On topic. By-elections are characterised by negative campaigning. It is harder to "go negative" on a female candidate without looking like a dick. We are not yet in a post-feminist world where "gallantry" is not a thing.
Interesting idea but this particular by election seems to have been peculiarly nasty with references to the winning candidate's sexuality, for example. The various leaflets without a clear author and the aggression shown in the streets were also quite exceptional.
The other unusual, but very pleasing feature, was how Kim Leadbeater and her team and Ryan Stephenson and his team praised each other for the professional manner in the way they had interacted with each other
FPT: Sean_F said: ’WRT White Working Class constituencies, if one wants to know why the Conservatives have gained strongly in some and not others, I think much of the answer lies in coal-mining, and its subsequent demise…
‘…My view is that these places were actually pretty right wing in outlook for decades, but the voters' economic interests, based on mining, inclined them strongly to Labour. Once mining went, and as over time, people either bought their own homes, and plenty of new houses were built, that historic loyalty to Labour went with it.
‘In demographically similar constituencies where coal-mining was not of much importance, or where there were always other signficant sources of employment, one does not see the same shift in allegiances.’
You could write a dissertation about this subject. Having been born and raised in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, surrounded by (ex-)mining communities and (ex-)miners, here’s my brief take…
You make a good point that these places have always been small-c conservative. Very socially conservative. But the strong trade union movement led people to vote Labour - as you say it suited their economic interests.
There are many factors why that knee jerk Labour support is eroding but if I were to try and sum it up quickly I would say it boils down to demographics. These communities are chock full of old people. If you go into Pontefract it is full of pensioners. It feels like a sleepy town. These pensioners were raised on a diet of war films and the Empire. I have heard more than one person say ‘We should never have got rid of the Empire’.
You go into Leeds and it is full of young people. I’m only in my 40s and walking around Leeds I think to myself ‘Christ, everyone’s young!’ Leeds feels like the future.
Young people from round here, if they have the means or opportunity to, generally move away as soon as they can. I certainly did. I came back in my late 20s for what I intended to be for a few months, but then life happened and I ended up staying. I don’t mind, I went to uni, broadened my outlook, got educated, had my 20s in more exciting places. Once you want a quieter life, this is a nice place to live.
But most of those who leave don’t come back.
So we have aging, socially conservative populations in these places who don’t like change, don’t like foreigners, want everything to stay the same. The more liberal, progressive types generally move elsewhere.
Now they’re chucking up houses round here. We will be a dormitory town for Leeds. How that plays out in terms of voting will be interesting to watch. Will it bring more young, liberal types who simply can’t afford to live in Leeds who will be centrist or left-leaning? Or will, by the very act of buying a house, they become more inclined to vote Tory as they get older and move out of the city?
One extra note - of course miners were very well paid, and could all afford their houses, which is potentially a Tory time bomb.
Really interesting discussion. Social liberalism seems to stick into older age - people of my generation (born in the 50s) are generally very relaxed about sexual issues, in a way that my parents' generation often weren't. But political preference usually doesn't stick, in Britain. I find it baffling - I'm if anything further left than 20 years ago - and I don't think it's purely house ownership that does it, perhaps more a sense that social upheaval has costs and they have established jobs and families which makes those costs look alarming.
We have two factors which overwhelmingly determine political preference - age and educational level. Income level seems to have become irrelevant.
Six hundred and fifty MPs. How many people do you think are (or statistically would expect to be) non-binary? And do you mean that biologically (genetically), or people who are identifying that way?
Around 0.3% of the population identify as non-binary in population surveys, by self definition.
I wonder how many of that actually are, or just don't understand the question or are taking the piss or something? When you get very low numbers like that, even a small percentage of such people can affect the results significantly.
I think it is also non-binary for people to identify as non-binary, as frequently they will also identify as other gender labels.
Most surveys do come out with a figure of around 0.2-0.4% though. We may get some useful data from the recent census.
While there may be some genetic or other physical reason to be non-binary, that doesn't really fit with the epidemiology. We see rates much higher in the young, in some metropolitan areas, etc. This would suggest that sociological acceptance is a bigger factor than physical factors.
FPT: Sean_F said: ’WRT White Working Class constituencies, if one wants to know why the Conservatives have gained strongly in some and not others, I think much of the answer lies in coal-mining, and its subsequent demise…
‘…My view is that these places were actually pretty right wing in outlook for decades, but the voters' economic interests, based on mining, inclined them strongly to Labour. Once mining went, and as over time, people either bought their own homes, and plenty of new houses were built, that historic loyalty to Labour went with it.
‘In demographically similar constituencies where coal-mining was not of much importance, or where there were always other signficant sources of employment, one does not see the same shift in allegiances.’
You could write a dissertation about this subject. Having been born and raised in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, surrounded by (ex-)mining communities and (ex-)miners, here’s my brief take…
You make a good point that these places have always been small-c conservative. Very socially conservative. But the strong trade union movement led people to vote Labour - as you say it suited their economic interests.
There are many factors why that knee jerk Labour support is eroding but if I were to try and sum it up quickly I would say it boils down to demographics. These communities are chock full of old people. If you go into Pontefract it is full of pensioners. It feels like a sleepy town. These pensioners were raised on a diet of war films and the Empire. I have heard more than one person say ‘We should never have got rid of the Empire’.
You go into Leeds and it is full of young people. I’m only in my 40s and walking around Leeds I think to myself ‘Christ, everyone’s young!’ Leeds feels like the future.
Young people from round here, if they have the means or opportunity to, generally move away as soon as they can. I certainly did. I came back in my late 20s for what I intended to be for a few months, but then life happened and I ended up staying. I don’t mind, I went to uni, broadened my outlook, got educated, had my 20s in more exciting places. Once you want a quieter life, this is a nice place to live.
But most of those who leave don’t come back.
So we have aging, socially conservative populations in these places who don’t like change, don’t like foreigners, want everything to stay the same. The more liberal, progressive types generally move elsewhere.
Now they’re chucking up houses round here. We will be a dormitory town for Leeds. How that plays out in terms of voting will be interesting to watch. Will it bring more young, liberal types who simply can’t afford to live in Leeds who will be centrist or left-leaning? Or will, by the very act of buying a house, they become more inclined to vote Tory as they get older and move out of the city?
One extra note - of course miners were very well paid, and could all afford their houses, which is potentially a Tory time bomb.
Really interesting discussion. Social liberalism seems to stick into older age - people of my generation (born in the 50s) are generally very relaxed about sexual issues, in a way that my parents' generation often weren't. But political preference usually doesn't stick, in Britain. I find it baffling - I'm if anything further left than 20 years ago - and I don't think it's purely house ownership that does it, perhaps more a sense that social upheaval has costs and they have established jobs and families which makes those costs look alarming.
We have two factors which overwhelmingly determine political preference - age and educational level. Income level seems to have become irrelevant.
Becoming a parent is known to change political attitudes. It tends to move radicals towards the centre, from both wings. And I believe the gender of your child has a further, observable difference, within that. eg parents of daughters become more ‘right wing’ about crime
On topic. By-elections are characterised by negative campaigning. It is harder to "go negative" on a female candidate without looking like a dick. We are not yet in a post-feminist world where "gallantry" is not a thing.
Interesting idea but this particular by election seems to have been peculiarly nasty with references to the winning candidate's sexuality, for example. The various leaflets without a clear author and the aggression shown in the streets were also quite exceptional.
The other unusual, but very pleasing feature, was how Kim Leadbeater and her team and Ryan Stephenson and his team praised each other for the professional manner in the way they had interacted with each other
A rare and welcome development
That’s easy to do when there’s a pantomime villain to point at though
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Important point, that.
When one thing arises, everybody checks everything and all the issues get flushed out at once.
I think "found in my favour" is the wrong terminology. AIUI the Council have no power to make such a finding - only to decide their opinions and how their process should operate.
He should have taken his advice from a solicitor or MRICS.
Well they agreed that I had filled out the correct ownership certificate, meaning that on the evidence before them he doesn't have any interest in the land. But you are right that this is not a binding finding over the issue. That would need to be determined in a court.
What was interesting is the fact that the land registry plan is not really absolute in relation to boundaries, there is also a procedure of changing title plans if they are incorrectly drawn based on earlier information. So this type of problem can really happen to anyone - I've come to the view that freehold land isn't really what it seems.
A friend of mine had an amusing fight over land a few years ago. Usually the Crown owns the foreshore (I think) as a matter of right, except for a chunk of North Somerset which was granted to my friend’s ancestors a while back.
The government tried to claim it but it was proved in court they didn’t. But they then stated in the recitals of some act of parliament that they owned this specific piece of foreshore… that had to go pretty far up the chain to sort out
These feudal irregularities should be killed off.
The Crown should seize your friend’s foreshore by compulsory purchase.
Why? Why should the state seize private property?
In the national interest to prevent it being sold to a russian oligarch.
These guys were French oligarchs whose family moved here a while back
eek emoji
Nearly 1000 years ago…
Bloody foreigners.
The Irish still see my family like that
What, all of the Irish? What did you all do to the poor buggers?!
The ones that knew us quite liked us, but others stereotyped us as English
We left when the IRA set fire to the house when my grandmother (a toddler) was in there and tried to prevent her father from rescuing her.
On Monday, Galloway, the divisive candidate and pro-Palestine campaigner who won more than 8,000 votes in the West Yorkshire constituency, suggested he would stand in Leicester East should there be a byelection there after the trial of Claudia Webbe, the Labour MP turned independent who is facing a harassment charge.
Meanwhile Apsana Begum, the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse in east London, faces trial in July on housing fraud charges, which could trigger a byelection if she is found guilty. Census data indicates it had a Muslim population of 33.6% in 2011.
I suspect we haven’t seen the last of George Galloway.
Certainly Webbe is a dead loss locally, and will be deselected if not booted out by the courts. She has made no effort at all to reverse her unpopularity locally. For all his faults Keith Vaz knew how to cultivate local popularity.
There are numbers of Palestinian flags on cars and houses in the constituency, but East Leicester is not Bradford or Bow. The Asian community is more mixed, being Muslim, Sikh and Hindu, and the Muslim part being mostly Gujerati and Somali, so different issues apply.
In B&S, I thought the local Asian community was half and half Pakistani and Indian. Roughly 10% of each.
One question is are those Indians Indian Muslim or other religions.
Data (admittedly based on the 2011 census, but probably still broadly accurate) published by the House of Commons library indicates that the populace of Batley & Spen is 20.2% Asian by ethnicity, and 18.8% Muslim by religion.
Worth noting that India is one of the largest Muslim countries on the planet, with around 200 million, so many in B and S could be Indian Muslims.
Yes - the former MP whose comments I quoted yesterday (who said that the extremist attacks on Kim had helped her win back older Muslim voters) is from that background. The Pakistani-British community is also not homogenous. I noticed the Mail interviewing an Ahmadiyya spokesman in B&S as representing Muslim views, when (regrettably IMO) many Muslims just think of them as not really Muslim at all. Nobody (including my party) does ethnic minorities (or WWC or any other group) any favours by treating them as basically all the same person.
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Car parking spaces are a big thing in our village. One of my elderly near neighbours came to my door twice a while back, asking for help/support. Once he even brought legal documents/maps with him. His house has one driveway space, and another space allocated in a shared car park. His next-door neighbour's house is large, and contains five adults (two adults, three young adults). And (I think!) six cars, as one of the lads is into his fast cars. (All from memory; I'm keeping out of it, aside from suggesting he talk to the council.)
The neighbours use his parking space in the shared car park, including storing a dishevelled non-runner in it. His documents show clearly they 'belong' to him (the actual land ownership is a very different matter). It's all got very messy, and sometimes nasty. They sometimes park on the pavement directly in front of his house, blocking it (which annoyed me when I had to use a pram.)
It will get much more common with time as the horde of kids in our young village grow up and get cars.
IMV six cars for a four/five bedroom house with two parking spaces, in a built-up area, is a tad unreasonable. If you want that many cars, buy a house with more land ...
Our local council have decided to introduce a maximum provision of 1 car parking space per house in their draft local plan, supposedly to tackle climate change. This is despite the Councillors all driving to work, so they are probably 2+ car households; and the Council itself requiring that most of its staff are car users, in the interests of efficiency (although it is a small local authority, and there would be no real difficulty in getting around by e-bike at 15 mph.
Parking is becoming a significant problem and it isn't helped by the situation you describe. The family over the road from where I am writing has 7 cars - two sports cars, a land cruiser parked on the road, a large saloon, 2 cars for the kids, and a van - for which they have 3 parking spaces.
I expect that that criteria will be pithed or mitigated in the LP approval process.
Are they signalling to their local green nimbies, like a political-no on a Planning Application that they know will pass at Appeal?
Who know. However, the most likely explanation is municipal ignorance. With regard to nimbies, their biggest complaint people have is often about parking, so putting in a limit of 1 space will not go down well with these people.
Green nimbies imo have a different pattern.
Somewhat authoritarian measures to exclude things they don't like by kneejerk, without really considering the consequences in the round.
Someone mentioned Japan. But they have a different transport infrastructure than we have in most places here.
Did we need the sub header? "The other twelve winners have all been penguins" would be news.
Well.....
That penguin is death …
Seems a very odd form for the grim reaper to adopt. Now the bagpipes I could believe.
I meant deaf - blooming autocorrect.
Of course, we’re assuming the bagpipes worked and that they hadn’t warped in the unaccustomed warm temperatures of Antarctica compared to the Highlands.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
Six hundred and fifty MPs. How many people do you think are (or statistically would expect to be) non-binary? And do you mean that biologically (genetically), or people who are identifying that way?
Around 0.3% of the population identify as non-binary in population surveys, by self definition.
I wonder how many of that actually are, or just don't understand the question or are taking the piss or something? When you get very low numbers like that, even a small percentage of such people can affect the results significantly.
Let's take Intersex as being the most obvious group of potential nonbinaries: people who are born with physical features that can make it hard to define gender. There are many cases of such people almost randomly being 'given' a gender at birth, and later feeling it was the wrong one for their bodies. They could (and should be able to decide their gender, or choose to be neither if it best suits them.
According to Wiki,: "The number of births where the baby is intersex has been reported to be as low as 0.018% or as high as roughly 1.7%, depending on which conditions are counted as intersex.[4][5][6] The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%."
So given Intersex is just one class of people, 0.3% sounds perfectly achievable (also assuming that many Intersex people see themselves as non-binary). Yes, there will be people who define themselves as 'nonbinary' for LOLs or attention. There will be far more who have genuine issues with their defined gender.
NZ elected its first transsexual MP in 1996. U.K. needs to get with the times.
If a transsexual wants to stand and is elected good for them. There’s a whole process for that. We don’t need to go around ticking boxes so that we are “with the times”
But that's not how Wokeness works, dear boy.
It's all about ticking boxes to show you're with the times, and then shouting as loudly as you can about how much you applaud it from the rooftops.
Ideally, you then want someone to object to your empty narcissistic grandstanding because you can then fingerpoint them as bigots for that pure virtuous feelgood of moral self-righteousness.
Did we need the sub header? "The other twelve winners have all been penguins" would be news.
Well.....
That penguin is death …
Seems a very odd form for the grim reaper to adopt. Now the bagpipes I could believe.
I meant deaf - blooming autocorrect.
Of course, we’re assuming the bagpipes worked and that they hadn’t warped in the unaccustomed warm temperatures of Antarctica compared to the Highlands.
When we discussed that recently, I pointed out that the original prints show a string from the piper to the penguin's leg ...
Mr. Jessop, aye, feel rather a lot of sympathy for people in that situation. I forget the intersex stat I learnt at university but I have a vague recollection of it being comparable to the synaesthesia number of 1:100,000 (this assumes I recall the synaesthesia number correctly).
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Son and his girlfriend have the Delta variant (he was contacted last night)
14 days isolation required
Both double jabbed and he has had one of the other variants last year.
Both now under weather - his SATS were not great last night but better this morning.
His girlfriend said in hindsight they should have socialised less ..........
My mate’s got it, early 30s, had his first jab about a month ago. Symptoms came on Monday night, felt crap for a couple of days but absolutely fine now. He’s got to isolate til next Friday, that’ll be the worst bit for him! So I hope it passes as quickly for your son and his girlfriend.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
Puts his pious bleating about his staff into context.
'His newest restaurant, Southside Scran, has been mothballed since last July. Throughout the pandemic he has made redundancies across the Kitchin Group and cut down his team of 240 staff. In an interview with The Scotsman he said: “I had to make 100 people redundant within my company. A hundred people, phoning them up personally and telling them. Having people crying down the phone. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in business.”'
I think such numbers of parking places "because of climate change" are a national issue, and quite unrealistic, particularly for developments with no public transport. Not least it is harder to charge electric cars. Hence cars parked all over pavements and lawns turned to hardstanding in new developments.
My parish has a couple of hundred new houses being built at the same time that the bus service was cut to 2 hourly, and the last bus from the city is 1830. There are no cycle paths. Clearly nothing other than cars is viable.
It is almost as if local people and councils have a better idea about what works locally than rip off developers and national government.
Public transport is certainly a key element. I used to live on Holloway Road in a modern block built with the explicit provision there we had no right to parking permits (which are pretty broadly required to park in Islington). I struggled for a bit, as I actually like driving, but in the end gave up and sold my car and used the Tube or bus for everything, with an occasional car hire for long journeys with lots of luggage. This actually worked fine and I wondered why I'd struggled against it.
But where I live now on the outskirts of Godalming has a bus service twice a day. It is literally impossible to pursue a normal life without a car or motorbike or similar. Perhaps new estates should be established with a service charge on all houses to subsidise a regular bus service to a transport hub?
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Car parking spaces are a big thing in our village. One of my elderly near neighbours came to my door twice a while back, asking for help/support. Once he even brought legal documents/maps with him. His house has one driveway space, and another space allocated in a shared car park. His next-door neighbour's house is large, and contains five adults (two adults, three young adults). And (I think!) six cars, as one of the lads is into his fast cars. (All from memory; I'm keeping out of it, aside from suggesting he talk to the council.)
The neighbours use his parking space in the shared car park, including storing a dishevelled non-runner in it. His documents show clearly they 'belong' to him (the actual land ownership is a very different matter). It's all got very messy, and sometimes nasty. They sometimes park on the pavement directly in front of his house, blocking it (which annoyed me when I had to use a pram.)
It will get much more common with time as the horde of kids in our young village grow up and get cars.
IMV six cars for a four/five bedroom house with two parking spaces, in a built-up area, is a tad unreasonable. If you want that many cars, buy a house with more land ...
Our local council have decided to introduce a maximum provision of 1 car parking space per house in their draft local plan, supposedly to tackle climate change. This is despite the Councillors all driving to work, so they are probably 2+ car households; and the Council itself requiring that most of its staff are car users, in the interests of efficiency (although it is a small local authority, and there would be no real difficulty in getting around by e-bike at 15 mph.
Parking is becoming a significant problem and it isn't helped by the situation you describe. The family over the road from where I am writing has 6 cars - two sports cars, a land cruiser parked on the road, a large saloon, 2 cars for the kids, and a van - for which they have 3 parking spaces.
The problem has two elements. First, towns that were barely big enough for the "everyone has a car now" revolution and definitely aren't now households own multiple cars. New estates keep being built where houses are allocated a single parking space plus a garage big enough for a Mini. Some councillors get this is stupid and say so, others cite climate change, either way the planning laws mean they can do little about it.
Second, people's self-serving sense of entitlement. The only person in the world is them, and if that means acting like a pig-ignorant moron to their neighbours then so what. At the old place the estate didn't have enough parking spaces, but the planners had at least laid it out with regular 90 degree bends to (attempt to) slow traffic down. A row broke out between neighbours across the road from each other.
Each had a big white van parked half on the pavement (which we all had to do as the street was narrow) which didn't leave enough room. Whose fault it is, who should fuck off with their van etc etc. One tried to get the council involved, then complained to me (as they knew I was in the ruling party and knew the top people) that the council was "useless".
The problem was the covenants attached to the sale of the plots of land to the freeholders. Several conditions were included, one of which prohibited the parking of commercial vehicles (vans were given as example) on the street. Whilst this was hardly enforceable it meant that "can you make them move their van" was met with "you'll have to move yours as well" = "the council are useless".
As with various other always badly parked vehicles, neighbours managed to persuade both to take a breath and stop competing with each other. The bitterness never stopped - the public highway was THEIRS and they should be able to do what they like on the bit outside THEIR house and screw the rest of you.
Covenants on new builds are weird. For instance, in our 'village', we are not allowed caravans outside our houses - and the builders provided a small, secure, caravan park for them to be parked up in. Except it was too small to begin with, and never expanded as the council kept on allowing more houses.
Likewise, we were not allowed satellite dishes, as we would all have cable. And the houses built in the first few years did - before the company went bust and loads of houses were built without cable. I've never heard of the no-satellite-dishes rule being enforced.
Building standards are also really lax. I've been saying this on here for years, and had people saying they were not that bad. Then Grenfell happened. We see cases of houses with poor insulation, wall cracks, subsidence, flooding gardens. They're not terribly built, but they're not brilliant, either.
The government and councils need to understand that it is absolutely fine introducing new standards, rules and levies - e.g. on energy efficiency. But they're pointless unless those standards are robustly checked, and that costs money. Likewise, they need to think more of the lived environment, and throwing more houses onto smaller plots may not be an ideal way forward.
Sadly, though, checks and large plots all cost money, and drive up the prices of new builds. So we're in a race to the bottom.
Yes, we also had a no satellite dishes covenant. Pretty much every single house had a dish. Some had two.
Covenants are interesting. It is one thing where an argument can be won by proving that someone else has broken the same covenant successfully with no challenge.
A little unusual in land law.
And sometime they just time out (eg there often be one preventing people buying an estate house trying to undermine the finishing of the development) which means nothing once all the houses are occupied, unless it also applies where the developer has further land adjoining.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
Because of a rugger bugger culture, or the physical strength needed when wielding spanner, saw and drill?
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Another new thing is "equity" - which is just another word for reverse discrimination - where if you're a member of the wrong group you're actively held back and those in the right group are pushed forwards in a desire to achieve equality of outcome across all groups.
Interesting results from KCL about British attitudes to the culture wars.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk.pdf … Majorities say they have at least a little awareness of some key concepts in the culture wars debate – but when it comes to others, most people know very little or nothing about them: • The UK public are as likely to think being “woke” is a compliment (26%) as they are to think it’s an insult (24%) – and are in fact most likely to say they don’t know what the term means (38%). • 72% report they have either never heard of the term “microaggressions” or have heard of them but know very little, while 61% say the same about both “cancel culture” and “identity politics”, and 54% are similarly unaware of “trigger warnings”. • A major exception is “white privilege”: 82% of the public say they’ve heard at least a little about this term, including 55% who say they’ve heard a lot about it – by far the most widely known concept of those asked about. • When people are asked to describe, in their own words, what sorts of issues the term “culture wars” makes them think of, by far the most common response is that it doesn’t make them think of any (43%). • And only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area: just over 1% link the term to the Black Lives Matter movement or debates over transgender issues, while under 1% make a connection to the removal of statues, for instance….
I think such numbers of parking places "because of climate change" are a national issue, and quite unrealistic, particularly for developments with no public transport. Not least it is harder to charge electric cars. Hence cars parked all over pavements and lawns turned to hardstanding in new developments.
My parish has a couple of hundred new houses being built at the same time that the bus service was cut to 2 hourly, and the last bus from the city is 1830. There are no cycle paths. Clearly nothing other than cars is viable.
It is almost as if local people and councils have a better idea about what works locally than rip off developers and national government.
Public transport is certainly a key element. I used to live on Holloway Road in a modern block built with the explicit provision there we had no right to parking permits (which are pretty broadly required to park in Islington). I struggled for a bit, as I actually like driving, but in the end gave up and sold my car and used the Tube or bus for everything, with an occasional car hire for long journeys with lots of luggage. This actually worked fine and I wondered why I'd struggled against it.
But where I live now on the outskirts of Godalming has a bus service twice a day. It is literally impossible to pursue a normal life without a car or motorbike or similar. Perhaps new estates should be established with a service charge on all houses to subsidise a regular bus service to a transport hub?
Yes. Some of the more self-aware Greenies pivoted to congestion from pollution quite a few years ago.
I'm quite interested as to why cycling paths were not made a Planning Condition for that development. It is a normal thing to require make a development sustainable.
We need a lot more unbundling of traffic modes to make it more attractive to use cycles than cars.
Dr. Foxy, when women were a minority in medicine and university they weren't told to up their game. It was down to sexism and unfair lack of opportunity.
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Another new thing is "equity" - which is just another word for reverse discrimination - where if you're a member of the wrong group you're actively held back and those in the right group are pushed forwards in a desire to achieve equality of outcome across all groups.
This is happening in my firm right now.
It's why I started off contracting - more money and no silly politics.
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Important point, that.
When one thing arises, everybody checks everything and all the issues get flushed out at once.
I think "found in my favour" is the wrong terminology. AIUI the Council have no power to make such a finding - only to decide their opinions and how their process should operate.
He should have taken his advice from a solicitor or MRICS.
Well they agreed that I had filled out the correct ownership certificate, meaning that on the evidence before them he doesn't have any interest in the land. But you are right that this is not a binding finding over the issue. That would need to be determined in a court.
What was interesting is the fact that the land registry plan is not really absolute in relation to boundaries, there is also a procedure of changing title plans if they are incorrectly drawn based on earlier information. So this type of problem can really happen to anyone - I've come to the view that freehold land isn't really what it seems.
A friend of mine had an amusing fight over land a few years ago. Usually the Crown owns the foreshore (I think) as a matter of right, except for a chunk of North Somerset which was granted to my friend’s ancestors a while back.
The government tried to claim it but it was proved in court they didn’t. But they then stated in the recitals of some act of parliament that they owned this specific piece of foreshore… that had to go pretty far up the chain to sort out
These feudal irregularities should be killed off.
The Crown should seize your friend’s foreshore by compulsory purchase.
Why? Why should the state seize private property?
In the national interest to prevent it being sold to a russian oligarch.
These guys were French oligarchs whose family moved here a while back
eek emoji
Nearly 1000 years ago…
Bloody foreigners.
Indeed, I have a purity of Celtic heritage that pre dates all the invaders.
I stake my claim!
You tell them MP. A quick blast of “Get off my land!” Will have those Bloody normans running.
I am quite surprised there has been no demands for reparations from a Celtic rights group. I am only saying this semi humorously.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
It’s 85%. That being said, the number of male headteachers in both primary and secondary is disproportionately high. In 2018, for example, 63% of secondary teachers were female and 37% male, but the proportion of principals was almost exactly reversed - 38% to 62%. In primary, 15% of teachers were men but they made up 27% of heads.
That does suggest some issues, but based on my entirely anecdotal experience I think the main one is that women with children or indeed elderly parents still tend to be the one who exploit the family friendly policies of teaching for flexible working, rather than their male partners.
Which, of course, severely scars their career progress.
Puts his pious bleating about his staff into context.
'His newest restaurant, Southside Scran, has been mothballed since last July. Throughout the pandemic he has made redundancies across the Kitchin Group and cut down his team of 240 staff. In an interview with The Scotsman he said: “I had to make 100 people redundant within my company. A hundred people, phoning them up personally and telling them. Having people crying down the phone. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in business.”'
I’ve heard fairly horrifying stories about several top chefs in the UK (not just the usual suspects who obviously have a temper)
So, being an obnoxious, demanding bastard does seem to be quite common. Restaurant cookery is one of the most macho work environments, in many ways. As Anthony Bourdain brilliantly described, in his memoir
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Another new thing is "equity" - which is just another word for reverse discrimination - where if you're a member of the wrong group you're actively held back and those in the right group are pushed forwards in a desire to achieve equality of outcome across all groups.
This is happening in my firm right now.
Point of Order.
Reverse-discrimination is not a thing.
It is Discrimination.
Zara Sultana & friends' attempts to deny Jewish people the right to be identified as a 'minority' in the NUS was discrimination - not 'reverse;'.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Interesting results from KCL about British attitudes to the culture wars.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk.pdf … Majorities say they have at least a little awareness of some key concepts in the culture wars debate – but when it comes to others, most people know very little or nothing about them: • The UK public are as likely to think being “woke” is a compliment (26%) as they are to think it’s an insult (24%) – and are in fact most likely to say they don’t know what the term means (38%). • 72% report they have either never heard of the term “microaggressions” or have heard of them but know very little, while 61% say the same about both “cancel culture” and “identity politics”, and 54% are similarly unaware of “trigger warnings”. • A major exception is “white privilege”: 82% of the public say they’ve heard at least a little about this term, including 55% who say they’ve heard a lot about it – by far the most widely known concept of those asked about. • When people are asked to describe, in their own words, what sorts of issues the term “culture wars” makes them think of, by far the most common response is that it doesn’t make them think of any (43%). • And only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area: just over 1% link the term to the Black Lives Matter movement or debates over transgender issues, while under 1% make a connection to the removal of statues, for instance….
We are about 3-5 years behind America on this. Let’s hope we never catch up
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
It’s 85%. That being said, the number of male headteachers in both primary and secondary is disproportionately high. In 2018, for example, 63% of secondary teachers were female and 37% male, but the proportion of principals was almost exactly reversed - 38% to 62%. In primary, 15% of teachers were men but they made up 27% of heads.
That does suggest some issues, but based on my entirely anecdotal experience I think the main one is that women with children or indeed elderly parents still tend to be the one who exploit the family friendly policies of teaching for flexible working, rather than their male partners.
Which, of course, severely scars their career progress.
In the case of primary head teachers - most teachers really don't want the stress and it ends up being male primary school teachers going for the role as no-one else wants it and eventually someone has to.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
There is obviously something in male privilege; but it is naive to think that women don't use the situation to their advantage. My own assessment is that some organisations and professions become feminised, as may be happening with medicine. Men may not want to/ or otherwise find it hard to adapt to the situation, they will just vote with their feet. I've seen this happen time and time again; it isn't retreating in to an incel bunker it is exercising freedom of choice.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
If women outcompete men, in aggregate, based purely on effort and performance then I have no problem with that.
But, I'd also feel the same the other way round too.
Puts his pious bleating about his staff into context.
'His newest restaurant, Southside Scran, has been mothballed since last July. Throughout the pandemic he has made redundancies across the Kitchin Group and cut down his team of 240 staff. In an interview with The Scotsman he said: “I had to make 100 people redundant within my company. A hundred people, phoning them up personally and telling them. Having people crying down the phone. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in business.”'
My ex was a trained chef, who talked openly about the bullying atmosphere in the restaurants she used to work. When I said that it shouldn't have to be like that, she would just shrug and say it was a pressured environment, and it was needed to get the food out.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Effectively this is what has happened in Scotland in that someone in the same position as described by @Cyclefree is in a woman's prison but is kept in a separate wing with no contact with the remainder of the population there. I really do not see how Prison authorities can do anything else in the face of such an obvious risk. They will be sued if they don't.
Puts his pious bleating about his staff into context.
'His newest restaurant, Southside Scran, has been mothballed since last July. Throughout the pandemic he has made redundancies across the Kitchin Group and cut down his team of 240 staff. In an interview with The Scotsman he said: “I had to make 100 people redundant within my company. A hundred people, phoning them up personally and telling them. Having people crying down the phone. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in business.”'
My ex was a trained chef, who talked openly about the bullying atmosphere in the restaurants she used to work. When I said that it shouldn't have to be like that, she would just shrug and say it was a pressured environment, and it was needed to get the food out.
Never made much sense to me.
That sounds like the classic justification for bullying/hazing environments. Strangely, it always turns out to be bullshit.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
It’s 85%. That being said, the number of male headteachers in both primary and secondary is disproportionately high. In 2018, for example, 63% of secondary teachers were female and 37% male, but the proportion of principals was almost exactly reversed - 38% to 62%. In primary, 15% of teachers were men but they made up 27% of heads.
That does suggest some issues, but based on my entirely anecdotal experience I think the main one is that women with children or indeed elderly parents still tend to be the one who exploit the family friendly policies of teaching for flexible working, rather than their male partners.
Which, of course, severely scars their career progress.
Yes, I suspect it matches with childcare arrangements and, also, there's still a residual suspicion of parents around male teachers teaching very young children, which is very out of date and needs challenging.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
It’s 85%. That being said, the number of male headteachers in both primary and secondary is disproportionately high. In 2018, for example, 63% of secondary teachers were female and 37% male, but the proportion of principals was almost exactly reversed - 38% to 62%. In primary, 15% of teachers were men but they made up 27% of heads.
That does suggest some issues, but based on my entirely anecdotal experience I think the main one is that women with children or indeed elderly parents still tend to be the one who exploit the family friendly policies of teaching for flexible working, rather than their male partners.
Which, of course, severely scars their career progress.
I think such numbers of parking places "because of climate change" are a national issue, and quite unrealistic, particularly for developments with no public transport. Not least it is harder to charge electric cars. Hence cars parked all over pavements and lawns turned to hardstanding in new developments.
My parish has a couple of hundred new houses being built at the same time that the bus service was cut to 2 hourly, and the last bus from the city is 1830. There are no cycle paths. Clearly nothing other than cars is viable.
It is almost as if local people and councils have a better idea about what works locally than rip off developers and national government.
Public transport is certainly a key element. I used to live on Holloway Road in a modern block built with the explicit provision there we had no right to parking permits (which are pretty broadly required to park in Islington). I struggled for a bit, as I actually like driving, but in the end gave up and sold my car and used the Tube or bus for everything, with an occasional car hire for long journeys with lots of luggage. This actually worked fine and I wondered why I'd struggled against it.
But where I live now on the outskirts of Godalming has a bus service twice a day. It is literally impossible to pursue a normal life without a car or motorbike or similar. Perhaps new estates should be established with a service charge on all houses to subsidise a regular bus service to a transport hub?
We have one bus service most of the day, every half hour in each direction, towards two larger towns, but not to the nearest railway station. Makes connections to anywhere but those two towns difficult with one's own transport, and there are no buses in the evenings. The nearest hospital requires two buses, one further away only one but takes an hour.
JUST IN: Ollie Robinson has been handed a suspension of 8 matches, 5 of those suspended for 2 years, following an investigation into his historic offensive tweets.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
I don’t know.
I was told, when I started training, that if I went into primary education I would be a headteacher within four years, and that was by a female interviewer in a training provider that prided itself on its inclusivity.
Speaking personally, however, I didn’t want to teach in a primary school, and still don’t. I’m interested in teaching A-level, for all the terrible damage Spielman’s incompetence has done. And that’s what I’m best at. Indeed, based on my results I’m one of the top 200 A-level teachers of History in the country.
I think there is still a belief that women are best at managing younger children, and it’s one of those self-reinforcing things that means more women put themselves forward for training and therefore are over represented in the sample size.
Some years ago there was a blog by a male reception teacher who said he faced a lot of discrimination because ‘everyone knows only women teach reception.’
JUST IN: Ollie Robinson has been handed a suspension of 8 matches, 5 of those suspended for 2 years, following an investigation into his historic offensive tweets.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
Six hundred and fifty MPs. How many people do you think are (or statistically would expect to be) non-binary? And do you mean that biologically (genetically), or people who are identifying that way?
Around 0.3% of the population identify as non-binary in population surveys, by self definition.
I wonder how many of that actually are, or just don't understand the question or are taking the piss or something? When you get very low numbers like that, even a small percentage of such people can affect the results significantly.
I think it is also non-binary for people to identify as non-binary, as frequently they will also identify as other gender labels.
Most surveys do come out with a figure of around 0.2-0.4% though. We may get some useful data from the recent census.
While there may be some genetic or other physical reason to be non-binary, that doesn't really fit with the epidemiology. We see rates much higher in the young, in some metropolitan areas, etc. This would suggest that sociological acceptance is a bigger factor than physical factors.
Yes, I think that's probably true. Funnily enough I was having this discussion with some friends of mine yesterday who have a distinctly non-binary son. They said in their other son's high school, several of his friends are non-binary and it's considered fashionable - "cool" if they still use that word. Certainly unimaginable when I was at a similar school decades back.
Dr. Foxy, when women were a minority in medicine and university they weren't told to up their game. It was down to sexism and unfair lack of opportunity.
But when men do worse it's men's fault.
Straight white men are going to be just fine. Don't worry about us.
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
Because of a rugger bugger culture, or the physical strength needed when wielding spanner, saw and drill?
A bit of both.
Obstetrics is not surprisingly quite a female speciality and we get quite a lot of occupational back injuries in petite women. Forceps take quite a lot physically from the obstetrician, and often cannot wait.
Apparently Mount back this evening....and Sancho to start (ahead of Saka, Foden and Grealish).
I really cannot believe that Grealish is not starting. England only started to play any kind of linked up football when he came on in the last game. Southgate is going to prove fatal to this campaign at some point, probably not tonight though.
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Another new thing is "equity" - which is just another word for reverse discrimination - where if you're a member of the wrong group you're actively held back and those in the right group are pushed forwards in a desire to achieve equality of outcome across all groups.
This is happening in my firm right now.
Point of Order.
Reverse-discrimination is not a thing.
It is Discrimination.
Zara Sultana & friends' attempts to deny Jewish people the right to be identified as a 'minority' in the NUS was discrimination - not 'reverse;'.
I agree, and I use it to make a point.
It's making actual discrimination policy in a belief that's necessary to correct perceived discrimination in society.
It will absolutely create injustices towards real individual people, and fuel resentment accordingly, but for now it isn't challenged much because the risks of doing so are just too high.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
I suspect it's an extension of traditional stereotypes about childcare. If you look at childminders and nurseries, hardly any males can be found. Then comes primary schools: looking after little ones fits with the 'female' role. The proportion of males teaching grows as children grow older. The other, smaller, factor is also 'traditional' - there's higher paid jobs in secondary education (headteachers in a secondary school earn almost double what primary school heads earn). For dual-income families, it's enough for the second earner to work with very young children.
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Important point, that.
When one thing arises, everybody checks everything and all the issues get flushed out at once.
I think "found in my favour" is the wrong terminology. AIUI the Council have no power to make such a finding - only to decide their opinions and how their process should operate.
He should have taken his advice from a solicitor or MRICS.
Well they agreed that I had filled out the correct ownership certificate, meaning that on the evidence before them he doesn't have any interest in the land. But you are right that this is not a binding finding over the issue. That would need to be determined in a court.
What was interesting is the fact that the land registry plan is not really absolute in relation to boundaries, there is also a procedure of changing title plans if they are incorrectly drawn based on earlier information. So this type of problem can really happen to anyone - I've come to the view that freehold land isn't really what it seems.
A friend of mine had an amusing fight over land a few years ago. Usually the Crown owns the foreshore (I think) as a matter of right, except for a chunk of North Somerset which was granted to my friend’s ancestors a while back.
The government tried to claim it but it was proved in court they didn’t. But they then stated in the recitals of some act of parliament that they owned this specific piece of foreshore… that had to go pretty far up the chain to sort out
These feudal irregularities should be killed off.
The Crown should seize your friend’s foreshore by compulsory purchase.
Why? Why should the state seize private property?
In the national interest to prevent it being sold to a russian oligarch.
These guys were French oligarchs whose family moved here a while back
eek emoji
Nearly 1000 years ago…
Bloody foreigners.
Indeed, I have a purity of Celtic heritage that pre dates all the invaders.
I stake my claim!
You tell them MP. A quick blast of “Get off my land!” Will have those Bloody normans running.
I am quite surprised there has been no demands for reparations from a Celtic rights group. I am only saying this semi humorously.
What about the pre-Celtic groups? Bloody Celts with their hill forts tearing up the landscape. Built on Green Belt with no planning permission....
Dr. Foxy, when women were a minority in medicine and university they weren't told to up their game. It was down to sexism and unfair lack of opportunity.
Mr. Ace, men aren't fine when it comes to custody battles. Or workplace deaths. Or proportional funding for refuges for victims of domestic violence. Or suicide. Or homelessness.
JUST IN: Ollie Robinson has been handed a suspension of 8 matches, 5 of those suspended for 2 years, following an investigation into his historic offensive tweets.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
Ridiculous OTT punishment. For context Craig Overton got a 2 match ban for racist abuse during a game.
Yes, but they like him. He was picked on potential, Robinson because he took so many wickets they couldn’t ignore him any longer without looking even stupider than they are.
Apparently Mount back this evening....and Sancho to start (ahead of Saka, Foden and Grealish).
I really cannot believe that Grealish is not starting. England only started to play any kind of linked up football when he came on in the last game. Southgate is going to prove fatal to this campaign at some point, probably not tonight though.
Grealish or Foden has to be in the team to create. Compare England to other teams...Expected Threat level is terrible and coming from limited area.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
Eldest Grandson is a primary school teacher, but, at the moment at least, all the other teachers are (appear to be) female. I think there is, or was a while ago, an effort to get more men to become primary school teachers, especially in areas with many broken families, to give the boys some acceptable role models.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
There is obviously something in male privilege; but it is naive to think that women don't use the situation to their advantage. My own assessment is that some organisations and professions become feminised, as may be happening with medicine. Men may not want to/ or otherwise find it hard to adapt to the situation, they will just vote with their feet. I've seen this happen time and time again; it isn't retreating in to an incel bunker it is exercising freedom of choice.
If women tend to be better at academic learning and interpersonal skills, they will be better doctors. If feminising the profession means having someone who will listen to you before diagnosing, that is great. I've had good and bad doctors, both male and female, but I remember from a few years ago that some of the more traditional, older male doctors were fairly shit. Had no truck with the idea of mental health problems, would diagnose on a whim and persist with the same old same old ineffective treatment. "Oh it's not working. We just need to do some more of it". Standard blinkered I-know-best stereotypical male attitude
JUST IN: Ollie Robinson has been handed a suspension of 8 matches, 5 of those suspended for 2 years, following an investigation into his historic offensive tweets.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
Ridiculous OTT punishment. For context Craig Overton got a 2 match ban for racist abuse during a game.
Yes, but they like him. He was picked on potential, Robinson because he took so many wickets they couldn’t ignore him any longer without looking even stupider than they are.
Overton isn't good enough for international cricket.
Dr. Foxy, that's something that I utterly disagree with.
I know it's fashionable to blame men if they're not doing well compared to women, but it's still hypocritical when women get sympathy in the same situation.
My Neighbour turned up at my door in an anxious state one afternoon a few years ago. He said he owns our garden, based on some document from a hundred years ago - even though the title plan for both properties indicates otherwise, as well as the reality on the ground.
The cause of this outburst was that we had a planning application in to do some minor works. I told him he would have to put his case to the Council (if he was correct, I would have needed to have filled in a different ownership certificate). The Council took one look at the land registry plan and found in my favour, helpfully the planning officer then wrote as much in the officer report.
He hasn't raised it again for a few years, but I am not convinced it has completely gone away.
The problem with these situations is that they quickly descend in to a fog where it is not clear who is right or wrong (as is the case with the conservative councillor).
Important point, that.
When one thing arises, everybody checks everything and all the issues get flushed out at once.
I think "found in my favour" is the wrong terminology. AIUI the Council have no power to make such a finding - only to decide their opinions and how their process should operate.
He should have taken his advice from a solicitor or MRICS.
Well they agreed that I had filled out the correct ownership certificate, meaning that on the evidence before them he doesn't have any interest in the land. But you are right that this is not a binding finding over the issue. That would need to be determined in a court.
What was interesting is the fact that the land registry plan is not really absolute in relation to boundaries, there is also a procedure of changing title plans if they are incorrectly drawn based on earlier information. So this type of problem can really happen to anyone - I've come to the view that freehold land isn't really what it seems.
A friend of mine had an amusing fight over land a few years ago. Usually the Crown owns the foreshore (I think) as a matter of right, except for a chunk of North Somerset which was granted to my friend’s ancestors a while back.
The government tried to claim it but it was proved in court they didn’t. But they then stated in the recitals of some act of parliament that they owned this specific piece of foreshore… that had to go pretty far up the chain to sort out
These feudal irregularities should be killed off.
The Crown should seize your friend’s foreshore by compulsory purchase.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
I suspect it's an extension of traditional stereotypes about childcare. If you look at childminders and nurseries, hardly any males can be found. Then comes primary schools: looking after little ones fits with the 'female' role. The proportion of males teaching grows as children grow older. The other, smaller, factor is also 'traditional' - there's higher paid jobs in secondary education (headteachers in a secondary school earn almost double what primary school heads earn). For dual-income families, it's enough for the second earner to work with very young children.
Not just stereotyping in a passive way.
At my younger daughters primary school, which was new and was being built out, year by year, so small, it happened that all the teaching staff so far were women. The headmistress told me that when she hired a male teacher, a group of the other teachers came to her and said that while he was a nice bloke and a good teacher, they felt the presence of a man in a previously all female teachers common room made them feel un-comfortable.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
If women outcompete men, in aggregate, based purely on effort and performance then I have no problem with that.
But, I'd also feel the same the other way round too.
One of the issues though is what is classified as "performance". Often this is defined in terms which are easy to measure but which ignore more important elements and which may favour male staff more than female ones.
With a love life like his, no wonder Hugh Grant wants to silence the press
Lets hope Marina Hyde's on form this week
For Roger
Just wanted to let you know that divorce isnt funny , and that she has every right to wish for privacy for her and her children, irrespective or her job or husband's job.
Rice and Philips are going to start this evening, despite the fact they will miss the semi-final if they get booked again (yellow cards are reset after this game). I think you bring in Henderson or Bellingham and give one of them a rest / protection.
JUST IN: Ollie Robinson has been handed a suspension of 8 matches, 5 of those suspended for 2 years, following an investigation into his historic offensive tweets.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
Ridiculous OTT punishment. For context Craig Overton got a 2 match ban for racist abuse during a game.
Yes, but they like him. He was picked on potential, Robinson because he took so many wickets they couldn’t ignore him any longer without looking even stupider than they are.
Overton isn't good enough for international cricket.
So? For how many years were the likes of Ronnie Irani and Ian Salisbury picked?
When I was in hospital recently it was very noticeable that women now seem to dominate the medical profession. There were several young female doctors for every male and of course a preponderance of nurses were female (possibly some uptick in the number of males there?) Such men as were about tended to be more senior, at consultant level. The bevy of young doctors following the consultants about on their ward rounds contained a token male but no more.
Is it possible that our politics might go the same way? In the next PM stakes I think I would go for Liz Truss at the moment, even ahead of Rishi.
Around 65% of my Medical School intake are female, and has been so for decades now. It does vary significantly by speciality though where they wind up. Orthopedics is a male bastion still, for example.
My career in the public sector was dominated by women. Most of my managers were women. I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
Another new thing is "equity" - which is just another word for reverse discrimination - where if you're a member of the wrong group you're actively held back and those in the right group are pushed forwards in a desire to achieve equality of outcome across all groups.
This is happening in my firm right now.
I've never come across that, but have no doubt that it would arrive at some point had I stuck around.
One problem is that no-one criticises it. No one points out the hypocrisy of the chief executive presiding over a female dominated senior management team and pronouncing that there more work to do. Men are silent, they just vote with their feet by leaving. Is that really what women want?
My son is seven. His teacher and the TA he has had for the last two years are both female. In his time at school, all bar one teacher/TA has been male. His school has two co-heads, one male, one female. Before that, at nursery, all the assistants were female.
It does not bother me one bit.
However: he (hopefully) has a strong male role model at home (i.e. me). I do worry about boys - like a friend of his - who has a single mother and gets no strong adult male role models from school, or at home.
How much do positive gender role models matter? I think quite a lot, especially for kids of single parents.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Prisoners who are a risk to other prisoners in terms of sexual and physical assault should be on seperate wings whether male female or trans.
We get a lot of "humour" on here about how X needs to be careful in the showers once he has been sent down. How is that acceptable? And are we to ignore sexual assaults by aggressive lesbians in prison because they are cis?
No the answer is humane prisons for all, as an essential path to rehabilitation, and segregation is often a key part of that for the vulnerable.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
I don’t know.
I was told, when I started training, that if I went into primary education I would be a headteacher within four years, and that was by a female interviewer in a training provider that prided itself on its inclusivity.
Speaking personally, however, I didn’t want to teach in a primary school, and still don’t. I’m interested in teaching A-level, for all the terrible damage Spielman’s incompetence has done. And that’s what I’m best at. Indeed, based on my results I’m one of the top 200 A-level teachers of History in the country.
I think there is still a belief that women are best at managing younger children, and it’s one of those self-reinforcing things that means more women put themselves forward for training and therefore are over represented in the sample size.
Some years ago there was a blog by a male reception teacher who said he faced a lot of discrimination because ‘everyone knows only women teach reception.’
NZ elected its first transsexual MP in 1996. U.K. needs to get with the times.
We don't vote for Eddie Izzard because he's Eddie Izzard, not because of his cross-dressing.
Too many woke Fcukwits in this country , lots of weak dumb people running about trying to pretend there are many genders and men can be women and F*** knows what else. It is a sh**hole nowadays full of to***rs and wimps. It really has reached Little Britain status, any clown thinking it is anywhere near Great is a deluded halfwit. We don't vote for Izzard because he is just another useless donkey, an dattention seeking halfwit who is about as funny as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Crap comedian moves down market and tries to be an MP, who would have thought it, jumped straight over estate agent right to the bottom rung.
Mr. Royale, there's a perverse irony and unwitting idiocy in having a Select Committee dedicated to Women and Equalities.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
c.90% of primary school teachers were female, last time I checked.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
The lack of male teachers at primary school level (I am a trustee of a primary school so have an interest in this) is an issue I quite agree. Not sure why this is so. Perhaps @ydoethur has thoughts on why this might be so?
I suspect it's an extension of traditional stereotypes about childcare. If you look at childminders and nurseries, hardly any males can be found. Then comes primary schools: looking after little ones fits with the 'female' role. The proportion of males teaching grows as children grow older. The other, smaller, factor is also 'traditional' - there's higher paid jobs in secondary education (headteachers in a secondary school earn almost double what primary school heads earn). For dual-income families, it's enough for the second earner to work with very young children.
I completely agree. Childcare, which is a huge component of primary school teaching, has always been more of a female responsibility. From that, it's completely logical that women want to be primary school teachers more than men do. Just as there aren't that many female bricklayers or plumbers, though of course they exist. Construction is predominantly a male activity. The surprise would be if it were different, and trying to force people into roles they don't want is a mistake.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
There is obviously something in male privilege; but it is naive to think that women don't use the situation to their advantage. My own assessment is that some organisations and professions become feminised, as may be happening with medicine. Men may not want to/ or otherwise find it hard to adapt to the situation, they will just vote with their feet. I've seen this happen time and time again; it isn't retreating in to an incel bunker it is exercising freedom of choice.
If women tend to be better at academic learning and interpersonal skills, they will be better doctors. If feminising the profession means having someone who will listen to you before diagnosing, that is great. I've had good and bad doctors, both male and female, but I remember from a few years ago that some of the more traditional, older male doctors were fairly shit. Had no truck with the idea of mental health problems, would diagnose on a whim and persist with the same old same old ineffective treatment. "Oh it's not working. We just need to do some more of it". Standard blinkered I-know-best stereotypical male attitude
On the other hand, men have bigger brains than women, are on average slightly more intelligent, are physically much stronger, are more innovative and risk-taking, and there are many more male geniuses than female, due to differing bell curves
NZ elected its first transsexual MP in 1996. U.K. needs to get with the times.
We don't vote for Eddie Izzard because he's Eddie Izzard, not because of his cross-dressing.
Too many woke Fcukwits in this country , lots of weak dumb people running about trying to pretend there are many genders and men can be women and F*** knows what else. It is a sh**hole nowadays full of to***rs and wimps. It really has reached Little Britain status, any clown thinking it is anywhere near Great is a deluded halfwit. We don't vote for Izzard because he is just another useless donkey, an dattention seeking halfwit who is about as funny as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Crap comedian moves down market and tries to be an MP, who would have thought it, jumped straight over estate agent right to the bottom rung.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
There is obviously something in male privilege; but it is naive to think that women don't use the situation to their advantage. My own assessment is that some organisations and professions become feminised, as may be happening with medicine. Men may not want to/ or otherwise find it hard to adapt to the situation, they will just vote with their feet. I've seen this happen time and time again; it isn't retreating in to an incel bunker it is exercising freedom of choice.
If women tend to be better at academic learning and interpersonal skills, they will be better doctors. If feminising the profession means having someone who will listen to you before diagnosing, that is great. I've had good and bad doctors, both male and female, but I remember from a few years ago that some of the more traditional, older male doctors were fairly shit. Had no truck with the idea of mental health problems, would diagnose on a whim and persist with the same old same old ineffective treatment. "Oh it's not working. We just need to do some more of it". Standard blinkered I-know-best stereotypical male attitude
We had a female doctor several years whose interpersonal skills ranked among the worst I've known. And I've interacted with a LOT of doctors. We now have one who is the exact opposite, and when I complimented her on them she responded that at Uni she'd been told that she was really good and would really well as a GP. She'd wondered, she said, whether that was a way of telling her she wasn't in the top tier academically.
Some years ago too, I wrote a dissertation on changing practice, and found evidence that some doctors, although they went on course, did so because that was the 'thing to do' and made no changes as a result of what they had 'learned'.
It was an attitude I found in my reading, very typical of the farming community.
Six hundred and fifty MPs. How many people do you think are (or statistically would expect to be) non-binary? And do you mean that biologically (genetically), or people who are identifying that way?
Around 0.3% of the population identify as non-binary in population surveys, by self definition.
I wonder how many of that actually are, or just don't understand the question or are taking the piss or something? When you get very low numbers like that, even a small percentage of such people can affect the results significantly.
I think it is also non-binary for people to identify as non-binary, as frequently they will also identify as other gender labels.
Most surveys do come out with a figure of around 0.2-0.4% though. We may get some useful data from the recent census.
While there may be some genetic or other physical reason to be non-binary, that doesn't really fit with the epidemiology. We see rates much higher in the young, in some metropolitan areas, etc. This would suggest that sociological acceptance is a bigger factor than physical factors.
Yes, I think that's probably true. Funnily enough I was having this discussion with some friends of mine yesterday who have a distinctly non-binary son. They said in their other son's high school, several of his friends are non-binary and it's considered fashionable - "cool" if they still use that word. Certainly unimaginable when I was at a similar school decades back.
I'm not sure that most people know what the definition is - some confuse it with bisexual. That has certainly become more common, and defined as "possibly open to having sex with someone of the same gender" it probably covers a lot of people who in previous generations (like me) wouldn't have considered it for a second. Not being sure which gender you are still seems a bit strange to me, though not thinking it matters is fine, and I recognise that I'm just a child of my generation in slowly getting my head round it.
Interesting results from KCL about British attitudes to the culture wars.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk.pdf … Majorities say they have at least a little awareness of some key concepts in the culture wars debate – but when it comes to others, most people know very little or nothing about them: • The UK public are as likely to think being “woke” is a compliment (26%) as they are to think it’s an insult (24%) – and are in fact most likely to say they don’t know what the term means (38%). • 72% report they have either never heard of the term “microaggressions” or have heard of them but know very little, while 61% say the same about both “cancel culture” and “identity politics”, and 54% are similarly unaware of “trigger warnings”. • A major exception is “white privilege”: 82% of the public say they’ve heard at least a little about this term, including 55% who say they’ve heard a lot about it – by far the most widely known concept of those asked about. • When people are asked to describe, in their own words, what sorts of issues the term “culture wars” makes them think of, by far the most common response is that it doesn’t make them think of any (43%). • And only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area: just over 1% link the term to the Black Lives Matter movement or debates over transgender issues, while under 1% make a connection to the removal of statues, for instance….
We are about 3-5 years behind America on this. Let’s hope we never catch up
I don’t think we’re anywhere near the US in this.
Go to the link and look at the stats for S Korea, though. For tension between those identifying as liberal/traditional, elite/working class, men/women, university educated/uneducated, by different political party affiliation, rich/poor, by social classes, by age, by religion, and urban/rural, they’re at or near the top of each category. The only exceptions are race or immigration.
Dr. Foxy, when women were a minority in medicine and university they weren't told to up their game. It was down to sexism and unfair lack of opportunity.
But when men do worse it's men's fault.
Straight white men are going to be just fine. Don't worry about us.
That's very easy to say with your grand country mansion and fleet of supercars.
What about a motivated bright talented man in his late 20s with no assets or money who's trying to get on?
The only thing he'd have in his favour is sheer weight of numbers (at c.35-40% of the population there aren't enough alternative choices) but there will be plenty of individual injustices within that.
The most likely consequence is political because if people are treated along group lines they will start to organise along group lines, and the consequences of that is not pleasant which is why I don't support it.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Effectively this is what has happened in Scotland in that someone in the same position as described by @Cyclefree is in a woman's prison but is kept in a separate wing with no contact with the remainder of the population there. I really do not see how Prison authorities can do anything else in the face of such an obvious risk. They will be sued if they don't.
That is the obvious practical solution. But the demand by trans activists is that they should be in a women's prison with full access to other women prisoners even if (a) they have been found guilty of sexual assaults against women; (b) this increases the risk to women prisoners; and (c) they genuinely feel unsafe.
And yesterday's judgment makes this more likely.
It is both absurd and horrifying. The effect of the judgment is to diminish the rights of women. Because this is about prisoners no-one will give a damn. Sadly, it will likely be when such a policy is adopted among the non-prison population and some tragedy results that people might start asking some obvious questions about how and why this has occurred.
We seem to have moved beyond gender equality to saying that women are better than men, and no percentage of the former can be high enough.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
I think though that men need to up their game. Women are often out competing us, despite male privilege still in many areas. Medicine is just one of many fields where female abilities with academic and interpersonal skills are ahead of males.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
There is obviously something in male privilege; but it is naive to think that women don't use the situation to their advantage. My own assessment is that some organisations and professions become feminised, as may be happening with medicine. Men may not want to/ or otherwise find it hard to adapt to the situation, they will just vote with their feet. I've seen this happen time and time again; it isn't retreating in to an incel bunker it is exercising freedom of choice.
If women tend to be better at academic learning and interpersonal skills, they will be better doctors. If feminising the profession means having someone who will listen to you before diagnosing, that is great. I've had good and bad doctors, both male and female, but I remember from a few years ago that some of the more traditional, older male doctors were fairly shit. Had no truck with the idea of mental health problems, would diagnose on a whim and persist with the same old same old ineffective treatment. "Oh it's not working. We just need to do some more of it". Standard blinkered I-know-best stereotypical male attitude
We had a female doctor several years whose interpersonal skills ranked among the worst I've known. And I've interacted with a LOT of doctors. We now have one who is the exact opposite, and when I complimented her on them she responded that at Uni she'd been told that she was really good and would really well as a GP. She'd wondered, she said, whether that was a way of telling her she wasn't in the top tier academically.
Some years ago too, I wrote a dissertation on changing practice, and found evidence that some doctors, although they went on course, did so because that was the 'thing to do' and made no changes as a result of what they had 'learned'.
It was an attitude I found in my reading, very typical of the farming community.
Sleep walking through courses that are required for "professional development" happens in many careers.
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Dr. Foxy, aye. But liking a particular sport or period of history is fundamentally different to claiming you don't belong to either gender in vague and strange ways.
Ironically, perhaps, I strongly agree with you on sexual stereotypes, to the extent that some people now think if a chap's into sewing or a girl's into engineering then they're 'really' the other sex.
I'd support the right of a knowing adult to transition, though once again that's beyond me, but marketing this stuff to kids is deeply disturbing, as is the degradation of women's sport and having rapists sent to women's prison when they choose to identify that way.
A very disturbing judgment yesterday in the High Court about transwomen and prisons, essentially saying, that yes rights for men claiming to be women did harm women but too bad, their rights overrode those of women. So a man claiming to be a woman and convicted of sexual offences against women can demand to be put in a woman's prison even though the court accepted that this made women prisoners feel unsafe and put them at risk of attack.
Lovely.
Th
I suspect the only fix for this issue is going to be a small prison or section for transwomen prisoners. Nothing else is practical...
Prisoners who are a risk to other prisoners in terms of sexual and physical assault should be on seperate wings whether male female or trans.
We get a lot of "humour" on here about how X needs to be careful in the showers once he has been sent down. How is that acceptable? And are we to ignore sexual assaults by aggressive lesbians in prison because they are cis?
No the answer is humane prisons for all, as an essential path to rehabilitation, and segregation is often a key part of that for the vulnerable.
I think we've evolved to a sufficient degree to accept that male sexual assault of women, girls, and boys is wrong. That's progress. Cicero could set a jury laughing by saying that a 13 year old actress who was the victim of rape was basically asking for it.
On the other hand, there's quite a widespread view that sexual assault of men by other men is funny. Sexual assault of women by other women is hot. And, as for sexual assault of boys by women, well he should be so lucky.
It's nowhere near as bad as the US, where rape of men and women by other prisoners and the guards is just considered a routine part of the punishment.
Comments
A rare and welcome development
We have two factors which overwhelmingly determine political preference - age and educational level. Income level seems to have become irrelevant.
Most surveys do come out with a figure of around 0.2-0.4% though. We may get some useful data from the recent census.
While there may be some genetic or other physical reason to be non-binary, that doesn't really fit with the epidemiology. We see rates much higher in the young, in some metropolitan areas, etc. This would suggest that sociological acceptance is a bigger factor than physical factors.
We left when the IRA set fire to the house when my grandmother (a toddler) was in there and tried to prevent her father from rescuing her.
It's a view but let's not pretend it's consistent.
However - Lord Cornbury, House of Lords, 1709. Name of Edward Hyde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hyde,_3rd_Earl_of_Clarendon
14 days isolation required
Both double jabbed and he has had one of the other variants last year.
Both now under weather - his SATS were not great last night but better this morning.
His girlfriend said in hindsight they should have socialised less ..........
Somewhat authoritarian measures to exclude things they don't like by kneejerk, without really considering the consequences in the round.
Someone mentioned Japan. But they have a different transport infrastructure than we have in most places here.
Edited extra bit: for the sake of anyone who hasn't had their coffee yet, you can't have just one sex be equal. Like justice being for both accuser and accused, equality between the sexes has to necessarily involve both of them.
According to Wiki,: "The number of births where the baby is intersex has been reported to be as low as 0.018% or as high as roughly 1.7%, depending on which conditions are counted as intersex.[4][5][6] The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%."
So given Intersex is just one class of people, 0.3% sounds perfectly achievable (also assuming that many Intersex people see themselves as non-binary). Yes, there will be people who define themselves as 'nonbinary' for LOLs or attention. There will be far more who have genuine issues with their defined gender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
It's all about ticking boxes to show you're with the times, and then shouting as loudly as you can about how much you applaud it from the rooftops.
Ideally, you then want someone to object to your empty narcissistic grandstanding because you can then fingerpoint them as bigots for that pure virtuous feelgood of moral self-righteousness.
I got on well with them and never saw it as a problem. In the last organisation I worked for, all the senior management roles relevant to my job were staffed by women.
One thing I did notice which was that there was a lot of emphasis from above on the gender pay gap - basically from what I could work out, there were a lot of women working part time on low paid administrative jobs which they had returned to after having children. There were also a lot of men who were in middle ranking jobs who had been there for many years, sometimes 30 years, a legacy of a point where it genuinely was a male dominated organisation. So there was an emphasis to try and get more women to come forward for promotion when the opportunities arose.
I cannot say for certain if this has led to bias in the recruitment process, but what I can say that I started my last job in a group of 9 people, 4 women, 5 men. The 4 women were all promoted in the first 3 years. Of the 5 men, 3 have left to work in the private sector (including myself), the other 2 are still going but have never been promoted.
I wouldn't say that the organisation is prejudiced against men, and I have no complaints about it. But it is definetly a case that women have taken it over and shaped it. For instance, they have made it noticeably more corporate and rules based, which I instinctively disliked. In my last meeting with my manager, she said that it was this that was hindering my progression.
If gender equality were consistent in its philosophy (spoiler: it's not) then we'd hear a bit more about that.
It is no good sitting in some incel bunker, men need to put some effort in.
Puts his pious bleating about his staff into context.
'His newest restaurant, Southside Scran, has been mothballed since last July. Throughout the pandemic he has made redundancies across the Kitchin Group and cut down his team of 240 staff. In an interview with The Scotsman he said: “I had to make 100 people redundant within my company. A hundred people, phoning them up personally and telling them. Having people crying down the phone. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in business.”'
But where I live now on the outskirts of Godalming has a bus service twice a day. It is literally impossible to pursue a normal life without a car or motorbike or similar. Perhaps new estates should be established with a service charge on all houses to subsidise a regular bus service to a transport hub?
A little unusual in land law.
And sometime they just time out (eg there often be one preventing people buying an estate house trying to undermine the finishing of the development) which means nothing once all the houses are occupied, unless it also applies where the developer has further land adjoining.
Lovely.
The case was a judicial review which limits what a court can actually do as the test is whether the prison service has taken into account all the relevant factors in coming to its decision not whether the decision is necessarily right or, indeed, desirable. But the consequence is that once again women's safeguarding is taken less seriously than it should be. Because self-ID is, frankly, a crock of shit. Gender dysphoria is a real thing and people with it are no threat to anyone. But people who claim to have it without more are completely undermining the very real needs of trans people.
Interestingly, as in the Keira Bell case, it appears that the Prison Service has not been collecting data on who in prison is or is not trans and, following this judgment, they will have to do so. Similar to the lack of evidence for some of the medical treatment given to allegedly trans children.
It is alarming when policies with significant consequences for individuals and societies are taken with very little or no data or evidence in support.
The irony about self-ID is that it is fundamentally rooted in old-fashioned stereotypes which feminism has tried hard to overcome. It is also inherently homophobic. After all, if gender is a choice why shouldn't sexuality also be a choice? Which is exactly the argument that a lot of people used against gay people - that homosexuality is a choice and that they had made the wrong choice of an evil lifestyle. Whereas it isn't. And they haven't.
This is happening in my firm right now.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk.pdf
… Majorities say they have at least a little awareness of some key concepts in the culture wars debate – but when it comes to others, most people know very little or nothing about them:
• The UK public are as likely to think being “woke” is a compliment (26%) as they are to think it’s an insult (24%) – and are in fact most likely to say they don’t know what the term means (38%).
• 72% report they have either never heard of the term “microaggressions” or have heard of them but know very little, while 61% say the same about both “cancel culture” and “identity politics”, and 54% are similarly unaware of “trigger warnings”.
• A major exception is “white privilege”: 82% of the public say they’ve heard at least a little about this term, including 55% who say they’ve heard a lot about it – by far the most widely known concept of those asked about.
• When people are asked to describe, in their own words, what sorts of issues the term “culture wars” makes them think of, by far the most common response is that it doesn’t make them think of any (43%).
• And only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area: just over 1% link the term to the Black Lives Matter movement or debates over transgender issues, while under 1% make a connection to the removal of statues, for instance….
I'm quite interested as to why cycling paths were not made a Planning Condition for that development. It is a normal thing to require make a development sustainable.
We need a lot more unbundling of traffic modes to make it more attractive to use cycles than cars.
But when men do worse it's men's fault.
I am quite surprised there has been no demands for reparations from a Celtic rights group. I am only saying this semi humorously.
That does suggest some issues, but based on my entirely anecdotal experience I think the main one is that women with children or indeed elderly parents still tend to be the one who exploit the family friendly policies of teaching for flexible working, rather than their male partners.
Which, of course, severely scars their career progress.
More here.
https://www.qaeducation.co.uk/article/state-schools-male-heads
So, being an obnoxious, demanding bastard does seem to be quite common. Restaurant cookery is one of the most macho work environments, in many ways. As Anthony Bourdain brilliantly described, in his memoir
Reverse-discrimination is not a thing.
It is Discrimination.
Zara Sultana & friends' attempts to deny Jewish people the right to be identified as a 'minority' in the NUS was discrimination - not 'reverse;'.
But, I'd also feel the same the other way round too.
Never made much sense to me.
Three matches have already been served and he is available to play immediately. He has also been fined £3,200
https://twitter.com/ESPNcricinfo/status/1411248529067155456
I was told, when I started training, that if I went into primary education I would be a headteacher within four years, and that was by a female interviewer in a training provider that prided itself on its inclusivity.
Speaking personally, however, I didn’t want to teach in a primary school, and still don’t. I’m interested in teaching A-level, for all the terrible damage Spielman’s incompetence has done. And that’s what I’m best at. Indeed, based on my results I’m one of the top 200 A-level teachers of History in the country.
I think there is still a belief that women are best at managing younger children, and it’s one of those self-reinforcing things that means more women put themselves forward for training and therefore are over represented in the sample size.
Some years ago there was a blog by a male reception teacher who said he faced a lot of discrimination because ‘everyone knows only women teach reception.’
https://timlondinium.wordpress.com/
It makes for interesting reading.
Obstetrics is not surprisingly quite a female speciality and we get quite a lot of occupational back injuries in petite women. Forceps take quite a lot physically from the obstetrician, and often cannot wait.
It's making actual discrimination policy in a belief that's necessary to correct perceived discrimination in society.
It will absolutely create injustices towards real individual people, and fuel resentment accordingly, but for now it isn't challenged much because the risks of doing so are just too high.
https://twitter.com/markrstats/status/1411212680505925638?s=19
I think there is, or was a while ago, an effort to get more men to become primary school teachers, especially in areas with many broken families, to give the boys some acceptable role models.
I know it's fashionable to blame men if they're not doing well compared to women, but it's still hypocritical when women get sympathy in the same situation.
At my younger daughters primary school, which was new and was being built out, year by year, so small, it happened that all the teaching staff so far were women. The headmistress told me that when she hired a male teacher, a group of the other teachers came to her and said that while he was a nice bloke and a good teacher, they felt the presence of a man in a previously all female teachers common room made them feel un-comfortable.
She gave them a piece of her mind.
Just wanted to let you know that divorce isnt funny , and that she has every right to wish for privacy for her and her children, irrespective or her job or husband's job.
Dont be a shit Roger, have a day off.
One problem is that no-one criticises it. No one points out the hypocrisy of the chief executive presiding over a female dominated senior management team and pronouncing that there more work to do. Men are silent, they just vote with their feet by leaving. Is that really what women want?
My son is seven. His teacher and the TA he has had for the last two years are both female. In his time at school, all bar one teacher/TA has been male. His school has two co-heads, one male, one female. Before that, at nursery, all the assistants were female.
It does not bother me one bit.
However: he (hopefully) has a strong male role model at home (i.e. me). I do worry about boys - like a friend of his - who has a single mother and gets no strong adult male role models from school, or at home.
How much do positive gender role models matter? I think quite a lot, especially for kids of single parents.
We get a lot of "humour" on here about how X needs to be careful in the showers once he has been sent down. How is that acceptable? And are we to ignore sexual assaults by aggressive lesbians in prison because they are cis?
No the answer is humane prisons for all, as an essential path to rehabilitation, and segregation is often a key part of that for the vulnerable.
So there’s that
We now have one who is the exact opposite, and when I complimented her on them she responded that at Uni she'd been told that she was really good and would really well as a GP. She'd wondered, she said, whether that was a way of telling her she wasn't in the top tier academically.
Some years ago too, I wrote a dissertation on changing practice, and found evidence that some doctors, although they went on course, did so because that was the 'thing to do' and made no changes as a result of what they had 'learned'.
It was an attitude I found in my reading, very typical of the farming community.
Go to the link and look at the stats for S Korea, though. For tension between those identifying as liberal/traditional, elite/working class, men/women, university educated/uneducated, by different political party affiliation, rich/poor, by social classes, by age, by religion, and urban/rural, they’re at or near the top of each category.
The only exceptions are race or immigration.
What about a motivated bright talented man in his late 20s with no assets or money who's trying to get on?
The only thing he'd have in his favour is sheer weight of numbers (at c.35-40% of the population there aren't enough alternative choices) but there will be plenty of individual injustices within that.
The most likely consequence is political because if people are treated along group lines they will start to organise along group lines, and the consequences of that is not pleasant which is why I don't support it.
And yesterday's judgment makes this more likely.
It is both absurd and horrifying. The effect of the judgment is to diminish the rights of women. Because this is about prisoners no-one will give a damn. Sadly, it will likely be when such a policy is adopted among the non-prison population and some tragedy results that people might start asking some obvious questions about how and why this has occurred.
Meanwhile, large landowners =/= rich peasants.
On the other hand, there's quite a widespread view that sexual assault of men by other men is funny. Sexual assault of women by other women is hot. And, as for sexual assault of boys by women, well he should be so lucky.
It's nowhere near as bad as the US, where rape of men and women by other prisoners and the guards is just considered a routine part of the punishment.