designed by Brunel sen. and implemented by Maudslay. Who trained Babbage's workers.
Edit: but wasn't the interchangeable parts stuff also imtroduced by the management at the US Arsenals, for musket/rifle production?
Alex Salmond died penniless after expensive court cases
The former Scottish first minister ran up big debts while fighting to clear his name
Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, died virtually penniless after defending his reputation in two court cases, it can be revealed.
Lawyers instructed to wind up his estate confirmed they would apply next week to have a “trustee in sequestration” appointed, a process equivalent to declaring the estate bankrupt.
Over the course of 18 months from 2018, Salmond faced two court hearings. He won a judicial review of the Scottish government’s handling of complaints against him and was then cleared of 14 charges of alleged sexual misconduct after a High Court trial.
The legal actions left the former leader of the SNP on the verge of financial ruin as he “lost almost all of his income” from directorships and speaking engagements, according to his lawyers.
At his death, in October last year, he was still pursuing a claim against the Scottish government for malfeasance — the wrongful exercise of lawful authority — which remains active.
Levy & McRae, the firm instructed by Salmond’s widow, Moira, to wind up his affairs, identified the expense of his legal defences as the primary reason for bankruptcy.
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Textiles and weapons. The UK played a similar role in the Napoleonic wars to the USA in WWII. Mass production of weapons played a huge role in driving industrialisation.
To an extent - go to Portsmouth to see the first mass production line, complete with some of the original machines. For making wooden blocks (pulleys) for the Royal Navy.
Arguably, the next big step in mass production (interchangeable parts) was the fallout from the Government giving Charles Babbage the price of a couple of battleships to not build a calculating machine. All the money ended up funding Clement and Whitworth…
The block line designed by Brunel sen. and implemented by Maudslay. Who trained Babbage's workers.
Edit: but wasn't the interchangeable parts stuff also imtroduced by the management at the US Arsenals, for musket/rifle production?
The Rest Is History made the point about Chatham and Portsmouth epitomising the Industrial Revolution applying to the Navy. A precursor to allied industrial might in WW2.
[Snip to fix blockquotes] Nothing in the EA mandates such single sex services: what the Equality Act does is say that discrimination on the basis of sex in only allowing a single sex to access a permitted single-sex space does not breach the Act.
Hence the problem, as I see it: if the requirement to offer such services is contained elsewhere in legislation, then that legislation is still affected by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The Supreme Court judgement in “For Women vs ...” is very clear that it’s definitions of terms applies strictly to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to any other legislation.
But I am not a lawyer & am happy to be corrected!
IANAL but I believe you're conflating two separate issues, whether single sex spaces are mandated, and the provision of such spaces.
Under the Equality Act, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, a single sex women's space is for women and not for biological men who hold a GRA that identifies them as women.
Yes, other laws mandate the existence of single sex spaces, but those laws operate under the Equality Act and the Supreme Court's ruling thereon.
If not mandated, then there is no requirement to provide a single sex space, but if one is provided (and where it is mandated) then the EA applies, not the GRA, as per the Supreme Court's ruling and the law of the land.
You are the one claiming that someone with a GRC is not permitted in a single-sex space under the Equality Act.
The terms of the EA permit an organisation to restrict a space to a single biological sex without infringing the Act. That’s it - that’s all they do. They don’t mandate anything.
Any mandates, if they exist, must exist elsewhere in legislation or regulation. The interpretation of those laws hasn’t changed under the Supreme Court judgement. For the majority of customarily single-sex spaces, no legal mandate exists at all. An organisation is free to nominate their spaces as “gender of choice“ instead of “biological gender” (to use the Supreme Court’s language) in this case, or to make no determination at all, but allow people to use whichever facilities they deem most appropriate.
Under the Equality Act you can either choose to have an area be unrestricted by sex, or single sex.
If its not restricted by sex, then all sexes are able to go to it. Men, women, trans, it is irrelevant.
If restricted by sex, then single-sex is defined as women.
Where is provision for "gender of choice" under the law as opposed to actual sex?
All sexes can, but whether they choose to is up to them. Historically, in most of these kind of spaces, people have generally chosen the most appropriate facilities to their situation. But nothing legally mandated that - it was just custom.
You’ve misunderstood. There are two states possible under the EA.
1) Free for anyone to use 2) Restricted by sex, defined by the SC to be biological sex
Those are the only two options. A provider is entitled to make their entire venue unisex should they so wish. But they can’t call it a “women’s only space” and allow trans women to use it.
No, I understand perfectly well. What I’m saying is that the EA simply doesn’t apply, because many of these “single-sex” spaces were never really single-sex in any legally official fashion that would have required the EA exemption in the first place.
Natal men have always been able to go into “single-sex” changing rooms and vice versa - how else could very young boys and girls get changed? Very few of these spaces were ever explicitly 100% single sex & they never relied on the EA exemptions to limit who could use them. They relied on custom & their ability to evict whomever they liked on other grounds. “Making our other customers uncomfortable” was a perfectly legal ground to boot someone from your premises in most cases...
So when the TERFs try to extend the Supreme Court EA judgement to mandating explicit single-sex use of these kind of spaces, they are attempting to break new legal ground.
The fact that organisations chose not to enforce the law doesn’t mean it wasn’t the law.
If a woman was to complain about a man taking their young daughter into a women’s bathroom (a changing room would be a little odd - in that circumstance I would have taken my daughter to the men’s changing room) then the facility could have kicked them out if they so choose. But the man wasn’t there *as of right* but because no one complained.
With the trans activist cases you have people claiming they have the *right* to be in a women’s only space. That is not the case.
Nobody is there “as of right”. That’s the point - everyone is in these spaces with the permission of the owner, who can boot out whoever they like, subject to the relevant laws.
Before trans issues became a massive culture war (on both sides) trans women just quietly used female changing rooms if they thought that was the most appropriate choice in the circumstances. They broke no law by entering those spaces, and neither did the service provider that let them do so, just as a cleaner entering an opposite gender space to do their job doesn’t break any law.
Some US states have explicitly legislated on this point once the culture war ramped up, but as far as I know no such law exists in the UK at this time. (Again, happy to corrected.)
The law, even before the ruling, already set different thresholds for single sex or unisex facilities.
You are acting as if it is all just custom and they were all always unisex, but the law already says otherwise.
A cleaner of the opposite sex going in to clean the facilities is not the same thing as someone going in to use them.
This definitely gets a "citation needed”! Where are these thresholds documented exactly?
& no, you misunderstand: I’m saying that these spaces were customarily single gender, but not explicitly legally so. They were never a free-for-all.
The Building Regulations 2010. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Either legally single sex or universal (which includes sink behind a lock).
Ah, so you’re talking workplaces - in which case sure, I agree - those have specific requirements in law. But I thought I was talking about spaces accessible to the public - pubs, swimming room changing facilities, toilet facilities in motorway service stations, that kind of thing.
NB. Even in workplaces, we still have the problem that the GRA says that someone with a GRC is the gender on that GRC. If an employer doesn’t not have the space to assign a unisex toilet for them, how do they (legally) not discriminate against them?
NB2: The The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 appear to require separate Male & Female toilets. You can’t get around the issue by only having unisex toilets, even if the Building Regulations let you build a building that way. (Surely there’s case law allowing small employers to have a single toilet though? This requirement seems impossible to them to meet...)
edit: oh wait - that only applies to changing rooms. Makes sense.
Eh?
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
What law stops someone with a GRC using a toilet marked with the gender on the GRC? The GRA 2004 states that for all applicable purposes they /are/ the gender on the GRC.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
I thought the whole point of the SC ruling was to adjudicate on a conflict between the EA and the GRA. And they ruled that the EA takes precedence.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Absolutely, but they also explicitly stated that their resolution to this conflict only applied to the interpretation of the Equality Act & not to the rest of UK law, which is still subject to the interpretation placed on it by the GRA.
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
May be the government should publish guidance then?
"Afghan who threatened to kill Farage mocks him in video filmed in prison TikTok posts showing Fayaz Khan ranting in cell are further embarrassment for justice ministry"
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.
If AI is decimating graduate jobs without replacement, sooner rather than later a UBI funded by a robot tax is inevitable. There will be too many votes in it for at least one or two of the main parties not to propose it
We need a govt with vision to look at where the future jobs are when these jobs, and jobs like driving jobs, go. We can’t all be plumbers or brickies or sparks and the loss in tax revenue will be large. A robot tax here would incentivise some businesses to move.
It’s a hard one to reconcile. But the govt needs to grasp the nettle on the changes is bringing and radically downsizing our universities would be a good start.we don’t want 50% going to uni now. Not if there are no jobs or fewer jobs for them. It would also piss off the UCU so doubly worthwhile.
Alternatively, if AI does take off to that point (and that remains an awfully big if, because it's currently only popular to the extent that people don't have to pay for it), that largely solves the "making enough stuff for everyone to have a good life" question. The question left is "what do we all do all day to give our lives meaning?" That's a much harder nut to crack, but useless university study seems as good an idea as any.
Otherwise, the risk of a nation of Prince Andrews looms.
Dark Factories or Lights-out manufacturing. In this example, 11 production lines make a new smartphone every 1-3 seconds. The manufacturing software was developed in-house and self-optimises. Looking at it with my ex-manufacturing hat on makes me feel as if the west has abandoned it's future. No wonder Trump and his supporters have concerns about China.
This is why the idea of "bringing back manufacturing jobs" is so stupid. It's not trade that has eliminated manufacturing jobs in the West, primarily, but automation. It's a process that has been playing out since the industrial revolution and it isn't going to stop. Indeed, similar dynamics are now playing out in white collar services thanks to AI. Any country that tries to build a wall against these processes is simply going to find itself getting poorer in the long run. If other countries are using unfair subsidies to compete or you want to protect your industrial base so you can defend yourself in a war then sure, put barriers up to offset that. But don't imagine it will create jobs in vast numbers, because it won't.
Utter garbage.
Textile factories have literally shut up shop and sold their heavy equipment to India where it is being happily used and the output sold back to us.
And the solution has nothing to do with 'building a wall', it has to do with ceasing the practice of stupid governments gaily increasing the cost base of businesses with taxes, regulations, carbon levies, minimum wage increases, national insurance hikes, diversity targets etc., so that the suggestion of starting or investing in a UK business is a bad joke.
So presumably you'd like to see that factory back in the UK staffed by a workforce on Indian pay rates - i.e. £100 per month? Because that is the only way the factory would compete.
And the garment factories moved because, at the time, finding meat robots to run the machines for £100 a month was the cheap solution.
As the world runs out of £100 a month meat robots, the next generation of garment machinery is being created. Which requires a very small number - might well be zero - of workers.
It’s like the raspberry picking, here. The people in the raspberry picking business are fighting it - cheap labour is how they’ve done it for decades. They know cheap labour. But the robots are already in the fields.
Hmmmmm: I'm not 100% convinced.
Textiles was one the very first industries to be mechanised, but it hasn't really changed the need for low cost labour. The machines are cheap, can be moved around, and workers can be trained quickly.
Textiles was the first step towards industrialisation for a ton of different countrie.
I guess, I'm not seeing machines that eliminate the need for low cost labour in garment manufacturing yet. And, by the way, we should celebtrate that, because textile manufacturing was the first step that dragged hundreds of millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, and helped build modern economies.
It was the first step that dragged millions in Britain out of poverty, and before all those.
Textiles and weapons. The UK played a similar role in the Napoleonic wars to the USA in WWII. Mass production of weapons played a huge role in driving industrialisation.
To an extent - go to Portsmouth to see the first mass production line, complete with some of the original machines. For making wooden blocks (pulleys) for the Royal Navy.
Arguably, the next big step in mass production (interchangeable parts) was the fallout from the Government giving Charles Babbage the price of a couple of battleships to not build a calculating machine. All the money ended up funding Clement and Whitworth…
The block line designed by Brunel sen. and implemented by Maudslay. Who trained Babbage's workers.
Edit: but wasn't the interchangeable parts stuff also imtroduced by the management at the US Arsenals, for musket/rifle production?
They expanded on Clement and Whitworth’s work.
Standardised, interchangeable screws, nuts and bolts were the first thing in that line.
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The first delayed train on the northbound side looks like it might be the Grand Central that departed King's Cross at 1957 for Bradford Interchange (and various stops on the way)
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.
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The first delayed train on the northbound side looks like it might be the Grand Central that departed King's Cross at 1957 for Bradford Interchange (and various stops on the way)
X front page reporting a Newcastle -> KGX train that made an emergency stop at Huntingdon at 1939.
...I must admit, I travelled ECML last weekend and I think there are bus replacements on that route, so origin Newcastle seems unlikely.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Due to my lack of faith in Northern Trains, I opted for the X43 bus from Burnley to Manchester then Avanti to Euston. A lot of Arsenal fans who went via Leeds are currently stuck at Retford.
Due to my lack of faith in Northern Trains, I opted for the X43 bus from Burnley to Manchester then Avanti to Euston. A lot of Arsenal fans who went via Leeds are currently stuck at Retford.
Woindering how many rugger buggers have got stuck on the way back from Edinburgh (Scotland vs USA).
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
Gets still worse. It says 'like Cambridge and Peterborough' as if the areas were similar but did not include them. 'Such as' is the correct term.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
Thank God we have the BBC to inform us and educate us. Worth every penny.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The first delayed train on the northbound side looks like it might be the Grand Central that departed King's Cross at 1957 for Bradford Interchange (and various stops on the way)
X front page reporting a Newcastle -> KGX train that made an emergency stop at Huntingdon at 1939.
...I must admit, I travelled ECML last weekend and I think there are bus replacements on that route, so origin Newcastle seems unlikely.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
There aren't many trains whose "final destination" is Huntington [sic].
I turned on BBC News during a major news event, and they were talking about Heidi Klum's Halloween party. We used to be a proper country.
We are a proper country. We just don’t have a proper national broadcaster.
Sky News are at least making an attempt to get someone on the scene now.
The merger of BBC News and BBC World has led directly to a massive decline in the output of the BBC News channel.
The BBC find trouble in getting to Cambridgeshire due to funding issues?
Out of office hours and an event that's not in the diary... expensive to cover.
(It's not that long ago that the Friday evening edition of Look In The Region You're In Today, Tonight would pretty much have been the end of matters until Monday, with just a sports roundup and some weather to fill the gap. The main reason that the BBC looks and sounds cheap these days is because it is.)
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The Peterborough trains operated by Thameslink normally go via St Pancras and Farringdon towards Blackfriars and London Bridge or Elephant & Castle
But this is a LNER train.
It looks like tlg has it - a Doncaster-> London LNER (bus replacements operating from Northallerton-Doncaster again this weekend - I drove up to Darlington to head northbound last weekend).
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The Peterborough trains operated by Thameslink normally go via St Pancras and Farringdon towards Blackfriars and London Bridge or Elephant & Castle
But this is a LNER train.
It looks like tlg has it - a Doncaster-> London LNER (bus replacements operating from Northallerton-Doncaster again this weekend - I drove up to Darlington to head northbound last weekend).
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The Peterborough trains operated by Thameslink normally go via St Pancras and Farringdon towards Blackfriars and London Bridge or Elephant & Castle
But this is a LNER train.
It looks like tlg has it - a Doncaster-> London LNER (bus replacements operating from Northallerton-Doncaster again this weekend - I drove up to Darlington to head northbound last weekend).
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 discussin 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.
Was that really the case on PB ? Certainly there are some who are quick to assume, but it's really not my impression that's the majority.
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...
Sunil would tell us it wasn't from St Pancras but from King's X.
The Peterborough trains operated by Thameslink normally go via St Pancras and Farringdon towards Blackfriars and London Bridge or Elephant & Castle
But this is a LNER train.
It looks like tlg has it - a Doncaster-> London LNER (bus replacements operating from Northallerton-Doncaster again this weekend - I drove up to Darlington to head northbound last weekend).
Donny to Darlo bus replacements this weekend.
Yes, I think some of the point to point bus replacements are running directly from Darlington, but also some from Northallerton which is the point of closure and where a lot of LNER, XC and TPX are terminating.
I turned on BBC News during a major news event, and they were talking about Heidi Klum's Halloween party. We used to be a proper country.
We are a proper country. We just don’t have a proper national broadcaster.
Sky News are at least making an attempt to get someone on the scene now.
The merger of BBC News and BBC World has led directly to a massive decline in the output of the BBC News channel.
The BBC find trouble in getting to Cambridgeshire due to funding issues?
Out of office hours and an event that's not in the diary... expensive to cover.
(It's not that long ago that the Friday evening edition of Look In The Region You're In Today, Tonight would pretty much have been the end of matters until Monday, with just a sports roundup and some weather to fill the gap. The main reason that the BBC looks and sounds cheap these days is because it is.)
I know plenty of people who have to get to Cambridgeshire from London out of office hours. Especially after office hours. A couple of Jornos whacked in an Uber would be what - £200. Hardly a stretch for our esteemed national broadcaster.
They could put it on the Strictly tab. Considering that’s all they seem to do these days.
Very off topic, but was at birthday party for someone in my son's school this morning - has only been in England for 6 months having previously been in Belgrade having escaped Russia after the war started.
Ordinary, nice friendly family. But what struck me most is they are relatively young parents - I'd guess still in their 20s with a 6 year-old. Which means in a parallel universe where they didn't flee Russia, the dad might have been forced to fight in Ukraine by now on the wrong side.
So very well done to them for making the right decision for their family. And the more we can do to encourage Russians to make similar decisions the better.
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 discussin 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.
Was that really the case on PB ? Certainly there are some who are quick to assume, but it's really not my impression that's the majority.
Sadly yes. Oh there were plenty of people who said nothing - which was probably the wisest move as a story is breaking. But there were plenty more assuming it a some form of islamic attack and happy to argue when we pointed out why that was extremely unlikely.
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
How many people could distinguish between Caithness and Sutherland? That map is genuinely useful to me; I know very little of England south of York.
(Don't worry, I intend to fix that via bicycle over the next few years).
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
It's lucky they show us where HuntingTon is in relation to Glasgow
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.
Sadly, my first thought given the location was "gypsy fight", rather than Islamic terrorism. You can judge me for that if you like.
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
Absolutely brilliant. Never forget - thiese are the people in charge of informing us if ever the balloon goes up.
When I posted it, I hadn't even noticed "takes in areas like Cambridge".
AI generated? Surely no human would write that.
It's been copying the wrong human examples. They exist. believe me (I've had to correct a coauthor on this issue).
Appreciate it's early but curious that we don't have a good idea of what has happened here - social media accounts and phone videos would typically show up by now.
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 discussin 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.
Was that really the case on PB ? Certainly there are some who are quick to assume, but it's really not my impression that's the majority.
Sadly yes. Oh there were plenty of people who said nothing - which was probably the wisest move as a story is breaking. But there were plenty more assuming it a some form of islamic attack and happy to argue when we pointed out why that was extremely unlikely.
Appreciate it's early but curious that we don't have a good idea of what has happened here - social media accounts and phone videos would typically show up by now.
Train = isolated capsule. Maybe very few people in the carriage in question? Not sure how busy it would be, today, esp. with the rugger types not yet percolated down that far. So not something into which one can read too much.
Appreciate it's early but curious that we don't have a good idea of what has happened here - social media accounts and phone videos would typically show up by now.
Train = isolated capsule. Maybe very few people in the carriage in question? Not sure how busy it would be, today, esp. with the rugger types not yet percolated down that far. So not something into which one can read too much.
Confined space, nowhere to go, essentially no security and not able to get any on until you get to a station. Potentially fairly grim scenario for those involved.
We seem to have a BBC headlines show from Washington describing what's going on. What the hell has happened to BBC news 24?
Does this mean we are now the 51 st state?
It merged with BBC World News some time ago, and the powers that be decided we didn't need to know what was going on in our own country all of the time. They also got rid of loads of experienced journalists and decent programming, just to be on the safe side.
“ Inadvertent mistake” mark 2. Another estate agent, Knight Frank, has told the Mail on Sunday that it too told Rachel Reeves she would need a licence to rent out their home in Dulwich.
She went on to use another agent, Harvey & Wheeler, and later wrote to Starmer saying she hadn’t been aware a licence was needed.
That turned out to be untrue as there were extensive emails between the agent and Mr Reeves. How many agents needed to tell her and how many times did she ignore them? Were the Reeves trying to avoid the £900+ licence fee or as a politician does lying just come to easily?
Comments
I didn't say the Workplace bit, i said the bit "The Building Regulations 2010" which applies to all buildings other than dwellings and limited exemptions with their own regulations such as schools.
As for your NB, if someone has a GRA they can either use the unisex facility or their birth facility. Preferably a unisex one.
I believe unisex facilities do get around the workplace regulations, so long as the unisex requirements are met (ie each facility is universal with its own lockable sink). IANAL though.
2012-13: 32,000 students
2024-25: 45,000 students
That's why we're struggling for student accommodation despite the best housebuilding figures anywhere in Scotland. And it's not like Edinburgh is an unpopular place to live in the first place...
The locals have clocked that PBSA does nothing to reduce housing pressure, because it's just used by the Universities to increase revenues.
You might want them to use unisex facilities, but I can’t see how they are required to do so under current law? These facilities would remain single-sex for the purposes of the Building Regulations & Employment Acts, since the trans user must be counted as the gender on their GRC for the purposes of those Acts - the Supreme Court judgement has not redefined single-sex for the purposes of the Employment Act, nor in the Building Regulations.
It’s a mess.
So, effectively, that means that any “rights” granted by the GRA which are in conflict with the EA are null. Therefore someone with a GRC is not defined as a woman for the purpose of using sex-defined facilities.
Edit: and IIRC the judges commentary explicitly said that it was determining the law as it was and it was entirely within Parliament’s remit to change it if it saw fit. But Parliament is too frit to go near the topic, hence things like sitting on the draft guidance and playing for time. They don’t want to enforce the law (because they don’t agree with it and they don’t want to be seen to be against a vocal group of their supporters / potential supporters). But they don’t want to change the law because it would burn up all their remaining political capital
In the make-believe world of Labour’s promises, experienced nurses, police sergeants and deputy heads of primary schools lie around all day eating peeled grapes.
This is the trouble that politicians get into if they try to make words mean what they say they mean. The term “working people” was slippery from the start. It was meant to send a signal to the working class that Labour would stand up for them, without offending the party’s middle-class support. But it was not so much a dog whistle as a battle trumpet of the class war – and thus sounded the wrong note for a party whose voters were, at the last election, just as middle class as those of the Conservatives.
It offended pedants because it excluded retired people and those on out-of-work benefits. And it was meaningless because the actual number of people of working age who do lie around all day eating peeled grapes is quite small.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/keir-starmer-tax-manifesto-working-people-b2856645.html
Where trans rights relied on the Equality Act for their effect, that effect has been voided. Otherwise the GRA still applies.
(This is my current understanding of the legal situation.)
Arguably a party advancing the interests of working people would be looking to cut NI, at the expense of benefits paid to pensioners and the out of work, and would be looking to protect wages by opposing immigration.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vMiEFyTuuh8&list=RDvMiEFyTuuh8&start_radio=1&pp=ygUuQ291bnRyeSBrdXNpYyBzb25nIGRlYWQgcGVyc29uIGFnYWluc3QganVrZWJveKAHAQ==
Alex Salmond died penniless after expensive court cases
The former Scottish first minister ran up big debts while fighting to clear his name
Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, died virtually penniless after defending his reputation in two court cases, it can be revealed.
Lawyers instructed to wind up his estate confirmed they would apply next week to have a “trustee in sequestration” appointed, a process equivalent to declaring the estate bankrupt.
Over the course of 18 months from 2018, Salmond faced two court hearings. He won a judicial review of the Scottish government’s handling of complaints against him and was then cleared of 14 charges of alleged sexual misconduct after a High Court trial.
The legal actions left the former leader of the SNP on the verge of financial ruin as he “lost almost all of his income” from directorships and speaking engagements, according to his lawyers.
At his death, in October last year, he was still pursuing a claim against the Scottish government for malfeasance — the wrongful exercise of lawful authority — which remains active.
Levy & McRae, the firm instructed by Salmond’s widow, Moira, to wind up his affairs, identified the expense of his legal defences as the primary reason for bankruptcy.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/alex-salmond-death-lawsuits-n7nqw7wr3?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1762028947
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6lwY55Mts
Crown of Glass (1967)
The design and construction of Liverpool's Roman Catholic Cathedral. The co-operation between artists John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens and the architect and engineer is shown, and also the use of an industrial epoxy resin to bond the glass. This film was used as a BBC2 Trade Test Colour film.
Those who thought it was otherwise, were wrong.
That's the point of the judgement.
As someone said on the Times podcast, it means one of two things:
1. Income tax will be put up.
2. It's an elborate ruse, so when it doesn't go up, Labour can bask in a nation's gratitude.
Labour must know that raising income tax will kill their chances of returning to office, but right now I think the battle is to survive the next election as a parliamentary party, which means being the progressive choice that most will vote for to try and defeat Reform. You can sort of see why going tax and spend makes sense. It shores up their client vote and their left flank.
I think I am 70% thinking they will do it, 30% on the clever ruse side.
How many eggs would you like at 7 cents each?
Families living in highest-band properties face paying up to £10,000 a year
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/01/rachel-reeves-council-tax-bands-property-wealth-raid/
Arguably, the next big step in mass production (interchangeable parts) was the fallout from the Government giving Charles Babbage the price of a couple of battleships to not build a calculating machine. All the money ended up funding Clement and Whitworth…
Edit: but wasn't the interchangeable parts stuff also imtroduced by the management at the US Arsenals, for musket/rifle production?
TikTok posts showing Fayaz Khan ranting in cell are further embarrassment for justice ministry"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/01/afghan-threat-kill-farage-mocking-tiktok-filmed-prison
Arsenal have lost only 6 more home league games in their new stadium than Spurs have in theirs
Arsenal moved in 2006 and Spurs moved in 2019 😂
https://x.com/afc_richard/status/1984710991297351766?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Standardised, interchangeable screws, nuts and bolts were the first thing in that line.
I could happily spend the rest of my life on the East Coast Mainline (particularly from York to Scotland onwards.)
We used to be a proper country.
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.
Quite a few times I've caught the LNER service from Doncaster rather than Sheffield on EMR.
The merger of BBC News and BBC World has led directly to a massive decline in the output of the BBC News channel.
...I must admit, I travelled ECML last weekend and I think there are bus replacements on that route, so origin Newcastle seems unlikely.
Still trying to work out...
Meanwhile, BBC doing some much-needed public education on their live feed:
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1984743058856869942
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:P00149/2025-11-01/detailed#allox_id=0
Due to my lack of faith in Northern Trains, I opted for the X43 bus from Burnley to Manchester then Avanti to Euston. A lot of Arsenal fans who went via Leeds are currently stuck at Retford.
They never find trouble in getting to Glastonbury.
Obama
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1984707342055981214
(It's not that long ago that the Friday evening edition of Look In The Region You're In Today, Tonight would pretty much have been the end of matters until Monday, with just a sports roundup and some weather to fill the gap. The main reason that the BBC looks and sounds cheap these days is because it is.)
Certainly there are some who are quick to assume, but it's really not my impression that's the majority.
They could put it on the Strictly tab. Considering that’s all they seem to do these days.
Ordinary, nice friendly family. But what struck me most is they are relatively young parents - I'd guess still in their 20s with a 6 year-old. Which means in a parallel universe where they didn't flee Russia, the dad might have been forced to fight in Ukraine by now on the wrong side.
So very well done to them for making the right decision for their family. And the more we can do to encourage Russians to make similar decisions the better.
Europe must do the same.
Honda just released the footage of this rocket test — successful launch and landing!..
https://x.com/pronounced_kyle/status/1984629485841617103
(Don't worry, I intend to fix that via bicycle over the next few years).
Does this mean we are now the 51 st state?
@kelvmackenzie
“ Inadvertent mistake” mark 2. Another estate agent, Knight Frank, has told the Mail on Sunday that it too told Rachel Reeves she would need a licence to rent out their home in Dulwich.
She went on to use another agent, Harvey & Wheeler, and later wrote to Starmer saying she hadn’t been aware a licence was needed.
That turned out to be untrue as there were extensive emails between the agent and Mr Reeves.
How many agents needed to tell her and how many times did she ignore them?
Were the Reeves trying to avoid the £900+ licence fee or as a politician does lying just come to easily?
https://x.com/kelvmackenzie/status/1984750353787629655