Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Possibly true, but very convenient for your team. Would you be comfortable with Jenrick calling Rayner out for "corruption" whilst as a Minister in the light of his behaviour whilst in office re; Dirty Desmond?
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Possibly true, but very convenient for your team. Would you be comfortable with Jenrick calling Rayner out for "corruption" whilst as a Minister in the light of his behaviour whilst in office re; Dirty Desmond?
So whataboutery yes, but irrelevant? Maybe not.
Yes I would. As comfortable as I am with people calling Jenrick out. And that's as a free agent. Teams are for losers
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
Has anyone heard Farage in Congress? Has anyone also heard Jamie Raskin and Hank Johnson own him.
It turns out he was only in DC grifting for cash from Tech Bros opposed to the Online Safety Act.
I listened to him and he was a disgrace
Raskin pointed out that his interviewee wasn't so much a "disgrace" as an anti-NATO shill for Putin. He showed his working out too.
Another reminder, if needed, why talk of a "united right" is so misguided. Farage is NOT a Conservative. He's a populist - a very different thing. Tories conserve things, populists break things. The Conservatives need to keep their nerve and, in the words of Churchill, "keep buggerin' on".
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
I doubt it will matter much in the short to medium term, but there did feel something a bit 'Peak Nigel' about all that. Farage went there to heap scorn on Britain and the current government but ended up being on trial himself and looking a bit of a chump with it. Not what he would have intended. Might be best for him to keep his head down for a bit.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
She is the story. She is the Housing Minister. She made a housing error.
For the sake of the Government she should resign this portfolio, otherwise it goes on and on.
You might not have noticed but the media despise the Labour Government, and any fuel to that fire is best extinguished quickly.
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
When pressed Farage mumbled something about ‘others’ might have banned people but not him. First rule of any Faragist vehicle, the Leader is never at fault.
Is it possible Rayner could give up her housing brief and just stay as Deputy PM if she’s not found to have broken the ministerial code .
She cannot be housing minister by the time of Reeves statement
Tedious though this whole saga is, it did provide this unintentionally hilarious headline: "Reeves has ‘full confidence’ in Rayner, and thinks deputy PM can keep her job"
Has anyone heard Farage in Congress? Has anyone also heard Jamie Raskin and Hank Johnson own him.
It turns out he was only in DC grifting for cash from Tech Bros opposed to the Online Safety Act.
I listened to him and he was a disgrace
Raskin pointed out that his interviewee wasn't so much a "disgrace" as an anti-NATO shill for Putin. He showed his working out too.
Another reminder, if needed, why talk of a "united right" is so misguided. Farage is NOT a Conservative. He's a populist - a very different thing. Tories conserve things, populists break things. The Conservatives need to keep their nerve and, in the words of Churchill, "keep buggerin' on".
The Tories need to chip away at their lost and on strike voters and show enough ankle on issues of crossover to tempt some populists back into the fold. And start working the blue wall and rural seats very very hard. Reform will have their hands full in the Red Wall fighting Labour, let them MAD. If they want my advice that is
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
Has anyone heard Farage in Congress? Has anyone also heard Jamie Raskin and Hank Johnson own him.
It turns out he was only in DC grifting for cash from Tech Bros opposed to the Online Safety Act.
I listened to him and he was a disgrace
Raskin pointed out that his interviewee wasn't so much a "disgrace" as an anti-NATO shill for Putin. He showed his working out too.
Another reminder, if needed, why talk of a "united right" is so misguided. Farage is NOT a Conservative. He's a populist - a very different thing. Tories conserve things, populists break things. The Conservatives need to keep their nerve and, in the words of Churchill, "keep buggerin' on".
Johnson kicked out most of the conservatives and replaced them with populists not to mention the weird gang of ex revolutionary communists.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5484788-newsom-captures-democratic-imagination/ ...While the 2028 presidential election is still more than three years away, Newsom is making the kind of name for himself that could lead to front-runner status, political operatives say. Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said Newsom’s name is coming up more than anyone else in recent weeks, particularly with people outside the political sphere. “They ask me two questions: Do you think he can win? And do you think he can be the guy?” Simmons said. “No one has ever asked me a single policy question about him.”
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
I doubt it will matter much in the short to medium term, but there did feel something a bit 'Peak Nigel' about all that. Farage went there to heap scorn on Britain and the current government but ended up being on trial himself and looking a bit of a chump with it. Not what he would have intended. Might be best for him to keep his head down for a bit.
I think you raise a good point which is that at some point Farage is actually going to have to work out what he wants to be.
I think he relishes these little transatlantic sojourns and GB News pulpits, and at the moment everyone sort of shrugs and lets him get on with it, but in say 2 years time if Reform continue to lead the polls people are going to be seriously looking at him as The Next Prime Minister.
That is a bit of a different role, and I don’t think he is going to be able to get away with these little side hustles anymore. If he tries, I think he will start to see some damage.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
Going to need the ministerial money for the fine !
I expect HMRC will not fine her (Her story is just about plausible enough), but they will apply penalty interest at 8% in addition to the duty.
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
When pressed Farage mumbled something about ‘others’ might have banned people but not him. First rule of any Faragist vehicle, the Leader is never at fault.
He was a little bit St Peter, denying his disdain for free speech three times before the cock* crowed.
* Not sure who the cock is. There are so many to chose from.
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
I doubt it will matter much in the short to medium term, but there did feel something a bit 'Peak Nigel' about all that. Farage went there to heap scorn on Britain and the current government but ended up being on trial himself and looking a bit of a chump with it. Not what he would have intended. Might be best for him to keep his head down for a bit.
It's the Reform Party Conference this very weekend.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Both are fringe parties that your average Briton doesn't consider as viable alternatives.
Reform, hilariously, have supplanted LDs as the third party with very little effort.
By being relatively ordinary; not being afraid to say things that are said in pubs, but frowned upon in Woke Westminster, and by recognising that immigration is really, really unpopular.
Wasn't it Cummings who long predicted that a party of the cultural right and economic centre left could be very very difficult to beat in Britain?
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
She is the story. She is the Housing Minister. She made a housing error.
For the sake of the Government she should resign this portfolio, otherwise it goes on and on.
You might not have noticed but the media despise the Labour Government, and any fuel to that fire is best extinguished quickly.
I was looking at the issue purely on its merits there - ie does she *deserve* to lose her job or not. IMO she doesn't unless there was negligence or fraud.
The politics of it? Yes, there's your (very good) point. But otoh, would it go on and on if she stays? It's quite hard to predict these things. Also there's that notion of not giving up a scalp. If you sack somebody not for what they've done but to appease your opponents, is this ruthless pragmatism or weakness that in the longer term will do you no good.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Reform antics are good at getting publicity. Davey's lost his mojo. He needs to demonstrate a human catapult that will be used to deport Reform-voters under a LD majority government
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Reform antics are good at getting publicity. Davey's lost his mojo. He needs to demonstrate a human catapult that will be used to deport Reform-voters under a LD majority government
Davey is, I think, in the midst of consolidating the position from the GE, so I think his focus on putting the boot in to the Tories and going easy on Labour has to be seen in that context, a little,
But I do think the time has come, or will very soon, where he will need to shift his tone and language a bit. Labour are now incredibly unpopular, and if he wants to strengthen the LD position he needs to be taking the fight to them too - after all, they are the government of the day.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Reform antics are good at getting publicity. Davey's lost his mojo. He needs to demonstrate a human catapult that will be used to deport Reform-voters under a LD majority government
Davey is, I think, in the midst of consolidating the position from the GE, so I think his focus on putting the boot in to the Tories and going easy on Labour has to be seen in that context, a little,
But I do think the time has come, or will very soon, where he will need to shift his tone and language a bit. Labour are now incredibly unpopular, and if he wants to strengthen the LD position he needs to be taking the fight to them too - after all, they are the government of the day.
Knocking down a pile of red cardboard boxes with a comedy yellow hammer seems aesthetically ugly
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
I know women who are pro Trans rights and women who aren't. I also know a few whose viewpoint changed overnight when a drunk trans woman aggressively tried to join one of them in a toilet cubicle at a night out in a bar.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
You may listen to both. Neither have a monopoly on either truth or common sense
While I'd tend to agree with your friends, Cyclefree is I think correct in pointing out some if the perverse consequences of the well intentioned Scottish legislation on gender recognition
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
That's very much Mrs J's position.
What's going on is simple. We all know a lot of abuse is going on, of all sorts. But we don't want it to be performed by people like us. So it is easier to blame minorities - whether it's trans or Muslims. Whilst the vast majority of abuses occur by people like us.
it's easier to think: "It's that other group over there!" rather than "It's that bloke I play golf with," or "That guy I occasionally go drinking with from work."
The figures of abuse are startling, and mean that if you know more than a handful of men and women, then you will know someone who has suffered abuse, and perhaps is still suffering abuse. And it's not all done by those minorities you dislike. And, though it should not need to be said, the victims are not all female. Not by a long shot.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
One yob with a spray can doesn't show why she should resign!
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Not fully understanding why Labour and the Tories and everyone else don't take the attitude of that US Congressman to Farage. What exactly do they have to lose?
Simon Marx on LBC suggesting Farage "perjured" himself in Congress by telling Raskin he had "never" banned a journalist from one of his events, just moments after James Ball was banned from the Reform Conference?
Lock him up!
I doubt it will matter much in the short to medium term, but there did feel something a bit 'Peak Nigel' about all that. Farage went there to heap scorn on Britain and the current government but ended up being on trial himself and looking a bit of a chump with it. Not what he would have intended. Might be best for him to keep his head down for a bit.
It's the Reform Party Conference this very weekend.
Reform have a "special guest" lined up tomorrow, which I assume is code for a defector. While Reform have picked up some ex-MPs and an MSP and Senedd member, the big prize would be a current MP
Email your MP. The government might be about to kill its chances of getting anywhere near its housing targets stone dead.
A Rubbish Tax The expensive dangers a small tax tweak has for building in the UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/a-rubbish-tax Somewhere, deep in the Treasury, a few tax tweaks on landfills have been drawn up which risk blowing up both housebuilding and the Labour Government’s 1.5 million home target.
The UK currently has two bands of landfill tax. The standard rate is £126.15 per tonne. That’s for ‘active’ waste, which can decompose, release methane, or leach harmful substances. Think food, plastics, or general rubbish. Then there’s a lower rate of just £4.05 per tonne, which applies to ‘inert’ waste such as soil, rocks, and concrete. These are non-hazardous and pose little risk in a landfill.
The Government has proposed merging the two, with the lower rate rising over the next five years to eventually meet the standard rate. Meanwhile, the standard rate will rise faster than inflation.
On paper it looks like a minor technocratic change. Yet this small tweak could kill Labour’s 1.5 million home target and housebuilding in London.
The 3,000% increase in low-rate tax will add between £22,000 and £28,000 to the cost of building a home. Some estimates put the cost as high as £52,000 per home. With Labour already off the pace to hit 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, such a massive tax hike will doom their ambitious target...
This is as bad as anything Milliband ever came up with.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
How about oppose policies rather than going after the individual? Play the ball not the man/woman? Labour have always believed themselves to be morally better than the tories - it's in their DNA. So things like this ARE important.
I have no idea what happened in this case, whether she did everything correctly and was badly advised, or has tried to be fast and loose and save some money and got caught. I do care that she has always been strident in trying to force out opponents for exactly this kind of thing.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
“Listen to women! Oh wait, not those women.”
(Which group is which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The reverse side of the coin, to generalising about minority groups, because of the bad behaviour of some of their number, is denying that bad behaviour by some members of minority groups is a reality.
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
That's very much Mrs J's position.
What's going on is simple. We all know a lot of abuse is going on, of all sorts. But we don't want it to be performed by people like us. So it is easier to blame minorities - whether it's trans or Muslims. Whilst the vast majority of abuses occur by people like us.
it's easier to think: "It's that other group over there!" rather than "It's that bloke I play golf with," or "That guy I occasionally go drinking with from work."
The figures of abuse are startling, and mean that if you know more than a handful of men and women, then you will know someone who has suffered abuse, and perhaps is still suffering abuse. And it's not all done by those minorities you dislike. And, though it should not need to be said, the victims are not all female. Not by a long shot.
The culture of the times is that someone is to blame. And you must be angry about it. In fact there's summat wrong with you if you aren't. That it is someone else is much easier than reflection that you may have played a part, however unwittingly, in the situation.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
True , all opposition parties play the same game . That’s politics .
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
How about oppose policies rather than going after the individual? Play the ball not the man/woman?
I will repeat what I said yesterday, then.
She should be moved out of the housing post as she's failing miserably to push forward government policy to ease up planning rules and get house building going.
Email your MP. The government might be about to kill its chances of getting anywhere near its housing targets stone dead.
A Rubbish Tax The expensive dangers a small tax tweak has for building in the UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/a-rubbish-tax Somewhere, deep in the Treasury, a few tax tweaks on landfills have been drawn up which risk blowing up both housebuilding and the Labour Government’s 1.5 million home target.
The UK currently has two bands of landfill tax. The standard rate is £126.15 per tonne. That’s for ‘active’ waste, which can decompose, release methane, or leach harmful substances. Think food, plastics, or general rubbish. Then there’s a lower rate of just £4.05 per tonne, which applies to ‘inert’ waste such as soil, rocks, and concrete. These are non-hazardous and pose little risk in a landfill.
The Government has proposed merging the two, with the lower rate rising over the next five years to eventually meet the standard rate. Meanwhile, the standard rate will rise faster than inflation.
On paper it looks like a minor technocratic change. Yet this small tweak could kill Labour’s 1.5 million home target and housebuilding in London.
The 3,000% increase in low-rate tax will add between £22,000 and £28,000 to the cost of building a home. Some estimates put the cost as high as £52,000 per home. With Labour already off the pace to hit 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, such a massive tax hike will doom their ambitious target...
This is as bad as anything Milliband ever came up with.
Yes, I pointed this out on here yesterday. Just spectacularly wrong-headed. The government should at the minimum leave in place the lower rate for inert stuff used to fill in quarries & gravel pits. It’s not like those are outstanding sites of natural beauty that need protection at all costs.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
Well sympathies for the schoolboy Stereodog - but I'm sure those boys were simply generalising from themselves: because I reckon 95% of heterosexual schoolboys who for some reason found themselves in the girls' changing rooms would have been dead keen to see those bits of girls' bodies normally kept hidden - spotty and unattractive or not. It's an unusual man whose gaze is not drawn to an unclad woman. Hence separate changing rooms.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
You may listen to both. Neither have a monopoly on either truth or common sense
While I'd tend to agree with your friends, Cyclefree is I think correct in pointing out some if the perverse consequences of the well intentioned Scottish legislation on gender recognition
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts.
I know lots of lesbians who are appalled at the behaviour of trans activists and, in particular, the targeting of lesbians by men demanding sex with them or the, to them, deeply insulting claim, of the "male lesbian".
No-one can change sex. No man can ever become a woman or vice versa. The law and public policy has to be on the basis of reality not fantasy. People with gender dysphoria have the same legal rights as everyone else and I support those. The current position which is that they have those rights but that women and men are entitled to same single sex provision in the appropriate circumstances strikes the right balance IMO.
It is the demand that women should lose the rights they need (I repeat once more that Stonewall expressly campaigned for just this from 2015 onwards) is not a human right. It is an aggressive demand to obliterate someone else's rights and this is wrong. If Stonewall et al had not done this there would be no issue. If they had campaigned to get appropriate provision for dysphoric people there'd be no issue. But they needed something to keep the grift going. So they deliberately misrepresented the law to infiltrate a harmful ideology into our institutions and this is why those institutions are in the mess they're in and so many women and some men have lost jobs, been bullied, faced threats and so on. It is a hideous waste of energy but those who chose to talk nonsense and lie about biology and law are the ones to be blamed.
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
The money was in trust for her child or children. The trust still owns the asset that she sold it as I understand it, so the trust has not lost any money.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
Her position is irrelevant, shes not going to say 'im a wrong un' Time will tell of course
The investigation into Angela Rayner’s tax affairs could conclude as soon as today.
An inquiry launched by Sir Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on ministerial ethics, may finish in the coming hours.
A decision today by Sir Laurie would be significantly quicker than the usual process and would suggest the process has been expedited as far as possible.
Anna Mikhailova, the political editor of Times Radio, told listeners this morning: “I’m hearing that the investigation by Sir Laurie Magnus into Angela Rayner can conclude as quickly as today.
“So it could move very, very quickly. This is from senior well-placed sources.”
----
She isn't going anywhere.
Nobody is going to believe a proper investigation has been carried out in one day.
"Angela - Are you guilty?" "No" "Excellent - no case to answer!"
I am surprised these things take much more than a day to clear up to be honest.
Documents I'd want to read - whatever she sent her advisors and what she received from her advisors. That is probably enough, maybe get them reviewed by a tax expert.
Nothing else to do apart from make a decision.
Whatever her level of culpability it is politically best for her (both individually and Labour) to resign, but based on the documents above it may or may not be necessary for her to resign.
Dan Neidle got it in one question yesterday.
Did you mention the existence of the Trust to those advising you on the Hove apartment purchase?
If the answer to that question is yes then she has received bad advice. If the answer to that question is no then she is at fault.
Broadly yes but there are nuances. Did she fully and accurately describe the trust is potentially different to mentioning its existence. If she did mention it and then the advice specifically says pay £x despite the trust, that is slightly different to the advice saying pay £x.
Politically none of this matters. She is better resigning.
Except can she afford the mortgage if her pay is cut?
The endless TV appearances and newspaper columns are going to be insufferable if she resigns.
It’ll be like pre-PM Boris Johnson, except without the sense of humour.
Where does her partners income come into this? He, if it's still the same chap, doesn't appear to have a high-powered job.
AIUI from yesterday’s reporting, she bought the new apartment by herself, which would suggest a mortgage well north of half a million on it, perhaps £650k? She said she has no savings, and sold her interest in the constituency home to buy the Hove property.
Not knowing quite how mortgage lenders assess the creditworthiness of cabinet ministers, I still don’t think it’s too much of a reach for someone on her salary to be offered a loan of at least that.
If she’s using her MP salary of £90k and her ministerial salary of £70k together, then yes maybe, 4x gross income.
But if she loses the ministerial salary she’s going to be horribly over-leveraged at c.7x salary.
At peak I was 14x salary. That was squeaky bum time…
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
I think you raise a good point, and yes oppositions oppose and they make hay out of government failings. There is a bit of a game that is always played here. We remember Blair doing very much the same with Major, and his “pretty straight kind of guy” language only to be tripped up himself down the line.
There is I think a rather interesting dimension to all this which is that you do see as part of the wider criticisms of Labour quite a bit more of this “pre election” stance being used against them. I think they did very much major on topics of probity and being “adults” and that was tailored to Starmer’s image. I understand why they did it, but they are suffering the backlash now. If everything else was going swimmingly, I think they’d be able to shrug a lot of this off (as Blair could), but it’s not, so they can’t.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Hey, Zack Polanski has launched a podcast! That'll show 'em.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
How about oppose policies rather than going after the individual? Play the ball not the man/woman? Labour have always believed themselves to be morally better than the tories - it's in their DNA. So things like this ARE important.
I have no idea what happened in this case, whether she did everything correctly and was badly advised, or has tried to be fast and loose and save some money and got caught. I do care that she has always been strident in trying to force out opponents for exactly this kind of thing.
Sauce for the goose and all that.
Matters of integrity are necessarily personal and when people in government look like they have fallen short on this metric the Opposition will seek to punish and exploit. It's a feature not a bug.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
Yes, edge cases. As all of the data shows. I support women's rights - they absolutely matter. I just don't understand why "trans women are a threat" gets endlessly discussed whilst the vast majority of threat gets ignored.
A good mate of mine was *close* friends with Sarah Everard. She can't understand why all the noise on threats to women is trans and now migrants when they are quite literally a tiny minority of the cases where women are abused, assaulted and far worse.
I know several women (cis, or biological if you prefer) who would describe themselves as full on feminists. Some of them are bi/lesbian. They all think JKR is a knob and fully support trans rights.
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
You listen to all of them. Then you draw a graph. Or, if it's categorical data, you can do a contingency table and if you have enough you can do a chi-square test.
Anyhoo, nice to see @Cyclefree again. While I'm free during the lunch portion of the conference, if anybody wants to know my brief thoughts on the RSS session on the Sullivan review PM me. I'll write it up over the next day or two. Nothing big, just two-three paras.
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Janan Ganesh’s latest article in the FT makes a Marxist case that Sir Keir is the perfect ‘end of an era’ figure before the public do an about turn
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
Her position is irrelevant, shes not going to say 'im a wrong un' Time will tell of course
And, likewise, Allison Pearson isn't going to say "she's not a wrong 'un".
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The reverse side of the coin, to generalising about minority groups, because of the bad behaviour of some of their number, is denying that bad behaviour by some members of minority groups is a reality.
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
Whilst that is true, I think there are many in (say) the Muslim or black communities who have not exactly had a blind eye turned on them by the police. The Macpherson report is just a small part of it.
So we have some cases where the police and wider authorities turned a blind eye to certain crimes, and others where the police and wider authorities were actively racist regarding other crimes. Sometimes the same police.
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
I don’t really understand that take either.
My understanding is Rayner had some equity in the house, as did her ex husband, and the Trust held the rest. She then sold her equity to the trust, who paid the amount (I assume MV) to her, which she then used for the Hove flat.
The Trust has presumably not lost anything here on the basis that the value of its equity has increased in line with the payout to AR. Also I assume the trustees would have to sign off on this given their duties to the beneficiary.
You can perhaps suggest that optically it looks a bit odd that Rayner is selling her equity in the property to buy elsewhere given that I understand she does share living arrangements there with her ex husband, but it was her asset (partly) that she could do with as she wished.
Obviously this is only going off the detail as reported and as I understand it.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
That's entirely wrong. Labour have lost very few voters to Reform/Conservative. The current voting shares are due to very high voter retention for Reform, a large number of previous non-voters now stating a preference, Labour voters no longer staying a preference, and - to a much smaller degree - some internal switching between right and left wing parties.
This has been repeatedly pointed out on PB by me and others. And Labour's exceptionally poor approval rating is due to lefty disappointment, not right wing dislike (which is a given).
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
I don’t really understand that take either.
My understanding is Rayner had some equity in the house, as did her ex husband, and the Trust held the rest. She then sold her equity to the trust, who paid the amount (I assume MV) to her, which she then used for the Hove flat.
The Trust has presumably not lost anything here in the basis that the value of its equity has increased in line with the payout to AR. Also I assume the trustees would have to sign off on this given their duties to the beneficiary.
You can perhaps suggest that optically it looks a bit odd that Rayner is selling her equity in the property to buy elsewhere given that I understand she does share living arrangements there with her ex husband, but it was her asset (partly) that she could do with as she wished.
Obviously this is only going off the detail as reported and as I understand it.
I don't understand what you don't understand? These trust arrangements exist. Rayner was then tripped up because the stamp duty rules ask whether you own another property and she didn't, but for stamp duty purposes, she is deemed to own another property in her circumstances. It seems to me that there's a prima facie case that this is confusing.
Labours pious attitude in opposition left them vulnerable to any controversy in government. There have been scandals aplenty, and they only have themselves to blame
Well nobody likes piety in anyone but a priest - but I'm not sure I'd want an Opposition (Lab or Con) going easy on Government scandals so as to create the space to misbehave in power themselves.
Absolutely. What the Tories did is, in any case, utterly irrelevant to what happens now Whataboutery is completely inappropriate (from the perpetrators current or previous)
Yes, declutter. What Tories did in government isn't the issue. What Labour said about what Tories did in government isn't the issue. Angela Rayner underpaid tax on the purchase of a flat. If it was an innocent error that anyone could have made she shouldn't lose her job over it. If it was negligent she probably should and if it was fraudulent she definitely should.
It might not be the main issue, but it is relevant what Labour said about what the Tories did in govt. Double standards/hypocrisy/call it what you want is not something that politicians should be let off the hook for and, unfortunately for Labour, they told anyone who would listen they were clean as a whistle, horrified by the Tories misdemeanours & led by Mr Rules & Integrity. So it’s worse for them than it could have been
That's Opposition. You're outraged by Government scandals, would be whiter than white yourselves. The post 2019 Tory government (esp under Johnson) made integrity a big issue by palpably having so little of it and Labour made hay with that. Of course they did. Is this a problem for them now? Not especially. Maybe a bit. But so what? What would the alternative have been in Opposition? Let things go, don't be all 'oppositiony' in the hope you'll get an easy ride when it's your turn in office? That's not feasible and I don't think we'd want it to be.
I think you raise a good point, and yes oppositions oppose and they make hay out of government failings. There is a bit of a game that is always played here. We remember Blair doing very much the same with Major, and his “pretty straight kind of guy” language only to be tripped up himself down the line.
There is I think a rather interesting dimension to all this which is that you do see as part of the wider criticisms of Labour quite a bit more of this “pre election” stance being used against them. I think they did very much major on topics of probity and being “adults” and that was tailored to Starmer’s image. I understand why they did it, but they are suffering the backlash now. If everything else was going swimmingly, I think they’d be able to shrug a lot of this off (as Blair could), but it’s not, so they can’t.
Tailored to Starmer's image, yes, but what really shaped it was Johnson's image - and I'd argue reality - as a charlatan. That's what drove Labour to 'bang on' about integrity. It was a particular weakness for who they were opposing. Starmer's problem imo is not his effectiveness in Opposition but his perceived lack of it in government. People aren't buying him as PM.
Any council that is bankrupt and in special measures should be ruled out of any reorganizations until the problems have been sorted out.
Nottingham City finances are terrible iirc.
The problem with the Notts proposals is they treat the district boundaries as sacrosanct. Arnold, Carlton and Beeston belong with Nottingham but not the more rural bits of Broxtowe and Gedling. Likewise West Bridgford should be with Nottingham but not the rest of Rushcliffe
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
I don’t really understand that take either.
My understanding is Rayner had some equity in the house, as did her ex husband, and the Trust held the rest. She then sold her equity to the trust, who paid the amount (I assume MV) to her, which she then used for the Hove flat.
The Trust has presumably not lost anything here in the basis that the value of its equity has increased in line with the payout to AR. Also I assume the trustees would have to sign off on this given their duties to the beneficiary.
You can perhaps suggest that optically it looks a bit odd that Rayner is selling her equity in the property to buy elsewhere given that I understand she does share living arrangements there with her ex husband, but it was her asset (partly) that she could do with as she wished.
Obviously this is only going off the detail as reported and as I understand it.
I don't understand what you don't understand? These trust arrangements exist. Rayner was then tripped up because the stamp duty rules ask whether you own another property and she didn't, but for stamp duty purposes, she is deemed to own another property in her circumstances. It seems to me that there's a prima facie case that this is confusing.
I was saying I didn’t understand the point that was being made in the tweet that you quoted (re exploiting a loophole) - apologies if that was unclear.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The reverse side of the coin, to generalising about minority groups, because of the bad behaviour of some of their number, is denying that bad behaviour by some members of minority groups is a reality.
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
Whilst that is true, I think there are many in (say) the Muslim or black communities who have not exactly had a blind eye turned on them by the police. The Macpherson report is just a small part of it.
So we have some cases where the police and wider authorities turned a blind eye to certain crimes, and others where the police and wider authorities were actively racist regarding other crimes. Sometimes the same police.
I think that often it depends upon the degree of sympathy (or lack of sympathy), for the victims. I would say that there is an astonishing lack of official sympathy towards victims of sexual abuse, and prostitutes, from lower class backgrounds. And, all too often, child sexual abuse is treated as a peccadillo, rather than as a crime.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
For a political hack who makes a living, when they are not living it up at Raffles Hotel, writing political puff pieces for the house journal of the Conservative Party you don't seem to have much of a grasp on the current breakdown of left, right politics. I am not sure why you would leave the Green-Sultana Alliance and other left leaning nationalist parties out of your cabal of the left.
If you believe Ref and Con are indistinguishable from one another and should be considered as a single broad church grouping you may have a point.
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The reverse side of the coin, to generalising about minority groups, because of the bad behaviour of some of their number, is denying that bad behaviour by some members of minority groups is a reality.
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
Whilst that is true, I think there are many in (say) the Muslim or black communities who have not exactly had a blind eye turned on them by the police. The Macpherson report is just a small part of it.
So we have some cases where the police and wider authorities turned a blind eye to certain crimes, and others where the police and wider authorities were actively racist regarding other crimes. Sometimes the same police.
I think that often it depends upon the degree of sympathy (or lack of sympathy), for the victims. I would say that there is an astonishing lack of official sympathy towards victims of sexual abuse, and prostitutes, from lower class backgrounds. And, all too often, child sexual abuse is treated as a peccadillo, rather than as a crime.
This last is certainly true. If you are found in possession of pictures of CSA, even of the worst most depraved type, you generally walk free from court. The excuses given and accepted for this depravity are astonishing: stress being a common one.
I have had some astonishingly stressful times in my life and have never felt compelled to commit any sort of crime let alone look at pictures of babies being raped. Perhaps the "stress" men suffer is specially bad in some way.
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
Her position is irrelevant, shes not going to say 'im a wrong un' Time will tell of course
And, likewise, Allison Pearson isn't going to say "she's not a wrong 'un".
Good afternoon all, back in London.
The irony of the Telegraph, the house journal of probably some of the biggest tax evaders in the world, going after Rayner for getting the wrong legal advice, is almost too delicious to contemplate.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
For a political hack who makes a living, when they are not living it up at Raffles Hotel, writing political puff pieces for the house journal of the Conservative Party you don't seem to have much of a grasp on the current breakdown of left, right politics. I am not sure why you would leave the Green-Sultana Alliance and other left leaning nationalist parties out of your cabal of the left.
If you believe Ref and Con are indistinguishable from one another and should be considered as a single broad church grouping you may have a point.
And in "if push came to shove" news,
By 43% to 37%, Britons would rather the next election resulted in a Labour government under Keir Starmer than a Reform UK government under Nigel Farage
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
Edge cases, eh!
Well, let's see: the reason this matters is because the spread of this ideology has led to a KC in a Scottish employment tribunal argue that employers have a legal duty to force women to get undressed in front of men - physically intact heterosexual married men who claim to be women - regardless of their own wishes and how uncomfortable they feel. She argues that employers have a duty to force women to endure a criminal offence - voyeurism or indecent exposure because to object is "bigotry". This employer, BTW, is the NHS in Scotland and the case is the Sandie Peggie case.
And if this reasoning is adopted then women will not be able to say no to this.
What this is about and what you and others refuse to get is that this is about whether a woman's No means No. It's about respecting women and their wishes and understanding that a man's demands do not override her consent. It's about understanding that a woman is entitled to have boundaries and have those respected as of right. It's about understanding that a woman because she is a woman has rights and they are not to be ignored because of a man's feelings. It's about understanding that a woman is a material reality based on sex - not on feelings or costumes or identification - and that if you don't understand or respect those basic facts and that being of the female sex underlies every aspect of a female's life from birth to death: her life, her opportunities, her health, whether she is listened to or valued, her jobs, her safety, her position in society, everything then you are part of the problems and obstacles which so often make life much harder for women than it ought to be.
Women's rights matter. If men can call themselves women, women no longer have any rights as women. The oppression women face because of our sex and largely perpetrated by men and for the benefit of men cannot be dealt with if women are classified as some sort of fuzzy 'anyone can join in if they feel like it' group.
You argue very passionately Cyclefree and often I agree with what you say. Sometimes though I think back to my experience of being an outed gay boy at school and remember how I felt and was treated. I remember boys saying they didn't want to share a changing room with me because I might be looking at their junk. As if I was interested in every spotty thug just because I was gay. If I'd been running around with an erection trying to get off with them they might have had a point but of course I just wanted to get PE over and done with. I understand your points about women's rights and I don't disagree but I feel queasy about the view propounded by Linehan and co (which I fully accept may not be your views) that any trans woman in a female changing room is automatically committing a violent act.
My son is gay so through him I understand a little of what you must have felt.
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The reverse side of the coin, to generalising about minority groups, because of the bad behaviour of some of their number, is denying that bad behaviour by some members of minority groups is a reality.
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
Whilst that is true, I think there are many in (say) the Muslim or black communities who have not exactly had a blind eye turned on them by the police. The Macpherson report is just a small part of it.
So we have some cases where the police and wider authorities turned a blind eye to certain crimes, and others where the police and wider authorities were actively racist regarding other crimes. Sometimes the same police.
I think that often it depends upon the degree of sympathy (or lack of sympathy), for the victims. I would say that there is an astonishing lack of official sympathy towards victims of sexual abuse, and prostitutes, from lower class backgrounds. And, all too often, child sexual abuse is treated as a peccadillo, rather than as a crime.
I think it's simpler than that: the cases were complex and often hard to prosecute, particularly with individual victims. The victims were often (not always) troubled and may not make the best witnesses in court (*), and sometimes even felt in love with their abusers at that time, or felt that they, and their families, were under threat from those abusers, making them poor witnesses. It takes a lot of effort to get through that and, whilst it should have been done, it was placed on the 'too difficult' pile.
And it was not just the police: loads of authorities placed the cases on the 'too difficult' pile. They should not have, and hopefully will not in the future, but they wanted an easy life. And once you ignore some cases, it becomes easier to ignore others.
There was probably also a feeling of "these young girls are trouble, and loads of kids have sex young. What's the harm?"
Edit: and to be perfectly clear: this attitude was massively wrong.
(*) Though in some cases, the physical evidence was *very* obvious and compelling.
It is unclear that Rayner was using a trust to try and exploit a (believed) loophole. Her position, AIUI, is that she set up a trust for entirely understandable reasons and then made a mistake about the implications of that.
Her position is irrelevant, shes not going to say 'im a wrong un' Time will tell of course
A person's explanation for what they did is irrelevant? That's rather harsh.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
For a political hack who makes a living, when they are not living it up at Raffles Hotel, writing political puff pieces for the house journal of the Conservative Party you don't seem to have much of a grasp on the current breakdown of left, right politics. I am not sure why you would leave the Green-Sultana Alliance and other left leaning nationalist parties out of your cabal of the left.
If you believe Ref and Con are indistinguishable from one another and should be considered as a single broad church grouping you may have a point.
And in "if push came to shove" news,
By 43% to 37%, Britons would rather the next election resulted in a Labour government under Keir Starmer than a Reform UK government under Nigel Farage
That is valuable polling. If, as seems more likely than not, the next election is seen as between Farage as PM or Starmer/a replacement as PM, then this is the number that matters.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
BBC report: "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
There are two "publics". The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise. The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
Reform and Tory supporters currently constitute about 45-50% of the country, Lab and LD about 35-40%
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
For a political hack who makes a living, when they are not living it up at Raffles Hotel, writing political puff pieces for the house journal of the Conservative Party you don't seem to have much of a grasp on the current breakdown of left, right politics. I am not sure why you would leave the Green-Sultana Alliance and other left leaning nationalist parties out of your cabal of the left.
If you believe Ref and Con are indistinguishable from one another and should be considered as a single broad church grouping you may have a point.
And in "if push came to shove" news,
By 43% to 37%, Britons would rather the next election resulted in a Labour government under Keir Starmer than a Reform UK government under Nigel Farage
Forget left and right for a moment. Only Reform are providing an energetic opposition to the incumbent government. The Lib Dems and Greens really need to up their game.
Janan Ganesh’s latest article in the FT makes a Marxist case that Sir Keir is the perfect ‘end of an era’ figure before the public do an about turn
Great to see @Cyclefree back. I hope things are going well for you.
But this is a polemic, not an argument. Today I am starting another trial about domestic violence. The accused, a man of course, has been in custody since March 2024 for this awaiting trial. It is simply false to say that violence against women is not taken seriously. I am taking it seriously. Today.
With great respect and despite your valiant efforts, this is not true.
There have been many many examples of trans activists threatening women with violence and the police have done fuck all about them. It is the contrast with how they have behaved in this case, which is striking, something utterly ignored by the Met Commissioner.
The Met promised after the Everard murder to take incidents of indecent exposure more seriously. Instead police action on this has gone down. Read the Femicide Census for the women murdered in 2022 - out a few days ago. The perpetrators have been caught and convicted. But in so many of the cases, there were lots of warnings which were ignored. If they hadn't been women would still be alive. The same lessons are ignored over and over again. The number of women killed stays the same year after year - one every 3 days on average, every year.
This does not speak to me of a society taking this seriously, frankly.
Surely the threat against women - as the Sarah Everard murder demonstrates - is men?
I don't understand why all of the focus goes onto a handful of edge cases so that little light is shone onto the vast majority of cases where the person abusing / raping / killing a woman is a cis man. Usually a white cis man. Same thing with this nonsense about wanting to persecute men with brown skin because they are all potential threats to women. With 40% of the organisers of one protest carrying convictions for assaulting women.
I am bored of the trans issue simply because extremists on both sides shriek abuse at each other. We all want to protect women - my wife is pretty strident on the topic. But the threat to her or to my 14 year old daughter isn't a trans woman, it's a man.
The point is that you don't know which man is a threat until it's too late, and so it's sensible to take some precautions on the basis that all men are a potential threat. Even you. Even me.
So then the question is, are trans women in the group called men, that are potential threats to women, or not? The answer of the Supreme Court, Cyclefree, gender critical feminists, terfs, and myself, is that trans women are, for this purpose, still men.
It's not that trans women, as a group, are more of a threat than cis men. Just that, for threat identification purposes, there's no reason to think that they're less of a threat, particularly if you allow self-ID.
I can’t understand why men need to threaten women. I can’t understand when people are racist. Sadly, it seems I am becoming a minority in both cases.
I can't understand What makes a man Hate another man Help me understand
People are people, so why should it be You and I should get along so awfully? People are people, so why should it be You and I should get along so awfully?
Comments
Quite
So whataboutery yes, but irrelevant? Maybe not.
But it also shows why she has to resign. There’s no point in carrying on. If she tries to cling on she will become a huge focus of public anger, the “one rule for me” hypocrite who embodies Labour lies
Whether through malice or mistake she made an unforgivable error for a housing minister, and one with a history of calling Tories “tax cheats” and demanding they resign
And that's as a free agent. Teams are for losers
Lock him up!
The Conservatives need to keep their nerve and, in the words of Churchill, "keep buggerin' on".
For the sake of the Government she should resign this portfolio, otherwise it goes on and on.
You might not have noticed but the media despise the Labour Government, and any fuel to that fire is best extinguished quickly.
First rule of any Faragist vehicle, the Leader is never at fault.
"Reeves has ‘full confidence’ in Rayner, and thinks deputy PM can keep her job"
If they want my advice that is
"Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is at risk of a fine from the tax authorities in addition to having to pay an additional £40,000 in underpaid stamp duty, tax experts have said."
Not sure that is survivable if it happens. She may be better off resigning, and generating some sympathy, rather than clinging on and being prised out of office. It's all a bit sad as I find it difficult to believe she was really seeking to cheat. She has an estimable back story and may well be able to rehabilitate herself in time. But she needs to act pdq.
As @leon says she is becoming a lightning rod and the public is pretty unforgiving with this sort of thing.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5484788-newsom-captures-democratic-imagination/
...While the 2028 presidential election is still more than three years away, Newsom is making the kind of name for himself that could lead to front-runner status, political operatives say.
Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said Newsom’s name is coming up more than anyone else in recent weeks, particularly with people outside the political sphere.
“They ask me two questions: Do you think he can win? And do you think he can be the guy?” Simmons said. “No one has ever asked me a single policy question about him.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/04/ice-beer-wine-william-sitwell-gen-z
I think he relishes these little transatlantic sojourns and GB News pulpits, and at the moment everyone sort of shrugs and lets him get on with it, but in say 2 years time if Reform continue to lead the polls people are going to be seriously looking at him as The Next Prime Minister.
That is a bit of a different role, and I don’t think he is going to be able to get away with these little side hustles anymore. If he tries, I think he will start to see some damage.
I expect HMRC will not fine her (Her story is just about plausible enough), but they will apply penalty interest at 8% in addition to the duty.
* Not sure who the cock is. There are so many to chose from.
Reform, hilariously, have supplanted LDs as the third party with very little effort.
By being relatively ordinary; not being afraid to say things that are said in pubs, but frowned upon in Woke Westminster, and by recognising that immigration is really, really unpopular.
Wasn't it Cummings who long predicted that a party of the cultural right and economic centre left could be very very difficult to beat in Britain?
So who am I to listen to? Them, or Cyclefree?
The politics of it? Yes, there's your (very good) point. But otoh, would it go on and on if she stays? It's quite hard to predict these things. Also there's that notion of not giving up a scalp. If you sack somebody not for what they've done but to appease your opponents, is this ruthless pragmatism or weakness that in the longer term will do you no good.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XKmIol-5CSg
But I do think the time has come, or will very soon, where he will need to shift his tone and language a bit. Labour are now incredibly unpopular, and if he wants to strengthen the LD position he needs to be taking the fight to them too - after all, they are the government of the day.
Neither have a monopoly on either truth or common sense
While I'd tend to agree with your friends, Cyclefree is I think correct in pointing out some if the perverse consequences of the well intentioned Scottish legislation on gender recognition
What's going on is simple. We all know a lot of abuse is going on, of all sorts. But we don't want it to be performed by people like us. So it is easier to blame minorities - whether it's trans or Muslims. Whilst the vast majority of abuses occur by people like us.
it's easier to think: "It's that other group over there!" rather than "It's that bloke I play golf with," or "That guy I occasionally go drinking with from work."
The figures of abuse are startling, and mean that if you know more than a handful of men and women, then you will know someone who has suffered abuse, and perhaps is still suffering abuse. And it's not all done by those minorities you dislike. And, though it should not need to be said, the victims are not all female. Not by a long shot.
And that's being kind
A man who goes into a women's space is breaching boundaries. He should not be there. His presence is not physical violence but it may well be unsettling and scary - depending on his size, attitude, behaviour and also how a woman feels.
A woman faced with such a man has to make an instant calculation about the potential threat. It is automatic - just as it is when you hear a man following you in the streets late at night (man just going home like me or trouble?). It's not just the threat. Why is he here? To have a w**k? To mark his territory? To intimidate? What? Why should a woman using the loo have to go through this?
What if it's a changing room and he starts to look? Not physical violence. But voyeurism and deeply unsettling. I do not want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband. Even in hospital male doctors and nurses give me privacy.
What if he gets undressed? Again not physical violence but unsettling and frightening. Indecent exposure is horrible for women. The presence of an unwanted male body in a situation of vulnerability is a form of assault even if the man never touches the woman. This is something which men simply do not get about indecent exposure.
I think there is a total lack of empathy for how women feel by men who claim to be women. If they really had a female sensibility they would try and understand how and why their presence is unsettling and can be very frightening. Instead, far too often, far too many of them behave exactly like the sort of men who most women will classify as "creeps".
There is a reason why we have boundaries. Men - of whatever type - should respect those of women. Just as I, a woman, would not walk into a man's changing room or loo even though I would be no threat. It is a matter of respect. And of course a trans-identified man who does not wish to share a space with fellow men should have his own private space. But I note that when these are offered, they are rejected. They want to be in women's spaces regardless of women's say-so and this is an aggressive (and, frankly, very male) attitude to take.
So I'd use the phrase "aggressive and disrespectful" rather than violent.
The Tory and Reform public are baying for her blood. What a surprise.
The Labour and LD public are broadly sympathetic, or at least, let's wait for the inquiry.
What exactly do they have to lose?
The government might be about to kill its chances of getting anywhere near its housing targets stone dead.
A Rubbish Tax
The expensive dangers a small tax tweak has for building in the UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/a-rubbish-tax
Somewhere, deep in the Treasury, a few tax tweaks on landfills have been drawn up which risk blowing up both housebuilding and the Labour Government’s 1.5 million home target.
The UK currently has two bands of landfill tax. The standard rate is £126.15 per tonne. That’s for ‘active’ waste, which can decompose, release methane, or leach harmful substances. Think food, plastics, or general rubbish. Then there’s a lower rate of just £4.05 per tonne, which applies to ‘inert’ waste such as soil, rocks, and concrete. These are non-hazardous and pose little risk in a landfill.
The Government has proposed merging the two, with the lower rate rising over the next five years to eventually meet the standard rate. Meanwhile, the standard rate will rise faster than inflation.
On paper it looks like a minor technocratic change. Yet this small tweak could kill Labour’s 1.5 million home target and housebuilding in London.
The 3,000% increase in low-rate tax will add between £22,000 and £28,000 to the cost of building a home. Some estimates put the cost as high as £52,000 per home. With Labour already off the pace to hit 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, such a massive tax hike will doom their ambitious target...
This is as bad as anything Milliband ever came up with.
Labour have always believed themselves to be morally better than the tories - it's in their DNA. So things like this ARE important.
I have no idea what happened in this case, whether she did everything correctly and was badly advised, or has tried to be fast and loose and save some money and got caught. I do care that she has always been strident in trying to force out opponents for exactly this kind of thing.
Sauce for the goose and all that.
(Which group is which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/how-save-internet-threat-global-connection-political-conflict-nick-clegg-review-lmdfpdfl7
If it's lager, well.........
So no civil wat incoming for now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kzk0enx1wo
Hence, we ended up with police and social services turning a blind eye to teenagers being raped by grooming gangs, because they were mainly Pakistani, and Islington councillors, turning a blind eye to sex offenders working in their childrens' homes, because they were gay.
And you must be angry about it. In fact there's summat wrong with you if you aren't.
That it is someone else is much easier than reflection that you may have played a part, however unwittingly, in the situation.
She should be moved out of the housing post as she's failing miserably to push forward government policy to ease up planning rules and get house building going.
It's an unusual man whose gaze is not drawn to an unclad woman. Hence separate changing rooms.
I know lots of lesbians who are appalled at the behaviour of trans activists and, in particular, the targeting of lesbians by men demanding sex with them or the, to them, deeply insulting claim, of the "male lesbian".
No-one can change sex. No man can ever become a woman or vice versa. The law and public policy has to be on the basis of reality not fantasy. People with gender dysphoria have the same legal rights as everyone else and I support those. The current position which is that they have those rights but that women and men are entitled to same single sex provision in the appropriate circumstances strikes the right balance IMO.
It is the demand that women should lose the rights they need (I repeat once more that Stonewall expressly campaigned for just this from 2015 onwards) is not a human right. It is an aggressive demand to obliterate someone else's rights and this is wrong. If Stonewall et al had not done this there would be no issue. If they had campaigned to get appropriate provision for dysphoric people there'd be no issue. But they needed something to keep the grift going. So they deliberately misrepresented the law to infiltrate a harmful ideology into our institutions and this is why those institutions are in the mess they're in and so many women and some men have lost jobs, been bullied, faced threats and so on. It is a hideous waste of energy but those who chose to talk nonsense and lie about biology and law are the ones to be blamed.
There’s your problem. Labour needs a lot of those “right wing” voters to come back, alienating them further means this becomes impossible
I don’t even see the point. It’s clearly a resigning issue, Rayner said it herself for years about Tory “tax cheats”. What’s more she’s housing minister - it’s completely unsustainable. How can she, say, increase housing taxes without meeting a calamitous wave of anger?
If she was a different minister - maybe. But she isn’t
If she stays she damages the government, and brings no benefit to her or to them - except I guess she keeps that bigger salary
Time will tell of course
There is I think a rather interesting dimension to all this which is that you do see as part of the wider criticisms of Labour quite a bit more of this “pre election” stance being used against them. I think they did very much major on topics of probity and being “adults” and that was tailored to Starmer’s image. I understand why they did it, but they are suffering the backlash now. If everything else was going swimmingly, I think they’d be able to shrug a lot of this off (as Blair could), but it’s not, so they can’t.
Anyhoo, nice to see @Cyclefree again. While I'm free during the lunch portion of the conference, if anybody wants to know my brief thoughts on the RSS session on the Sullivan review PM me. I'll write it up over the next day or two. Nothing big, just two-three paras.
Nottingham City finances are terrible iirc.
So we have some cases where the police and wider authorities turned a blind eye to certain crimes, and others where the police and wider authorities were actively racist regarding other crimes. Sometimes the same police.
My understanding is Rayner had some equity in the house, as did her ex husband, and the Trust held the rest. She then sold her equity to the trust, who paid the amount (I assume MV) to her, which she then used for the Hove flat.
The Trust has presumably not lost anything here on the basis that the value of its equity has increased in line with the payout to AR. Also I assume the trustees would have to sign off on this given their duties to the beneficiary.
You can perhaps suggest that optically it looks a bit odd that Rayner is selling her equity in the property to buy elsewhere given that I understand she does share living arrangements there with her ex husband, but it was her asset (partly) that she could do with as she wished.
Obviously this is only going off the detail as reported and as I understand it.
This has been repeatedly pointed out on PB by me and others. And Labour's exceptionally poor approval rating is due to lefty disappointment, not right wing dislike (which is a given).
Oxford City Council have come up with a Greater Oxford proposal that takes bits from all the surrounding districts: https://greateroxford.org/our-proposal/
If you believe Ref and Con are indistinguishable from one another and should be considered as a single broad church grouping you may have a point.
I have had some astonishingly stressful times in my life and have never felt compelled to commit any sort of crime let alone look at pictures of babies being raped. Perhaps the "stress" men suffer is specially bad in some way.
The irony of the Telegraph, the house journal of probably some of the biggest tax evaders in the world, going after Rayner for getting the wrong legal advice, is almost too delicious to contemplate.
By 43% to 37%, Britons would rather the next election resulted in a Labour government under Keir Starmer than a Reform UK government under Nigel Farage
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52896-how-do-britons-see-reform-uk-ahead-of-their-2025-conference
Which is not to say that I like that margin.
And it was not just the police: loads of authorities placed the cases on the 'too difficult' pile. They should not have, and hopefully will not in the future, but they wanted an easy life. And once you ignore some cases, it becomes easier to ignore others.
There was probably also a feeling of "these young girls are trouble, and loads of kids have sex young. What's the harm?"
Edit: and to be perfectly clear: this attitude was massively wrong.
(*) Though in some cases, the physical evidence was *very* obvious and compelling.
Are you in the lagershed?
Who is Thatcher in this dialectic?
It's NOT
Badenoch
Jenrick
Farage
Corbyn
I can't understand
What makes a man
Hate another man
Help me understand
People are people, so why should it be
You and I should get along so awfully?
People are people, so why should it be
You and I should get along so awfully?