Shakes head...and the problem is after all this crap, they will go to court and if unlucky get £50 fine.
One thing that strikes me about that is that the entire group appears to be white. Couldn't they find an Asian or black protestor for the sake of equality?
It’s an issue already highlighted. The movement is too white and doesn’t focus on inequality.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
I wonder what would happen if the whole world had a first world standard of living.
Presumably no fruit and veg would ever get picked outside of back gardens and allotments.
Or perhaps farmers would then invest in technology so that it could be done quicker and cheaper.
Likewise I wonder what the reaction was when combine harvesters started to be developed - "nah you don't want any of that mate, get a dozen cheap immigrants with scythes - they'll harvest the field in a couple of weeks".
In Peru, back when guano was a thing, they imported tons of Japanese labourers because "The native Peruvians were too lazy to dig shit all day".
This was actually because the native Peruvians wanted more money for the job. Money that enabled them to have luxuries like a house. And food. Fascists, eh?
Plus the big cheeses thought they could kick Japanese workers around more without upsetting the Peruvian people..
Some people objected to this - and were told they were anti-business and nasty.
Sound familiar?
Apparently investing in steam shovels etc was bad - you could always get more Japanese immigrants, cheap.
I am unclear as to what the automation solution is to pick fruit and vegetables from the vine or similar. And how we coped in the past where labourers would accept a shitty standard of living isn't really relevant - this is 2021 and farm labourers expect to be able to live in a house with Sky TV and not be shoved in caravan accommodation with 5 fellow labourers.
So wages are only a part of the issue. We don't physically have the workforce in the places needed nor the ability for people to relocate. We're going to have to invest in housing in the cundryside so that people can get to work when needed. And then find winter work for them.
Add in the costs for all that, plus the money involved, then the impact on paying farm staff the wages they now want and its no wonder "bus in Romanians" was the solution as its just easier.
If we start applying actual production costs, decent wages and a viable margin to food production, consumers are going to have to both accept and find a way to pay for 30-40% higher food prices.
The logical suggestion is to look at how the Japanese manage - they have a much more aged population and a level of immigration that would make Nigel Farage campaign for more immigrants. What are their solutions?
Japan imports around 60% of its food vs our 45%. Of course they have a very different diet than us so the labour requirements are completely different.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
Tories down but Labour making no progress. It's time to get rid of Starmer and get Andy Burnham or Ed Balls a safe seat.
It's not going to happen. Starmer is safer than Johnson because getting rid of him is just about impossible. There is no conceivable route to it happening. He will only go if he wants to.
Then we get 5 more years of Boris. The government looks like it wants to lose but Labour doesn't look like it wants to win.
Most mid-term governments look like they want to lose. Most of them somehow don't.
It's rarer to see an Opposition that just can't be bothered.
I am unthrilled thus far with the Starmer project, love to see more fizz and radicalism, but he has decided to play it the way he's playing it and I have a sneaky feeling it's going to work, defining that as making the next election competitive. Dec 19 was a Con landslide and since then there's been Brexit done (yay!) followed by nothing of the remotest interest to the electorate apart from Covid. There's been no public appetite for hearing either grand visions or detailed alternatives from Labour. "Shut the fuck up, can't you see there's a pandemic on and Boris is doing his best" type thing. With this backdrop, that Labour are closing the gap in the polls bodes well for them. The notion they should be miles ahead "cos it's midterm" is old chestnut bollocks that doesn't pay sufficient regard to the highly unusual circumstances.
That being said, in every mid term I can remember, where the opposition wasn't ahead, people were saying "this time it is different"
The simple truth is that the kind of winners you can spot at this stage are obvious. Thatcher, Smith and Blair had it. Cameron as well.
Starmer isn't that kind of leader.
I think the similarities between Starmer and Cameron are strong. Everyone underestimated Cameron. There was even a TV drama that had him losing to Gordon Brown! It didn't happen of course and the rest is history. I don't particularly want a Labour government for purely selfish family reasons, but I think Starmer is underestimated even more than Cameron was, though for different reasons.
In the case of Cameron, there were alot of people trying to find ways to talk him down - "Hug a hoodie", "Huskies", the chameleon thing.
With Starmer - he seems to need talking up.
Maybe he has it inside him. I think that the legal background has made him practised in seeming detached - which is an issue.
He needs to get out there with a policy program. What is Starmer selling?
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
Taking back control means that our Parliament can make decisions and we can hold them to account and change the government if we don't like them.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
On topic, Starmer is still maybe a bit long or else the odds on next election are out of kilter. ~40% NOM for next election, but ~20% Starmer next PM - got to be >50% chance of Starmer PM in a NOM situation?
That, of course, assumes that Starmer survives to the next election (very likely, surely). Even in the obvious NOM/not Starmer scenario of Con technically short of a majority, but hanging on as technical minority (SF not sitting for example) Starmer might get another bite - he may not step down if he does that well, I guess, so could still be next PM after Johnson, although the risk of another Con PM in between increases.
I think the gap is because, if the Conservatives look like losing under BoJo, they will attempt to dump BoJo. And that person will be "Next PM".
That's certainly possible (although I don't think all that likely) but even if it does happen the aim and expectation would likely be to net a majority? If you're replacing Johnson, it has to be with a pretty good aim to get a majority?
To make sense of the odds, you need a scenario of Johnson replaced, still NOM at, what, ~20%? ~20% NOM and Starmer (or Starmer majority) ~20% NOM and new Con PM before (or after, if Cons hang on) election ~60% Con majority or other things such as Starmer replaced pre election
Is it 20% that Johnson is replaced and the Cons fail to get a majority? Maybe, but I don't really see it. That 20% does also include the NOM with Johnson, Con minority govt and Johnson stands down before next election, of course, but that's also quite slim.
Maybe I'm misjudging it - I'm not sure and so not adding any bets; I've got Starmer at 7.8 and Con maj at 2.4
There's also the tying money up discount I guess - you'd want longer than fair odds to account for that.
If Boris is replaced then Starmer cannot be next PM because Boris's replacement will already be.
Yes, clearly, but I'm comparing the odds of NOM with Starmer next PM (or, really, for my betting position, of a Con majority versus Starmer next PM). The odds of the two only make sense if it's 20% Johnson replaced and* NOM. I find that too high. Or my maths has failed.
*there are some other corner cases in the 20%, as I've mentioned.
Taking Betfair prices, Boris exit date 2024 or later is 1.9 so call it 50 per cent; and NOM is 2.2 so call it 45 per cent. So SKS next PM ought to be 50% of 45% which is 23 per cent. And the Betfair price for Starmer is 4.6 which is 22 per cent. Seems consistent. Whether it's correct is another matter.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I don't see anything suspicious about this at all. Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been banned from leaving the country amid an investigation into his alleged involvement in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A prosecutor is seeking charges against Mr Henry, who has been asked to explain his links with a key suspect in the killing, Joseph Felix Badio.
Records show the two men had multiple phone calls just hours after the assassination, prosecutors say...
On Monday, Mr Henry sent a letter purportedly sacking Chief Prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude and accusing him of a "serious administrative offence". He later nominated a replacement.
However, on Tuesday Mr Claude appeared to remain in his post as he asked a judge investigating the murder of Mr Moïse to charge the prime minister over his "suspected" involvement in the case.
Sources with knowledge of Haiti say it is not in the prime minister's remit to dismiss the prosecutor.
What’s does “sources with knowledge of Haiti” actually mean?
I know Haiti exists*. Therefore I have knowledge of Haiti.
* although, on second thoughts, I have never been there so - more correctly - I believe Haiti exists
Be careful.
That way lies thinking that Australia exists.
A liberal democracy created by fly tipping convicts? Black swans? A national animal that consists of a duck bill sewn to an otter? Which lays eggs?
Madness I tell you. Madness.
But I saw Lillian Thompson bowl at Trent bridge.
The resources put into the Fake Australia thing are incredible.
I even took a "flight" to "Australia" - complete with staying in Fake Melbourne, Fake Sydney and Fake Perth.
But you can't fool me. Not even by painting some swans black.....
I even lived there for a while, but if you pay close attention you can tell its all fake.
Afterall despite being "downunder" at the bottom of the world the ground and your feet are underneath you and the sky is still above. You don't walk around upside down like a bat so this whole downunder claim is clearly fake.
It was quite a shock, the first time we went to Oz, to walk in a direction which we knew was West and realise the sun was to our right. The stars at night were different, too.
Yep, really odd to look at the night sky and find it unfamiliar (my first time in southern hemisphere was in Patagonia, with very clear skies and no light pollution; quite spectacular)
We went on a tour into the outback of South Australia and went for a walk one evening with someone who knew his stars. Best viewing I have ever had - could see the Magellanic Clusters perfectly, never mind the Southern Cross. And the Milky Way was like an accident in the eponymous dairy.
I remember that disconcerting experience of realising the sun was going widdershins rather than the normal right and correct way round the sky. Like a clock going backwards.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
Taking back control means that our Parliament can make decisions and we can hold them to account and change the government if we don't like them.
It doesn't mean any more or less than that.
Like we did in 1974, 1979, 1997, or 2010 for example.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
Taking back control means that our Parliament can make decisions and we can hold them to account and change the government if we don't like them.
It doesn't mean any more or less than that.
Like we did in 1974, 1979, 1997, or 2010 for example.
No. Since in 1997 and 2010 at least (I wasn't alive for the others) the government were able to say they couldn't change certain laws because they were EU powers.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Tories down but Labour making no progress. It's time to get rid of Starmer and get Andy Burnham or Ed Balls a safe seat.
It's not going to happen. Starmer is safer than Johnson because getting rid of him is just about impossible. There is no conceivable route to it happening. He will only go if he wants to.
Then we get 5 more years of Boris. The government looks like it wants to lose but Labour doesn't look like it wants to win.
Most mid-term governments look like they want to lose. Most of them somehow don't.
It's rarer to see an Opposition that just can't be bothered.
I am unthrilled thus far with the Starmer project, love to see more fizz and radicalism, but he has decided to play it the way he's playing it and I have a sneaky feeling it's going to work, defining that as making the next election competitive. Dec 19 was a Con landslide and since then there's been Brexit done (yay!) followed by nothing of the remotest interest to the electorate apart from Covid. There's been no public appetite for hearing either grand visions or detailed alternatives from Labour. "Shut the fuck up, can't you see there's a pandemic on and Boris is doing his best" type thing. With this backdrop, that Labour are closing the gap in the polls bodes well for them. The notion they should be miles ahead "cos it's midterm" is old chestnut bollocks that doesn't pay sufficient regard to the highly unusual circumstances.
That being said, in every mid term I can remember, where the opposition wasn't ahead, people were saying "this time it is different"
The simple truth is that the kind of winners you can spot at this stage are obvious. Thatcher, Smith and Blair had it. Cameron as well.
Starmer isn't that kind of leader.
I think the similarities between Starmer and Cameron are strong. Everyone underestimated Cameron. There was even a TV drama that had him losing to Gordon Brown! It didn't happen of course and the rest is history. I don't particularly want a Labour government for purely selfish family reasons, but I think Starmer is underestimated even more than Cameron was, though for different reasons.
Starmer doesn't have star quality, that much has always been obvious. I have met him, and let's just say I voted for Nandy in the leadership election. It is possible that he still gets to be PM, because governments lose elections at least as much as oppositions win them. He is obviously competent and reasonable, I don't think anyone would be scared of him being PM as they were with Corbyn or Kinnock, say. He's a bit like John Smith in that regard. In one sense his failure to set the world on fire is depressing because it suggests that successful politicians really need to specialise in politics from a young age. We like to think that we'd prefer our leaders to have excelled in some other field beforehand rather than being the familiar crop of student political hacks. But it seems that the latter are just better at the business of politics, sadly.
I don't see anything suspicious about this at all. Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been banned from leaving the country amid an investigation into his alleged involvement in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A prosecutor is seeking charges against Mr Henry, who has been asked to explain his links with a key suspect in the killing, Joseph Felix Badio.
Records show the two men had multiple phone calls just hours after the assassination, prosecutors say...
On Monday, Mr Henry sent a letter purportedly sacking Chief Prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude and accusing him of a "serious administrative offence". He later nominated a replacement.
However, on Tuesday Mr Claude appeared to remain in his post as he asked a judge investigating the murder of Mr Moïse to charge the prime minister over his "suspected" involvement in the case.
Sources with knowledge of Haiti say it is not in the prime minister's remit to dismiss the prosecutor.
What’s does “sources with knowledge of Haiti” actually mean?
I know Haiti exists*. Therefore I have knowledge of Haiti.
* although, on second thoughts, I have never been there so - more correctly - I believe Haiti exists
Be careful.
That way lies thinking that Australia exists.
A liberal democracy created by fly tipping convicts? Black swans? A national animal that consists of a duck bill sewn to an otter? Which lays eggs?
Madness I tell you. Madness.
But I saw Lillian Thompson bowl at Trent bridge.
The resources put into the Fake Australia thing are incredible.
I even took a "flight" to "Australia" - complete with staying in Fake Melbourne, Fake Sydney and Fake Perth.
But you can't fool me. Not even by painting some swans black.....
I even lived there for a while, but if you pay close attention you can tell its all fake.
Afterall despite being "downunder" at the bottom of the world the ground and your feet are underneath you and the sky is still above. You don't walk around upside down like a bat so this whole downunder claim is clearly fake.
It was quite a shock, the first time we went to Oz, to walk in a direction which we knew was West and realise the sun was to our right. The stars at night were different, too.
I never quite got used to the sun's position when in NZ. Loved the different stars, especially when in remote country spots, away from Auckland.
I'm sure if I went there I would snap up a south facing house on South Island. And scrupulously avoid any involvement in the Sydney-Hobart race, because what could be more foolhardy than ocean racing in midwinter?
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
So how much do you expect agricultural production to fall by ?
The ONS shows that it has agricultural output has increased since 2016 despite all the 'foods is rotting in the fields' claims.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
Wow that's pretty horrifying. I did not know that.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
So how much do you expect agricultural production to fall by ?
The ONS shows that it has agricultural output has increased since 2016 despite all the 'foods is rotting in the fields' claims.
Define "agricultural production". Chopping more wheat with a combine may offset volume lost of fruit and vegetables left to rot but doesn't mean that they haven't rotted. Its the same with fish - we may be catching "fish" but what kind of fish?
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Indeed and if consumers want that and are willing to pay a premium for that, then they're free to do so.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Absolutely brilliant sunshine here. A clear blue sky. Limpid autumn light. The Duddon estuary is glinting in the distance. Birds singing. Bees and butterflies buzzing. And the roses and other flowers are in their second flush.
Tories down but Labour making no progress. It's time to get rid of Starmer and get Andy Burnham or Ed Balls a safe seat.
It's not going to happen. Starmer is safer than Johnson because getting rid of him is just about impossible. There is no conceivable route to it happening. He will only go if he wants to.
Then we get 5 more years of Boris. The government looks like it wants to lose but Labour doesn't look like it wants to win.
Most mid-term governments look like they want to lose. Most of them somehow don't.
It's rarer to see an Opposition that just can't be bothered.
I am unthrilled thus far with the Starmer project, love to see more fizz and radicalism, but he has decided to play it the way he's playing it and I have a sneaky feeling it's going to work, defining that as making the next election competitive. Dec 19 was a Con landslide and since then there's been Brexit done (yay!) followed by nothing of the remotest interest to the electorate apart from Covid. There's been no public appetite for hearing either grand visions or detailed alternatives from Labour. "Shut the fuck up, can't you see there's a pandemic on and Boris is doing his best" type thing. With this backdrop, that Labour are closing the gap in the polls bodes well for them. The notion they should be miles ahead "cos it's midterm" is old chestnut bollocks that doesn't pay sufficient regard to the highly unusual circumstances.
That being said, in every mid term I can remember, where the opposition wasn't ahead, people were saying "this time it is different"
The simple truth is that the kind of winners you can spot at this stage are obvious. Thatcher, Smith and Blair had it. Cameron as well.
Starmer isn't that kind of leader.
The lazy, out of touch, Labour supporters on here need to learn the lessons from the past, notably the eighties. Once you shred your credibility, such as managing the economy, which Labour has done in the last GE, those voters aren’t just going to bounce back now they have told themselves, family, friends, they now vote for someone else. It’s hard work to bring them back, election day to election day regardless what mid term protest votes and elections fool you into thinking is happening. And in this instance mid term polling and elections have been dire for Labour - pointing to a comfortable Boris win*
Labour need to understand the difference between a campaigning opposition and a government in waiting. The electorate want to hear certain things from them.
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
*I can’t say with 100% certainty as a small % chance a black swan flies into him.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Indeed and if consumers want that and are willing to pay a premium for that, then they're free to do so.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Either is fine. Let the consumer choose.
Except they can't because the UK producer has gone out of business...
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
So how much do you expect agricultural production to fall by ?
The ONS shows that it has agricultural output has increased since 2016 despite all the 'foods is rotting in the fields' claims.
The previouis poster has often been happy to advocate the reduction of the UK agricultural sector on the grounds of economics. That is a prima facie fall in production which is being advocated.
outrageous anti-sturgeon spin from the mainstream media - any nationalist could have told them that our dear leader would always deliver the right pre-scripted answer, so it must have been the pre-scripted question that was wrong (again)
Tories down but Labour making no progress. It's time to get rid of Starmer and get Andy Burnham or Ed Balls a safe seat.
It's not going to happen. Starmer is safer than Johnson because getting rid of him is just about impossible. There is no conceivable route to it happening. He will only go if he wants to.
Then we get 5 more years of Boris. The government looks like it wants to lose but Labour doesn't look like it wants to win.
Most mid-term governments look like they want to lose. Most of them somehow don't.
It's rarer to see an Opposition that just can't be bothered.
I am unthrilled thus far with the Starmer project, love to see more fizz and radicalism, but he has decided to play it the way he's playing it and I have a sneaky feeling it's going to work, defining that as making the next election competitive. Dec 19 was a Con landslide and since then there's been Brexit done (yay!) followed by nothing of the remotest interest to the electorate apart from Covid. There's been no public appetite for hearing either grand visions or detailed alternatives from Labour. "Shut the fuck up, can't you see there's a pandemic on and Boris is doing his best" type thing. With this backdrop, that Labour are closing the gap in the polls bodes well for them. The notion they should be miles ahead "cos it's midterm" is old chestnut bollocks that doesn't pay sufficient regard to the highly unusual circumstances.
That being said, in every mid term I can remember, where the opposition wasn't ahead, people were saying "this time it is different"
The simple truth is that the kind of winners you can spot at this stage are obvious. Thatcher, Smith and Blair had it. Cameron as well.
Starmer isn't that kind of leader.
I think the similarities between Starmer and Cameron are strong. Everyone underestimated Cameron. There was even a TV drama that had him losing to Gordon Brown! It didn't happen of course and the rest is history. I don't particularly want a Labour government for purely selfish family reasons, but I think Starmer is underestimated even more than Cameron was, though for different reasons.
And let's remember, under his leadership he fairly briskly closed the Conservative-Labour polling gap by Autumn 2020. And the vaccine triumph that caused the stone he had just rolled up the hill to squash him again was, in some ways, a damn close-run thing.
Since Hartlepool (which increasingly does look like Peak Johnson, for now anyway- hat tip to whoever called it at the time) the gap has closed from about 12 points to about 4. You have to step back from the poll-to-poll changes to see it, but it's there. The Conservatives have been losing about a percent a month, half going to Labour and half going elsewhere.
One way of looking at the polling data is that Conservatives are ahead, it's mid-term and that's normally enough to be confident about the next election. That possibility definitely exists.
The other is to notice the current trend and the Conservatives need something to make it bend, or they're in trouble. And the corollary of there being 2 - 3 years until the next election is that the government have less time to turn things round if they need to. And there are lots of unpopular measures already in the diary...
Absolutely brilliant sunshine here. A clear blue sky. Limpid autumn light. The Duddon estuary is glinting in the distance. Birds singing. Bees and butterflies buzzing. And the roses and other flowers are in their second flush.
Utter bliss.
Not quite so bucolic here, but I got a similar sense of utter happiness from being out and about this morning getting a pint of milk and some oragne juice. I mentioned yesterday the slight melancholy feeling about the August bank holiday Monday that summer is over. This is always, always replaced by the joy of sunny September days. The trees starting to change, the light changing. September is perhaps the prettiest month.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
Incidentally after five years of claiming 'the crops are rotting in the fields' wouldn't the farmers concerned either have shifted production to something they could get harvested or gone bankrupt ?
Absolutely brilliant sunshine here. A clear blue sky. Limpid autumn light. The Duddon estuary is glinting in the distance. Birds singing. Bees and butterflies buzzing. And the roses and other flowers are in their second flush.
Utter bliss.
Not quite so bucolic here, but I got a similar sense of utter happiness from being out and about this morning getting a pint of milk and some oragne juice. I mentioned yesterday the slight melancholy feeling about the August bank holiday Monday that summer is over. This is always, always replaced by the joy of sunny September days. The trees starting to change, the light changing. September is perhaps the prettiest month.
A heatwave in September always seemed to coincide with the start of school after a dreary August. The first rugby tackle of the season on a rock-hard pitch. Dragging a packed satchel home with the low sun full-on, hotter than ever. Mellow fruitfulness just a new line to remember for Eng. Lit.
Since the start of the pandemic, the UK internet population has increased by 6% (2.7m), now sitting just shy of 50m. But, what’s interesting is where this increase came from. People, such as my mother, aged 75 and over are driving the increase. The number of people aged 75+ who are online has increased by 43%, in absolute terms that’s up by over a million people.
So, with lots of new people online for the first time ever, do my mother’s changing habits mirror what we’re seeing generally? Broadly speaking, yes. Three of the biggest supermarkets have all seen big increases amongst over 75s. But, as with my mother, we’re also seeing a wider adoption of online services: there is big uptake in food delivery companies and 836,000 more over 75s are visiting Amazon! Similarly, there’s the move to managing finances online.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Indeed and if consumers want that and are willing to pay a premium for that, then they're free to do so.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Either is fine. Let the consumer choose.
Except they can't because the UK producer has gone out of business...
[Citation Needed]
I see Union Jack produce everywhere I go. The data shows that UK produce has gone up not down since 2016. And Rochdale just confirmed that UK consumers actively seek out UK produce which is why supermarkets are willing to stock it (and can charge accordingly).
Maybe start talking about what's actually happening rather than your imagination?
Intderesting comment by Stephen Bush in today's Statesman email re the Llafur/PC cooperation negotiations (not a coalition, AFAIK, but a SNP/SG type agreement):
"Good morning. The Welsh Labour party and Plaid Cymru are inching towards a co-operation agreement that would give the Welsh Labour party a reliable (or, at least, somewhat more reliable) path to a majority in the Senedd.
[...] But it does create problems for Plaid Cymru: Adam Price was and is absolutely right to believe that his party's interests lie in separating his party's identity from Welsh Labour's. His difficulty is, his party's interests also lie in helping to produce social democratic government in Wales. Finding a way to balance those competing interests will decide whether at the next election, Plaid Cymru are able to call the shots: or if they are once again one of a number of possible junior partners for Welsh Labour."
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
It's actually a serious potential problem when trying to write precise English, because of the ambiguity of singular/plural it at once opens up.
Re offspring, 'child' is neutral (but does imply still not grown up).
Energy prices going up will only sharpen attacks on the idea of the PM (or his wife) to make everyone have new, more expensive boilers.
Depends on how efficient the new boilers are vs the old boilers. If a switch to a new boiler cuts your energy consumption in half its probably a good thing. If not...
As an example in our new old house, an early investment was a new boiler. The old one drinking oil at a speldid speed if it were a supertanker engine not a boiler. We've then looked for energy efficiency investments we could make - new windows was high on the list. But as the bill for new windows is £60k, we would have to save spectacular amounts of oil to make it worth the money...
How many windows did you have to replace?
A phased approach, replacing the windows which are leaking the most heat might well catch some low hanging fruit....
My house is just under twenty years old. It was built under the regulations at the time which, whilst not quite as stringent energy-wise as the current ones, still favoured energy saving.
So what windows did they put in this house? Nice, draught-free ones, designed to keep heat in?
Did they ****. They put in sash windows which are as draughty as anything, and leak heat like p*ss from a drunkard.
You can get sash windows which are air tight or better than the traditional ones. Not cheap, mind.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I read the thread she posted from the meeting in Sheffield. It was bizarre. Thrown out for a simple question.
If women need help from a rape crisis centre they may be challenged on their ‘bigotry’ if they are uncomfortable with having male born people in the vicinity.
There was the woman who organised women only cycle races for the survivors of abuse and to commentate the female victims of domestic murder. She was abused and attacked online for not being ‘trans inclusive” even though many of the victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners would feel uncomfortable.
Stonewall have just redefined homosexuality as a same gender rather than same sex attraction. Lesbians are now guilt shamed and abused for not wanting relationships with male bodied people who claim to be women. The cotton ceiling is insidious.
I saw the video of the gay lad at Manchester pride and the abuse he toolkits. Quite a bit was from people who are not gay.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I read the thread she posted from the meeting in Sheffield. It was bizarre. Thrown out for a simple question.
If women need help from a rape crisis centre they may be challenged on their ‘bigotry’ if they are uncomfortable with having male born people in the vicinity.
There was the woman who organised women only cycle races for the survivors of abuse and to commentate the female victims of domestic murder. She was abused and attacked online for not being ‘trans inclusive” even though many of the victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners would feel uncomfortable.
Stonewall have just redefined homosexuality as a same gender rather than same sex attraction. Lesbians are now guilt shamed and abused for not wanting relationships with male bodied people who claim to be women. The cotton ceiling is insidious.
I saw the video of the gay lad at Manchester pride and the abuse he toolkits. Quite a bit was from people who are not gay.
Www.terfisaslur.com is worth looking at.
And then we have the world of hate about bisexuality. As an out bisexual man I have read that my adoption of "bisexual" (which too me 25 years...) is oppressive to people who don't identify with - or accept - the binary two-gender definitions.
The (LGBTwhatever) community needs to Calm Down. Its all getting ridiculously ansty.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Indeed and if consumers want that and are willing to pay a premium for that, then they're free to do so.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Either is fine. Let the consumer choose.
Except they can't because the UK producer has gone out of business...
[Citation Needed]
I see Union Jack produce everywhere I go. The data shows that UK produce has gone up not down since 2016. And Rochdale just confirmed that UK consumers actively seek out UK produce which is why supermarkets are willing to stock it (and can charge accordingly).
Maybe start talking about what's actually happening rather than your imagination?
We are talking about the hypothetical case of a UK producer whose costs have risen to the extent that they are no longer competitive against imports. Logically, they will have gone out of business - the supermarket will likely already have been pricing the item to capture the premium attached to UK produce, and it is doubtful it would allow much margin compression from paying the producer more to reflect their higher costs. Is this actually happening on the ground? I don't know, anecdotally there is some evidence but it's too early to say if it's a general trend. Our discussion was theoretical though, thinking through the thought experiment of what would happen when you increase the costs for domestic producers subject to international competition. This stuff should be easy for you, I thought you were an economist! If you want to have the empirical discussion I suggest we wait for hard data rather than trading anecdotes.
I don’t think anyone was calling Cameron a winner at this point during the 2005-2010 period
Yes they were, Dave was immediately seen as a potential winner for the Tories when he got promoted into the Shadow Cabinet by Howard and then once more when he beat David Davis to the leadership. He also used his set pieces a lot better than anything Starmer has come up with. Do you think Dave would be letting himself be crowded out of the media spotlight in the same way Starmer is right now? No chance, he'd be popping up on the news and all over the media to give his thoughts on all of the serious matters of the day, he'd be getting George out there as well to smash the government on the "jobs tax" as economically illiterate etc...
Labour look nothing like the Tory party of 2005-2010. Dave and George wanted to win and voters understood what voting for them would mean - lower taxes, more personal freedom and less nannying. I follow politics very closely, I post on nerdy political websites like this and I still couldn't tell you what Labour stands for and how a Labour government would make my life better.
Energy prices going up will only sharpen attacks on the idea of the PM (or his wife) to make everyone have new, more expensive boilers.
Depends on how efficient the new boilers are vs the old boilers. If a switch to a new boiler cuts your energy consumption in half its probably a good thing. If not...
As an example in our new old house, an early investment was a new boiler. The old one drinking oil at a speldid speed if it were a supertanker engine not a boiler. We've then looked for energy efficiency investments we could make - new windows was high on the list. But as the bill for new windows is £60k, we would have to save spectacular amounts of oil to make it worth the money...
How many windows did you have to replace?
A phased approach, replacing the windows which are leaking the most heat might well catch some low hanging fruit....
My house is just under twenty years old. It was built under the regulations at the time which, whilst not quite as stringent energy-wise as the current ones, still favoured energy saving.
So what windows did they put in this house? Nice, draught-free ones, designed to keep heat in?
Did they ****. They put in sash windows which are as draughty as anything, and leak heat like p*ss from a drunkard.
You can get sash windows which are air tight or better than the traditional ones. Not cheap, mind.
The traditional ones (really old) were usually good, before 100 years of shit maintenance.... Painting another layer on them and trying to open then with a hammer when they stuck.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I read the thread she posted from the meeting in Sheffield. It was bizarre. Thrown out for a simple question.
If women need help from a rape crisis centre they may be challenged on their ‘bigotry’ if they are uncomfortable with having male born people in the vicinity.
There was the woman who organised women only cycle races for the survivors of abuse and to commentate the female victims of domestic murder. She was abused and attacked online for not being ‘trans inclusive” even though many of the victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners would feel uncomfortable.
Stonewall have just redefined homosexuality as a same gender rather than same sex attraction. Lesbians are now guilt shamed and abused for not wanting relationships with male bodied people who claim to be women. The cotton ceiling is insidious.
I saw the video of the gay lad at Manchester pride and the abuse he toolkits. Quite a bit was from people who are not gay.
Www.terfisaslur.com is worth looking at.
And then we have the world of hate about bisexuality. As an out bisexual man I have read that my adoption of "bisexual" (which too me 25 years...) is oppressive to people who don't identify with - or accept - the binary two-gender definitions.
The (LGBTwhatever) community needs to Calm Down. Its all getting ridiculously ansty.
Really ? Not denying your experience but that is poor. Surely you should be supported in that journey.
On topic, Starmer is still maybe a bit long or else the odds on next election are out of kilter. ~40% NOM for next election, but ~20% Starmer next PM - got to be >50% chance of Starmer PM in a NOM situation?
That, of course, assumes that Starmer survives to the next election (very likely, surely). Even in the obvious NOM/not Starmer scenario of Con technically short of a majority, but hanging on as technical minority (SF not sitting for example) Starmer might get another bite - he may not step down if he does that well, I guess, so could still be next PM after Johnson, although the risk of another Con PM in between increases.
I think the gap is because, if the Conservatives look like losing under BoJo, they will attempt to dump BoJo. And that person will be "Next PM".
That's certainly possible (although I don't think all that likely) but even if it does happen the aim and expectation would likely be to net a majority? If you're replacing Johnson, it has to be with a pretty good aim to get a majority?
To make sense of the odds, you need a scenario of Johnson replaced, still NOM at, what, ~20%? ~20% NOM and Starmer (or Starmer majority) ~20% NOM and new Con PM before (or after, if Cons hang on) election ~60% Con majority or other things such as Starmer replaced pre election
Is it 20% that Johnson is replaced and the Cons fail to get a majority? Maybe, but I don't really see it. That 20% does also include the NOM with Johnson, Con minority govt and Johnson stands down before next election, of course, but that's also quite slim.
Maybe I'm misjudging it - I'm not sure and so not adding any bets; I've got Starmer at 7.8 and Con maj at 2.4
There's also the tying money up discount I guess - you'd want longer than fair odds to account for that.
If Boris is replaced then Starmer cannot be next PM because Boris's replacement will already be.
Yes, clearly, but I'm comparing the odds of NOM with Starmer next PM (or, really, for my betting position, of a Con majority versus Starmer next PM). The odds of the two only make sense if it's 20% Johnson replaced and* NOM. I find that too high. Or my maths has failed.
*there are some other corner cases in the 20%, as I've mentioned.
Taking Betfair prices, Boris exit date 2024 or later is 1.9 so call it 50 per cent; and NOM is 2.2 so call it 45 per cent. So SKS next PM ought to be 50% of 45% which is 23 per cent. And the Betfair price for Starmer is 4.6 which is 22 per cent. Seems consistent. Whether it's correct is another matter.
There are some other complications - e.g. election in 2023, NOM, Boris goes before 2024 but Starmer still next PM, so you have to add whatever that chance is to the 50% of 45% (maybe it's negligible, so still ~ 22-23%)
Anyway, I think we can conclude it's complicated, so I'll stick with my plan to stick with my existing position and not bet any more at these prices. Was just a curiousity really. I put the NOM and not Starmer PM below 20%, but it does depend on how likely you think Johnson is to be defenestrated and how likely the successor would then be to get a majority.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I read the thread she posted from the meeting in Sheffield. It was bizarre. Thrown out for a simple question.
If women need help from a rape crisis centre they may be challenged on their ‘bigotry’ if they are uncomfortable with having male born people in the vicinity.
There was the woman who organised women only cycle races for the survivors of abuse and to commentate the female victims of domestic murder. She was abused and attacked online for not being ‘trans inclusive” even though many of the victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners would feel uncomfortable.
Stonewall have just redefined homosexuality as a same gender rather than same sex attraction. Lesbians are now guilt shamed and abused for not wanting relationships with male bodied people who claim to be women. The cotton ceiling is insidious.
I saw the video of the gay lad at Manchester pride and the abuse he toolkits. Quite a bit was from people who are not gay.
Www.terfisaslur.com is worth looking at.
And then we have the world of hate about bisexuality. As an out bisexual man I have read that my adoption of "bisexual" (which too me 25 years...) is oppressive to people who don't identify with - or accept - the binary two-gender definitions.
The (LGBTwhatever) community needs to Calm Down. Its all getting ridiculously ansty.
I've never really understood why it was so easily assumed that T slotted in with LGB. It's not obvious to me that the two have interests in common. It appears to be getting to the stage where the LGBT lobby is actively anti-gay. Which is somewhat odd, and makes you wonder whether anyone actively intended this to be the case.
Strange - Matt Chorley has tweeted a screenshot from @Conservatives congratulating Chris Grayling on appointment to Party Chairman - but 1) It doesn't appear on the @Conservatives twitter feed and ii) The logo is dark rather than light blue...
Incidentally after five years of claiming 'the crops are rotting in the fields' wouldn't the farmers concerned either have shifted production to something they could get harvested or gone bankrupt ?
How do you know they haven't? Agricultural output is down 12% since the end of 2019.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
Without venturing into the intense debate on this issue, I think that anyone who gets worked up about language change is on a loser. I'm still resistant to "bored of" instead of "bored by", but I recognise that English has moved on and will get over it. Cookie implicitly concedes they (ha) don't have a viable alternative suggestion. There are some really difficult issues here, but the English language ain't one of them.
For anyone interested, it is also worth reading the following on why the proposed Scottish GRA reforms will affect people outside Scotland and the rights of women under the Equality Act. The second also looks at the position in other countries.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
My wife's cousin's son is called Nicola. Her husband is of Italian heritage and they chose an Italian boy's name.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
I expect in a few years time it will be a case that we all have to do it.
It’s more a sign of how this sort of thing is creeping into everyday life. It does no harm I guess.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
In Italy, where the name originates, Nicola is a man's name, so actually that's a bad example! If you work in an international setting it could be quite useful to know the sex of someone called Nicola. Similarly Andrea.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
I wonder what would happen if the whole world had a first world standard of living.
Presumably no fruit and veg would ever get picked outside of back gardens and allotments.
Or perhaps farmers would then invest in technology so that it could be done quicker and cheaper.
Likewise I wonder what the reaction was when combine harvesters started to be developed - "nah you don't want any of that mate, get a dozen cheap immigrants with scythes - they'll harvest the field in a couple of weeks".
But they won't. That is how the world works.
I am loving this new Conservative promotion of workers rights. No need for Len McCluskey when the Tories are doing his work for him. Fantastic!
The effective combination he had was 1) actually changing the Conservative party 2) setting out a plan of what he wanted to do 3) being entirely comfortable with being David Cameron.
Incidentally after five years of claiming 'the crops are rotting in the fields' wouldn't the farmers concerned either have shifted production to something they could get harvested or gone bankrupt ?
How do you know they haven't? Agricultural output is down 12% since the end of 2019.
You do know that there's been this covid thing since then ?
With the ONS agricultural output data suspiciously exactly tracking overall output.
Wait for a year or so and we'll see revised numbers.
If not then we'll see that agricultural output had a big increase in 2021 over 2020 and therefore there cannot be any problem.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
We are encouraged to do it on our email sigs. I have done it. It took 30 seconds.
For anyone with a name such as Sandy or Harpreet it is helpful.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
British consumers want British food. So of course the supermarkets stick Union Flags on everything they can, consumers literally look for it.
Indeed and if consumers want that and are willing to pay a premium for that, then they're free to do so.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Either is fine. Let the consumer choose.
Except they can't because the UK producer has gone out of business...
[Citation Needed]
I see Union Jack produce everywhere I go. The data shows that UK produce has gone up not down since 2016. And Rochdale just confirmed that UK consumers actively seek out UK produce which is why supermarkets are willing to stock it (and can charge accordingly).
Maybe start talking about what's actually happening rather than your imagination?
We are talking about the hypothetical case of a UK producer whose costs have risen to the extent that they are no longer competitive against imports. Logically, they will have gone out of business - the supermarket will likely already have been pricing the item to capture the premium attached to UK produce, and it is doubtful it would allow much margin compression from paying the producer more to reflect their higher costs. Is this actually happening on the ground? I don't know, anecdotally there is some evidence but it's too early to say if it's a general trend. Our discussion was theoretical though, thinking through the thought experiment of what would happen when you increase the costs for domestic producers subject to international competition. This stuff should be easy for you, I thought you were an economist! If you want to have the empirical discussion I suggest we wait for hard data rather than trading anecdotes.
Its only logical if people aren't prepared to pay a premium, but people are prepared to pay a premium.
In economics not everything comes down to the lowest price, indeed some products are Veblen goods were the desire for the product increases the more expensive it is. Some might argue that applies to Apple goods. 😉
Since the consumers are willing to pay a premium for goods with a Union Jack on it, the Supermarkets can charge a premium, which means that the farmers can charge a premium. See how it works?
If the price for a good rises to the point consumers aren't willing to pay for it, then the Supermarkets will cease to pay for it too, meaning the farmers will cease to produce it. However the land will still exist, so the farmers can switch from producing what they're ineffective at producing and instead switch to a more competitive, more effective produce instead.
The notion that its all or nothing is completely fallacious and has no grounding in economics. Economics works with slopes and changes not binary success or complete and total destruction.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
Without venturing into the intense debate on this issue, I think that anyone who gets worked up about language change is on a loser. I'm still resistant to "bored of" instead of "bored by", but I recognise that English has moved on and will get over it. Cookie implicitly concedes they (ha) don't have a viable alternative suggestion. There are some really difficult issues here, but the English language ain't one of them.
Oh I do (implicitly concede) that Nick. It would be very useful to have had a viable alternative back in the days when we needed it only for 'I may be referring to either a man or a woman'. Though in all honesty - I am a middle aged suburban northerner after all - I can't help feeling that anyone who rejects the use of both 'he' and 'she' is being a tad self-indulgent. But that is a separate point. The point is that 'they' already means something else and when you use it to mean a single person you are using it wrongly. (And if you use it to refer to a single person, you should be saying 'They is', not 'They are'.)
But anyway, we SHOULD rail against the lazy or inaccurate use of language. I will happily join you in your crusade against 'bored of'. Similarly, I always flinch slightly at 'try and' rather than 'try to'. And I will silently seethe at the use of 'disinterested' to mean 'indifferent'. (I cannot enjoy the Elbow album 'The Seldom Seen Kid' until after the first two minutes, which I spend cringing with anticipation of the lyric 'a weary and disinterested sigh'.) I don't mind ADDING to language. But losing perfectly serviceable words because someone has decided those words now mean something else upsets me.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
Without venturing into the intense debate on this issue, I think that anyone who gets worked up about language change is on a loser. I'm still resistant to "bored of" instead of "bored by", but I recognise that English has moved on and will get over it. Cookie implicitly concedes they (ha) don't have a viable alternative suggestion. There are some really difficult issues here, but the English language ain't one of them.
It's not really a question of language, Nick. It's about not being bullied into validating someone else's opinion of themselves. It's about not being forced to deny the evidence of one's own eyes. I am not going to call a man a woman when they aren't one. Truth and facts matter. It is not hate or bigotry to call a man a man or a woman a woman.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
Alternatively supermarkets are already paying a premium for buying British, in order to advertise that they're selling British.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
My favourite is the co-op which sells bags of ice ‘made from British water’. With a Union Jack. Of course
Incidentally after five years of claiming 'the crops are rotting in the fields' wouldn't the farmers concerned either have shifted production to something they could get harvested or gone bankrupt ?
How do you know they haven't? Agricultural output is down 12% since the end of 2019.
You do know that there's been this covid thing since then ?
With the ONS agricultural output data suspiciously exactly tracking overall output.
Wait for a year or so and we'll see revised numbers.
If not then we'll see that agricultural output had a big increase in 2021 over 2020 and therefore there cannot be any problem.
Hardly tracking overall output, the latter is down just 2.4% over the same period. Not seeing the same pattern in other Covid affected countries like France, Italy or Spain either. Sure let's look again when data are revised, but I doubt they will change that much.
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
Absolutely the market will ultimately find an equilibrium but there is absolutely no reason for British people to be too thick/unskilled/unmotivated to do jobs if they're offered a decent salary to do them.
And if you want to import labour to do it, then you're still able to do so. The basic requirement now though is that the job must come with a job offer of at least £30,000 salary.
If you're paying that salary then you can still sponsor visas to get people in. If you're not, maybe you should try doing that first before complaining about a lack of motivation.
We will just import the goods instead of the people. That's bad news from the point of view of the economy but if your main goal is population reduction (which as I understand it seems to be the main goal of Brexiteers) then job done.
If imported goods are at a competitive advantage then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the economy.
Though its not as if importing people to work in minimum wage sweatshops has led to us having a balance of trade surplus anyway is it?
They're only competitive because we have made ourselves uncompetitive. It means higher prices for consumers and a smaller economy. Like I say, if you put a high weight on limiting the resident population then maybe that's worth it, but you can't make out it's an economic gain because it isn't. We have a current account and trade deficit because we have a financial account surplus, the whole thing is in balance and we have a floating exchange rate which adjusts to keep inflows and outflows in balance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with running a trade deficit. I would like us to have a stronger manufacturing and export sector but if that's your goal too then your support for Brexit is bizarre!
It doesn't mean higher prices for consumers because we can simply import whatever we're uncompetitive in at market prices.
And as for the size of the economy, it depends upon whether you're measuring GNI or GNI per capita. Personally I'd rather a higher GNI per capita and deflating our income by importing people to do unnecessary below-average jobs that then get subsidised by claiming "in-work benefits" paid for by our taxes is something that makes us poorer not richer per capita.
I'm all for having more immigration, so long as the immigration comes at the top of the skill and income scale making us richer per capita, not at the bottom of it deflating our skills and incomes. Those at the top of the pyramid can still get a visa.
Prices will be higher. Pre-Brexit, prices of UK produced goods must be cheaper than their imported counterparts, otherwise supermarkets would be buying the imports. Post Brexit, the domestic cost base goes up until the price is higher than the price of the imported competitors. At that point the supermarket buys the more expensive imports, passes the price rise onto consumers, and the domestic firm goes out of business. Now you may argue we are better off without those people in the country for whatever reason, that's fine. But it will mean a smaller economy and higher prices.
And a loss of strategic control in some key areas. Especially on food. So much for taking back control.
Taking back control means that our Parliament can make decisions and we can hold them to account and change the government if we don't like them.
It doesn't mean any more or less than that.
A majority never liked them in the first place yet we are stuck with them until 2023
Under the Tories they are getting a pay rise though, as wages are going up. Labour flooded the market with cheap EU workers, their traditional voters left over it whilst Sir Keir fought tooth and nail for the system that caused it to remain
All workers are not lorry drivers and of course what is the point of pay rises if they don't keep up with inflation created by £1000k p a lorry drivers.
Meat packers, restaurant staff, HGV drivers are all in high demand, and wages are going up as a consequence. There are jobs available and opportunities to be grabbed.
Both parties are taking with one hand and giving with the other, it comes down to what you prefer - higher wages and more job opportunities with the Tories, but 1.25% more NI, or lower wages and less job security with Labour, but they do something else they haven’t specified yet to raise money - tax the boss, so he pays you less/doesn’t employ as many people
But the other side of that coin is how do the £100k p a truck drivers get the raise? Higher prices. Your analysis is simplistic and thus spurious.
So what if the price of trucking rises to pay a decent salary?
What percentage of a goods on-the-shelf price is the pay of the trucker that moved it?
The myopic Brexit salary bonus merchants like yourself do not see the other side of the coin. I grant you Brexit along with Covid has created shortages of people in certain employment sectors and current supply and demand issues are driving salaries up. I hand it to you, at the moment that is a Brexit bonanza.
However the other side of the picture is that the reason we had well educated Eastern Europeans working in the industry I work in, Waste Management, was because they could do the jobs that domestic employees didn't have the motivation, skills or aptitude to do, i.e. sorting recyclables on a picking line. Johnny Foreigner didn't steal our jobs, they were welcome to them. Likewise fruit picking and vegetable harvesting, hard work that we can't be arsed to do. So what happens if we can't fill these vacancies? The job doesn't get done and fruit and veg rot in the fields, which then reduces supply and increases inflation. Also, wage hikes in retail and hospitality sectors are causing panic as employers say we can't afford them and shut up shop. Something I daresay a market economist like you agrees with. Meanwhile how long do you think the £100k trucker will last? When supply increases in a couple of years the salaries equalise again. I saw this a few years ago with tanker drivers.
By all means pay people their worth, but you have always advocated the market sets its labour costs, and over time the £100k trucker will become the stuff of legend.
Off to work!
I wonder what would happen if the whole world had a first world standard of living.
Presumably no fruit and veg would ever get picked outside of back gardens and allotments.
Or perhaps farmers would then invest in technology so that it could be done quicker and cheaper.
Likewise I wonder what the reaction was when combine harvesters started to be developed - "nah you don't want any of that mate, get a dozen cheap immigrants with scythes - they'll harvest the field in a couple of weeks".
In Peru, back when guano was a thing, they imported tons of Japanese labourers because "The native Peruvians were too lazy to dig shit all day".
This was actually because the native Peruvians wanted more money for the job. Money that enabled them to have luxuries like a house. And food. Fascists, eh?
Plus the big cheeses thought they could kick Japanese workers around more without upsetting the Peruvian people..
Some people objected to this - and were told they were anti-business and nasty.
Sound familiar?
Apparently investing in steam shovels etc was bad - you could always get more Japanese immigrants, cheap.
I am unclear as to what the automation solution is to pick fruit and vegetables from the vine or similar. And how we coped in the past where labourers would accept a shitty standard of living isn't really relevant - this is 2021 and farm labourers expect to be able to live in a house with Sky TV and not be shoved in caravan accommodation with 5 fellow labourers.
So wages are only a part of the issue. We don't physically have the workforce in the places needed nor the ability for people to relocate. We're going to have to invest in housing in the cundryside so that people can get to work when needed. And then find winter work for them.
Add in the costs for all that, plus the money involved, then the impact on paying farm staff the wages they now want and its no wonder "bus in Romanians" was the solution as its just easier.
If we start applying actual production costs, decent wages and a viable margin to food production, consumers are going to have to both accept and find a way to pay for 30-40% higher food prices.
The PB Tories "never a downside" to their economic and business plans is wonderfully positive.
Strange - Matt Chorley has tweeted a screenshot from @Conservatives congratulating Chris Grayling on appointment to Party Chairman - but 1) It doesn't appear on the @Conservatives twitter feed and ii) The logo is dark rather than light blue...
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
In Italy, where the name originates, Nicola is a man's name, so actually that's a bad example! If you work in an international setting it could be quite useful to know the sex of someone called Nicola. Similarly Andrea.
Ha, fair point. As confusion around our own @AndreaParma_82 has often shown.
Energy prices going up will only sharpen attacks on the idea of the PM (or his wife) to make everyone have new, more expensive boilers.
Depends on how efficient the new boilers are vs the old boilers. If a switch to a new boiler cuts your energy consumption in half its probably a good thing. If not...
As an example in our new old house, an early investment was a new boiler. The old one drinking oil at a speldid speed if it were a supertanker engine not a boiler. We've then looked for energy efficiency investments we could make - new windows was high on the list. But as the bill for new windows is £60k, we would have to save spectacular amounts of oil to make it worth the money...
How many windows did you have to replace?
A phased approach, replacing the windows which are leaking the most heat might well catch some low hanging fruit....
My house is just under twenty years old. It was built under the regulations at the time which, whilst not quite as stringent energy-wise as the current ones, still favoured energy saving.
So what windows did they put in this house? Nice, draught-free ones, designed to keep heat in?
Did they ****. They put in sash windows which are as draughty as anything, and leak heat like p*ss from a drunkard.
You can get sash windows which are air tight or better than the traditional ones. Not cheap, mind.
The traditional ones (really old) were usually good, before 100 years of shit maintenance.... Painting another layer on them and trying to open then with a hammer when they stuck.
Currently on a long-term project to return our Georgian windows to plain wood. Stripping away layers of lead-based paint exposes some curious colour preferences. When oh when was brown ever fashionable? They look nice when they're done, though. A pleasing blend of oak and beech, probably in better shape than the brickwork and therefore doing their bit to hold the house up.
There are some real serious inflationary pressures not about to go away:
1. Energy prices are shooting up. As we don't have enough generating capacity it isn't in our control to bring them back down 2. Commodity prices are shooting up. Stuff that we either need for manufacturing or consume costs more globally and the up pressures are not easing off any time soon 3. Climate impact on harvests skyrocketing prices. I flagged the threat to pasta supply caused by the failed Canadian harvest - oats will be the same. Where we have had a good harvest largely in the UK we're losing the upside by not being able to pick it 4. Brexit costs. Despite the "just kick checks into the long grass" that is only physical checks. Importing anything into the UK is a painful, long and expensive process. Export more so where so many small exporters are now priced out of the EU market completely 5. Wage inflation. We cannot sustain repeated 20% pay rises for crisis staff like drivers. You cannot pay your way out of job crisis unless there is a pool of labour ready to enter the sector. Same with care homes. Same with food production.
At the very least, the "there is nothing to see here, please disperse" commentators are showing that dogma trumps evidence...
We built an economy that made rentiers and providers of capital rich at the expense of the working poor. That was neither right nor sustainable. It will be painful to rebalance it, but that is the right thing to do.
It’s slightly surprising that I am more concerned about the long term welfare of our people than you seem to be
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
Without venturing into the intense debate on this issue, I think that anyone who gets worked up about language change is on a loser. I'm still resistant to "bored of" instead of "bored by", but I recognise that English has moved on and will get over it. Cookie implicitly concedes they (ha) don't have a viable alternative suggestion. There are some really difficult issues here, but the English language ain't one of them.
Tories into 39 with another pollster. Down down down
We aren't exactly the beneficiaries, however.
Labour seem to be marooned and should be well ahead mid term especially with all HMG's problems with covid and brexit
Starmer is a lawyer, and not really a politician, and his ratings of -18 (-8 on the week) after the week Boris has had should cause alarm in labour circles
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Not that Johnson craves popularity..... As the reshuffle speculation reaches fever pitch here in Westminster, your handy reminder of what Conservative members make of the cabinet’s performance (via @ConHome).
On topic, Starmer is still maybe a bit long or else the odds on next election are out of kilter. ~40% NOM for next election, but ~20% Starmer next PM - got to be >50% chance of Starmer PM in a NOM situation?
That, of course, assumes that Starmer survives to the next election (very likely, surely). Even in the obvious NOM/not Starmer scenario of Con technically short of a majority, but hanging on as technical minority (SF not sitting for example) Starmer might get another bite - he may not step down if he does that well, I guess, so could still be next PM after Johnson, although the risk of another Con PM in between increases.
I think the gap is because, if the Conservatives look like losing under BoJo, they will attempt to dump BoJo. And that person will be "Next PM".
That's certainly possible (although I don't think all that likely) but even if it does happen the aim and expectation would likely be to net a majority? If you're replacing Johnson, it has to be with a pretty good aim to get a majority?
To make sense of the odds, you need a scenario of Johnson replaced, still NOM at, what, ~20%? ~20% NOM and Starmer (or Starmer majority) ~20% NOM and new Con PM before (or after, if Cons hang on) election ~60% Con majority or other things such as Starmer replaced pre election
Is it 20% that Johnson is replaced and the Cons fail to get a majority? Maybe, but I don't really see it. That 20% does also include the NOM with Johnson, Con minority govt and Johnson stands down before next election, of course, but that's also quite slim.
Maybe I'm misjudging it - I'm not sure and so not adding any bets; I've got Starmer at 7.8 and Con maj at 2.4
There's also the tying money up discount I guess - you'd want longer than fair odds to account for that.
If Boris is replaced then Starmer cannot be next PM because Boris's replacement will already be.
Yes, clearly, but I'm comparing the odds of NOM with Starmer next PM (or, really, for my betting position, of a Con majority versus Starmer next PM). The odds of the two only make sense if it's 20% Johnson replaced and* NOM. I find that too high. Or my maths has failed.
*there are some other corner cases in the 20%, as I've mentioned.
Taking Betfair prices, Boris exit date 2024 or later is 1.9 so call it 50 per cent; and NOM is 2.2 so call it 45 per cent. So SKS next PM ought to be 50% of 45% which is 23 per cent. And the Betfair price for Starmer is 4.6 which is 22 per cent. Seems consistent. Whether it's correct is another matter.
There are some other complications - e.g. election in 2023, NOM, Boris goes before 2024 but Starmer still next PM, so you have to add whatever that chance is to the 50% of 45% (maybe it's negligible, so still ~ 22-23%)
Anyway, I think we can conclude it's complicated, so I'll stick with my plan to stick with my existing position and not bet any more at these prices. Was just a curiousity really. I put the NOM and not Starmer PM below 20%, but it does depend on how likely you think Johnson is to be defenestrated and how likely the successor would then be to get a majority.
No, you may be on the right track. The current prices seem to be consistent with each other so there is no obvious arb (although there might be if compared with some other market) but that is different from saying they are correct, so there could be great value somewhere.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
He turned up to Manchester Pride in an LGB Alliance cap and shirt. LGB Alliance are not anti trans, they are pro same sex.
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
Not that Johnson craves popularity..... As the reshuffle speculation reaches fever pitch here in Westminster, your handy reminder of what Conservative members make of the cabinet’s performance (via @ConHome).
Not that Johnson craves popularity..... As the reshuffle speculation reaches fever pitch here in Westminster, your handy reminder of what Conservative members make of the cabinet’s performance (via @ConHome).
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
No confirmation on a reshuffle. But fair to say no work in SW1 is getting done until it is (or it’s ruled out). Meetings / events being cancelled, decision making grinding to a halt & lots of ministers focused on whether their career is about to go up, stay the same or end
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Gosh that's horrendous. I agree, international pressure should be applied and the Faroese need to take a good look at themselves.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
Yes, it's creeping in among senior managers in my place too. To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure. But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
I expect in a few years time it will be a case that we all have to do it.
It’s more a sign of how this sort of thing is creeping into everyday life. It does no harm I guess.
I'm not going to do it. Reason being, for all that I accept my sex/gender as a physical fact, it shouldn't make any difference to anyone else except in very limited circumstances, so it doesn't matter.
Why would I be insulted if someone misgendered me? Being mistaken for a woman (or vice versa) shouldn't be viewed as derogatory.
For this reason what I have done is to stop providing a title for any online forms where it isn't compulsory to select one of Mr/Ms/etc.
Not that Johnson craves popularity..... As the reshuffle speculation reaches fever pitch here in Westminster, your handy reminder of what Conservative members make of the cabinet’s performance (via @ConHome).
Whats Amanda Milling done to offend? Seems very anonymous to me?
I think you have answered your own question
She is anonymous
So are Dowden, Coffey, Eustice, Spencer, Jack, Lewis, Hart and Sharma but they poll between +12 and +43 yet Milling is on -16, the only negative apart from Frank. She must have done something?
Comments
It’s an issue already highlighted. The movement is too white and doesn’t focus on inequality.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/04/extinction-rebellion-race-climate-crisis-inequality
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/21/five-ways-to-make-the-climate-movement-less-white
With Starmer - he seems to need talking up.
Maybe he has it inside him. I think that the legal background has made him practised in seeming detached - which is an issue.
He needs to get out there with a policy program. What is Starmer selling?
It doesn't mean any more or less than that.
I'm not sure what its like at Waitrose since I don't shop there, but go to Morrisons, Aldi or Tesco's and there's a prominent Union Jack on everything they can put it on.
Supermarkets are bigger "flegshaggers" than the government are.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
I remember that disconcerting experience of realising the sun was going widdershins rather than the normal right and correct way round the sky. Like a clock going backwards.
So not like that at all.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
It is possible that he still gets to be PM, because governments lose elections at least as much as oppositions win them. He is obviously competent and reasonable, I don't think anyone would be scared of him being PM as they were with Corbyn or Kinnock, say. He's a bit like John Smith in that regard.
In one sense his failure to set the world on fire is depressing because it suggests that successful politicians really need to specialise in politics from a young age. We like to think that we'd prefer our leaders to have excelled in some other field beforehand rather than being the familiar crop of student political hacks. But it seems that the latter are just better at the business of politics, sadly.
The ONS shows that it has agricultural output has increased since 2016 despite all the 'foods is rotting in the fields' claims.
The idiots at Heathrow should have been charged with endangering aircraft - for which one can expect to be sent to the Crown Court for sentencing.
If other consumers are more budget conscious, they can go for cheaper imported food at world market prices.
Either is fine. Let the consumer choose.
Utter bliss.
Labour need to understand the difference between a campaigning opposition and a government in waiting. The electorate want to hear certain things from them.
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
*I can’t say with 100% certainty as a small % chance a black swan flies into him.
https://twitter.com/kevverage/status/1438058733368717317?s=20
Since Hartlepool (which increasingly does look like Peak Johnson, for now anyway- hat tip to whoever called it at the time) the gap has closed from about 12 points to about 4. You have to step back from the poll-to-poll changes to see it, but it's there. The Conservatives have been losing about a percent a month, half going to Labour and half going elsewhere.
One way of looking at the polling data is that Conservatives are ahead, it's mid-term and that's normally enough to be confident about the next election. That possibility definitely exists.
The other is to notice the current trend and the Conservatives need something to make it bend, or they're in trouble. And the corollary of there being 2 - 3 years until the next election is that the government have less time to turn things round if they need to. And there are lots of unpopular measures already in the diary...
I mentioned yesterday the slight melancholy feeling about the August bank holiday Monday that summer is over. This is always, always replaced by the joy of sunny September days. The trees starting to change, the light changing. September is perhaps the prettiest month.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
So, with lots of new people online for the first time ever, do my mother’s changing habits mirror what we’re seeing generally? Broadly speaking, yes. Three of the biggest supermarkets have all seen big increases amongst over 75s. But, as with my mother, we’re also seeing a wider adoption of online services: there is big uptake in food delivery companies and 836,000 more over 75s are visiting Amazon! Similarly, there’s the move to managing finances online.
https://iris.ipsos.com/over-75s-fuelling-uk-online-growth/
I see Union Jack produce everywhere I go. The data shows that UK produce has gone up not down since 2016. And Rochdale just confirmed that UK consumers actively seek out UK produce which is why supermarkets are willing to stock it (and can charge accordingly).
Maybe start talking about what's actually happening rather than your imagination?
"Good morning. The Welsh Labour party and Plaid Cymru are inching towards a co-operation agreement that would give the Welsh Labour party a reliable (or, at least, somewhat more reliable) path to a majority in the Senedd.
[...] But it does create problems for Plaid Cymru: Adam Price was and is absolutely right to believe that his party's interests lie in separating his party's identity from Welsh Labour's. His difficulty is, his party's interests also lie in helping to produce social democratic government in Wales. Finding a way to balance those competing interests will decide whether at the next election, Plaid Cymru are able to call the shots: or if they are once again one of a number of possible junior partners for Welsh Labour."
Tories into 39 with another pollster. Down down down
Re offspring, 'child' is neutral (but does imply still not grown up).
If women need help from a rape crisis centre they may be challenged on their ‘bigotry’ if they are uncomfortable with having male born people in the vicinity.
https://thecritic.co.uk/reframe-your-trauma/
There was the woman who organised women only cycle races for the survivors of abuse and to commentate the female victims of domestic murder. She was abused and attacked online for not being ‘trans inclusive” even though many of the victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their male partners would feel uncomfortable.
Stonewall have just redefined homosexuality as a same gender rather than same sex attraction. Lesbians are now guilt shamed and abused for not wanting relationships with male bodied people who claim to be women. The cotton ceiling is insidious.
I saw the video of the gay lad at Manchester pride and the abuse he toolkits. Quite a bit was from people who are not gay.
Www.terfisaslur.com is worth looking at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_local_elections
'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
The (LGBTwhatever) community needs to Calm Down. Its all getting ridiculously ansty.
Is this actually happening on the ground? I don't know, anecdotally there is some evidence but it's too early to say if it's a general trend. Our discussion was theoretical though, thinking through the thought experiment of what would happen when you increase the costs for domestic producers subject to international competition. This stuff should be easy for you, I thought you were an economist! If you want to have the empirical discussion I suggest we wait for hard data rather than trading anecdotes.
Labour look nothing like the Tory party of 2005-2010. Dave and George wanted to win and voters understood what voting for them would mean - lower taxes, more personal freedom and less nannying. I follow politics very closely, I post on nerdy political websites like this and I still couldn't tell you what Labour stands for and how a Labour government would make my life better.
It’s an horrendous debate. Awful.
Anyway, I think we can conclude it's complicated, so I'll stick with my plan to stick with my existing position and not bet any more at these prices. Was just a curiousity really. I put the NOM and not Starmer PM below 20%, but it does depend on how likely you think Johnson is to be defenestrated and how likely the successor would then be to get a majority.
It appears to be getting to the stage where the LGBT lobby is actively anti-gay. Which is somewhat odd, and makes you wonder whether anyone actively intended this to be the case.
Why then, do they need to slaughter nearly 1,500 dolphins IN ONE DAY
A hideous frenzy. Drone the Faroes. Or sanction them. Ugh
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/14/outcry-over-killing-of-almost-1500-dolphins-on-faroe-islands?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/1438076077868470272?s=20
To be fair, in some cases, it's useful. I'm sure we've all had emails from someone with an unusual name and been unsure.
But it's rarely used like that. Someone called 'Nicola' informing you that she is a woman is doing so entirely performatively.
1. https://fairplayforwomen.com/crossborder/
2. https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2021/09/08/gender-recognition-reform-and-international-developments/
3. https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2021/09/10/gender-recognition-reform-are-womens-concerns-valid/
It’s more a sign of how this sort of thing is creeping into everyday life. It does no harm I guess.
I am loving this new Conservative promotion of workers rights. No need for Len McCluskey when the Tories are doing his work for him. Fantastic!
I have just had a smart meter installed which is useful but to be honest you need a degree in maths to even start to understand these bills
They may serve the energy industry and also make rises easier to disguise but it is just wrong that any bill should be so complex to any consumer
And my monthly direct debit has just risen 40%
I remember when they tried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_the_Chameleon - Cameron killed it by commenting that his children rather liked it.
The effective combination he had was 1) actually changing the Conservative party 2) setting out a plan of what he wanted to do 3) being entirely comfortable with being David Cameron.
With the ONS agricultural output data suspiciously exactly tracking overall output.
Wait for a year or so and we'll see revised numbers.
If not then we'll see that agricultural output had a big increase in 2021 over 2020 and therefore there cannot be any problem.
For anyone with a name such as Sandy or Harpreet it is helpful.
In economics not everything comes down to the lowest price, indeed some products are Veblen goods were the desire for the product increases the more expensive it is. Some might argue that applies to Apple goods. 😉
Since the consumers are willing to pay a premium for goods with a Union Jack on it, the Supermarkets can charge a premium, which means that the farmers can charge a premium. See how it works?
If the price for a good rises to the point consumers aren't willing to pay for it, then the Supermarkets will cease to pay for it too, meaning the farmers will cease to produce it. However the land will still exist, so the farmers can switch from producing what they're ineffective at producing and instead switch to a more competitive, more effective produce instead.
The notion that its all or nothing is completely fallacious and has no grounding in economics. Economics works with slopes and changes not binary success or complete and total destruction.
It would be very useful to have had a viable alternative back in the days when we needed it only for 'I may be referring to either a man or a woman'.
Though in all honesty - I am a middle aged suburban northerner after all - I can't help feeling that anyone who rejects the use of both 'he' and 'she' is being a tad self-indulgent. But that is a separate point. The point is that 'they' already means something else and when you use it to mean a single person you are using it wrongly. (And if you use it to refer to a single person, you should be saying 'They is', not 'They are'.)
But anyway, we SHOULD rail against the lazy or inaccurate use of language. I will happily join you in your crusade against 'bored of'. Similarly, I always flinch slightly at 'try and' rather than 'try to'. And I will silently seethe at the use of 'disinterested' to mean 'indifferent'. (I cannot enjoy the Elbow album 'The Seldom Seen Kid' until after the first two minutes, which I spend cringing with anticipation of the lyric 'a weary and disinterested sigh'.)
I don't mind ADDING to language. But losing perfectly serviceable words because someone has decided those words now mean something else upsets me.
It’s slightly surprising that I am more concerned about the long term welfare of our people than you seem to be
Starmer is a lawyer, and not really a politician, and his ratings of -18 (-8 on the week) after the week Boris has had should cause alarm in labour circles
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
As the reshuffle speculation reaches fever pitch here in Westminster, your handy reminder of what Conservative members make of the cabinet’s performance (via @ConHome).
https://twitter.com/GuardianHeather/status/1438083135896489993?s=20
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
You want bigotry. Read this.
Www.terfisaslur.com
She is anonymous
https://twitter.com/peter_elephants/status/1437834801432641542?s=21
https://twitter.com/jonie1303/status/1437834939295219722?s=21
https://twitter.com/seashepherd_uk/status/1437702281512771585?s=21
https://twitter.com/foreverartsakh/status/1438057310778269696?s=21
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1438080134544777219?s=20
Why would I be insulted if someone misgendered me? Being mistaken for a woman (or vice versa) shouldn't be viewed as derogatory.
For this reason what I have done is to stop providing a title for any online forms where it isn't compulsory to select one of Mr/Ms/etc.