Starmer’s successor looks set to be one of these three – politicalbetting.com

TOPPING said:

MrEd said:

MrEd said:

MattW said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.

No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.

"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.

What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.

Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?

On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:

1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x

Damn didn’t finish

2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.

I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.

Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

kinabalu said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -

1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.

2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.

3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.

There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.

#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.

#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?

#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.

You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.

The rest is fluff.

No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.

Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.

You are not allowed to not accept it because I'm guessing that for years and years not only have candidates been equal but, whisper it, minority candidates have been better but have been passed over because they have been minorities. There has been discrimination for years and years and the better candidate has time and again been looked over in favour of someone not from a minority background.

And now you are on your high horse bleating about how everyone should be treated equally.

I've always been in favour of treating everyone equally. Failing to do so is bad for minorities.

The Party of All Women Shortlists and discrimination has never had a female leader. The Party of treating everyone as an individual not a group has had two, and has the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever.

You may be in favour of treating everyone equally and you've probably got a live chance of winning Miss World with such an attitude.

But the facts are that for decades there has been discrimination against minorities so it's a bit rich (me being polite) for you to be the champion of fair selection processes now.

And as for your other point - what is it exactly? The party of All Women Shortlists has more female MPs than The Party of Treating Everyone as an Individual 52% vs 24%. You're a numbers guy - are you saying that it is likely that in three quarters of selection processes the men were better than the women for the Conservatives?

Quite possibly, yes. Politics is a male-dominated sphere of interest, you only have to look at how few women are in this conversation on this website to see that.

Simply getting more women in to sit on the backbenches, while still promoting the men anyway, isn't a solution.

And what does that tell you? That institutionally politics needs to change so that women for whatever reason are not put off.

Why is it a "male-dominated sphere of interest"? Genetics? Chromosomes? You are so biased you are actually trying to justify the bias as though it is a natural phenomenon.

What is it about politics or barristers or baristas that is particularly "male" or "female".

Oh but of course you are a champion of equality.

Absolutely don't put off women. If there's something that can be done to attract more women then great.

Maybe for starters look at the way MPs are treated by the press and social media, especially women.
Maybe look at the way prospective parliamentary candidates are treated.

Simply saying "men need not apply" doesn't fix any of those issues isn't the solution though.

Morris_Dancer said:

I await to see the male-only shortlists for primary school teachers.

JohnLilburne said:

moonshine said:

Lizzie the Lizard has had 14 PMs now. There would be a pleasing symmetry if her 15th and final PM was the son of Punjabi immigrants, seeing as she was the last Empress of India.

Next Labour leader is a bit of a side show to this I expect.

She was never Empress, or even Queen, of India, the country became a republic in 1950

Farooq said:

FPT

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

state_go_away said:

Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting

Copy/paste from a previous thread:

I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.

Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm."
Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!"
Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"

Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.

The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them.
The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.

It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).

While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.

What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.

I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.

If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate.
Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).

Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?

We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.

Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.

Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean.
If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.

This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).

Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.

I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.

It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.

What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.

We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.

No, you missed the whole point, sorry.
The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time.
To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).

The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble.
It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).

In short, correlation doesn't imply causation.

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

MrEd said:

MrEd said:

MattW said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.

No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.

"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.

What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.

Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?

On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:

1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x

Damn didn’t finish

2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.

I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.

Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.

Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.

Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.

Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

kinabalu said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -

1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.

2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.

3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.

There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.

#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.

#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?

#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.

You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.

The rest is fluff.

No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.

Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.

You are not allowed to not accept it because I'm guessing that for years and years not only have candidates been equal but, whisper it, minority candidates have been better but have been passed over because they have been minorities. There has been discrimination for years and years and the better candidate has time and again been looked over in favour of someone not from a minority background.

And now you are on your high horse bleating about how everyone should be treated equally.

I've always been in favour of treating everyone equally. Failing to do so is bad for minorities.

The Party of All Women Shortlists and discrimination has never had a female leader. The Party of treating everyone as an individual not a group has had two, and has the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever.

You may be in favour of treating everyone equally and you've probably got a live chance of winning Miss World with such an attitude.

But the facts are that for decades there has been discrimination against minorities so it's a bit rich (me being polite) for you to be the champion of fair selection processes now.

And as for your other point - what is it exactly? The party of All Women Shortlists has more female MPs than The Party of Treating Everyone as an Individual 52% vs 24%. You're a numbers guy - are you saying that it is likely that in three quarters of selection processes the men were better than the women for the Conservatives?

Quite possibly, yes. Politics is a male-dominated sphere of interest, you only have to look at how few women are in this conversation on this website to see that.

Simply getting more women in to sit on the backbenches, while still promoting the men anyway, isn't a solution.

And what does that tell you? That institutionally politics needs to change so that women for whatever reason are not put off.

Why is it a "male-dominated sphere of interest"? Genetics? Chromosomes? You are so biased you are actually trying to justify the bias as though it is a natural phenomenon.

What is it about politics or barristers or baristas that is particularly "male" or "female".

Oh but of course you are a champion of equality.

Absolutely don't put off women. If there's something that can be done to attract more women then great.

Maybe for starters look at the way MPs are treated by the press and social media, especially women.
Maybe look at the way prospective parliamentary candidates are treated.

Simply saying "men need not apply" doesn't fix any of those issues isn't the solution though.

It is one tool in the toolbox. And yes it might well fix some of those issues. If the HoC, say, was 50:50 then by definition politics would be a lot less "male dominated" than it currently is, which you, in a tremendous circular argument, cited as justification or explanation of why more women don't apply.

It might need a nudge to get us to where I'm sure you want us to be.

I didn't cite the make up of the HoC as the reason why politics is male-dominated though, did I?

The HoC is actually a lot more "representative" of society, for both parties not just one, than sites like this tend to be.

If you want to know how to deal with issues affecting women, I'd suggest that you stop shouting and listen to some actual women. @Cyclefree on this site for instance, or Truss or many others, can be very eloquent on the issues. And women having to compete against men on a shortlist isn't something I've heard any of them name as their issues.

moonshine said:

By the way I caught up on last night’s discussion. My view is that Leon is cheating by counting women he paid in his tally.

Theuniondivvie said:

IshmaelZ said:

Theuniondivvie said:

I'm getting a big, nostalgic jag for 2016-20 when I would regularly ask 'Is this real?'. Good times.

It seems that is fake, but it is true that trump jr is selling Guns don't kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people t shirts online.

Chip of the old block.

Chip would be a good name for a Trump son. Perhaps the Don still has it in him for one more squirt.

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Penis

JosiasJessop said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Shit people on a shit island in a sea of shit.

https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1454056436351311875?s=20

A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.

The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2191470.stm

(*) TBF I have no idea how a seal *should* look. But I guessed it shouldn't just lie on the sand as large dogs came up to it.

JosiasJessop said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Shit people on a shit island in a sea of shit.

https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1454056436351311875?s=20

A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.

The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2191470.stm

(*) TBF I have no idea how a seal *should* look. But I guessed it shouldn't just lie on the sand as large dogs came up to it.

Taz said:

JosiasJessop said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Shit people on a shit island in a sea of shit.

https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1454056436351311875?s=20

A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.

The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2191470.stm

(*) TBF I have no idea how a seal *should* look. But I guessed it shouldn't just lie on the sand as large dogs came up to it.

Hunstanton has a lovely spice museum

Barnesian said:

Farooq said:

FPT

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

LostPassword said:

Farooq said:

state_go_away said:

Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting

Copy/paste from a previous thread:

I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.

Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm."
Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!"
Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"

Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.

The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them.
The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.

It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).

While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.

What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.

I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.

If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate.
Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).

Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?

We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.

Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.

Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean.
If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.

This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).

Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.

I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.

It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.

What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.

We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.

No, you missed the whole point, sorry.
The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time.
To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).

The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble.
It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).

In short, correlation doesn't imply causation.

....

moonshine said:

MrEd said:

TOPPING said:

MrEd said:

MrEd said:

MattW said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.

No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.

"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.

What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.

Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?

On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:

1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x

Damn didn’t finish

2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.

I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.

Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.

Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?

Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.

As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.

Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.

We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.

I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.

kinabalu said:

Morris_Dancer said:

I await to see the male-only shortlists for primary school teachers.

Would you like to see that?

rcs1000 said:

Taz said:

JosiasJessop said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Shit people on a shit island in a sea of shit.

https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1454056436351311875?s=20

A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.

The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2191470.stm

(*) TBF I have no idea how a seal *should* look. But I guessed it shouldn't just lie on the sand as large dogs came up to it.

Hunstanton has a lovely spice museum

Wait: I thought Dune is in the future?

Taz said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Penis

Err, okay.

MrEd said:

SouthamObserver said:

On topic, I think Mike should also throw Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper into the ring. Rayner, because she would almost certainly bring the far-left vote with here (on the basis that the new leadership rules mean that the far-left would have no chance of getting a candidate on the ballot) and Cooper because the last poll of Labour members showed her as the favourite.

That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.

Isn’t there a chance Phillipson loses her seat? Not sure how it looks under the new boundaries so maybe that’s not the case.

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?

When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.

You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?

I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.

And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).

Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.

Sean_F said:

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?

When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.

You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?

I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.

And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).

Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.

And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?

Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.

IanB2 said:

kle4 said:

IshmaelZ said:

Seriously, Phillipson and reeves could be twins

I could see that. Non-identical obviously, but sibling level.

Good to see the thread kicked off with such incisive political analysis

MrEd said:

moonshine said:

MrEd said:

TOPPING said:

MrEd said:

MrEd said:

MattW said:

TOPPING said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Philip_Thompson said:

noneoftheabove said:

Sandpit said:

Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.

Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.

If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.

"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.

Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.

No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.

"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.

What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.

Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?

On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:

1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x

Damn didn’t finish

2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.

I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.

Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.

Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?

Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.

As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.

Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.

We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.

I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.

That’s the issue. No one wants to be the one saying “let’s hire the white male.” In many organisations, it’s tantamount to career suicide (at least at non-senior levels - when it comes to the top posts, funnily enough they don’t care that much).

If you want to see where this leads to, look at the current crop of TV adverts. I’d say well over half feature Black actors and probably not far off two thirds. You can see what’s happening. The advertiser has told its agency “find me some black people!” so they can look socially aware. The agency has scurried off and found them. Individually, it makes sense. In totally, it means that the TV adverts are completely out of whack with the make up of the country.

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

TOPPING said:

Sean_F said:

Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?

When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.

You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?

I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.

And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).

Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.

And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?

Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.

Yes we both saw that BBC article which I edited my post to reflect.

It is what it is. If they had said no more people from my social group then first I wouldn't have known and secondly the army would have come to represent far more closely society at large earlier. I can't see how that is a bad thing but neither can I go back in time to assess my reaction.

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Beans

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Beans

IanB2 said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Bob

Scaffolding

MattW said:

IanB2 said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Bob

Scaffolding

I see. We're playing a game of Straight Face from Clue.

Muffin.

ydoethur said:

MattW said:

IanB2 said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Bob

Scaffolding

I see. We're playing a game of Straight Face from Clue.

Muffin.

For Leon:

Crumpet.

Morris_Dancer said:

Mr. Password, I disagree with that entirely.

Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.

felix said:

IanB2 said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Penis

Alpaca

Mornington Crescent.

Morris_Dancer said:

Mr. kinabalu, apologies, I missed your reply before.

I'm not in favour of limiting recruitment by sex. Because of the particular nature of primary school teachers (often providing parental figures for those either lacking one or both parents or as a better version if said parents are rather bad examples) and the heavily slanted sex composition of schoolteachers I would like to see a recruitment drive for male teachers to increase the numbers. I would not advocate either all-male shortlists or some sort of quota, however.

Malmesbury said:

Morris_Dancer said:

Mr. Password, I disagree with that entirely.

Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.

The fascinating thing is how peer pressure works into this.

My daughters loved technical Lego, until they were old enough to succumb to the peer group pressure to like Lego Friends.

In my job (IT) it is common for women to relate experiences of the... suggestions from other women to go for non-IT careers. Being a geek is not seen as "womanly" by many other women - though, interestingly, doctor now is. As is lawyer....

MalcolmDunn said:

Don't think Rachel Reeves trounced Boris at PMQ's on Wednesday as Labour were represented by Ed Milliband. He shouted a lot but really just reminded us why Cameron beat him in 2015.
Reeves gave a competent response to the budget but anyone could have done better than Annaliese Dodds' lamentable effort last year. Reeves has the handicap of having a terrible voice.

moonshine said:

By the way I caught up on last night’s discussion. My view is that Leon is cheating by counting women he paid in his tally.