A Halloween Nightmare – politicalbetting.com
A Halloween Nightmare – politicalbetting.com
Halloween. And another government F*** You to women. They come fast these days but this is the best yet: not just 2 fingers to women but a positively Trumpian approach to compliance with the law, namely, use every excuse and deceitful dodge to ignore a law you don’t like. Or are too cowardly to enforce.
5
Comments
People going to'prison for social media posts.
On this issue the Met and other forces are happy,to be used by TRA’s to enact petty vendettas against people who speak up,against them and the govt happy to ignore the law. Lucy Powell has been vocal in her condemnation of the EHRC. The govt position is shameful. Ignoring the law to pander to activists.
Very true, but...
That's exactly the way they are behaving anyway. The post office, the water companies, the utility comapnies, the banks, the government and various agencies thereof, even the courts themselves on occasion.
Exhibit A - Horizon. Exhibit B - sewage discharges and dividends paid from borrowed money. Exhibit C - prepayment meters. Exhibit D - lockdown parties. Exhibit E - Hale's remarks on prorogation (which were fair enough on the law, but even as somebody who hates and despises Cummings went way, waaay too far on the abuse).
And they get away with it because they can. If the water regulator had done its job, not one water company would still be in business. If OFGEM were any use, most utility firms would have lost their licences. If the courts had done their job, then senior figures at the Post Office and Fujitsu (and in the legal profession, for that matter) would now be behind bars. Just to take a silly example, Harriet Harman committed multiple traffic offences including driving at double the speed limit (on a motorway) driving while using a phone and failing to stop after an accident. Any one of those could and probably should have resulted in a ban. Because of who she was as far as I know none of them did.
The point I'm making is I don't think this is a abberation and it's too late to serve as a warning. In one of @Cyclefree 's other headers she commented 'be ye ever so high you are not above the law.' It's difficult however looking at the evidence to argue that any more (if it ever was true - the different ways the police treated men caught cottaging based on their social class springs to mind).
The only saving grace is it's not quite as bad as in America where the judiciary is openly corrupt.
If the government gets away with behaving like this on this issue, it will do the same for those topics and laws you do care about."
As someone who struggles to get worked up about this issue, this has struck home.
If you tolerate this then your children will be next.
This case does seem like quite a contrast with this behaviour. The Supreme Court has spoken. Action should follow, to implement the law, or to amend it if so desired.
Anyway here are my answers to the Frequently Argued (and often stupid) Points raised when this topic is discussed.
1. It is cis men who are a threat to women. Not TW.
They are one and the same: both members of the male sex.
2. No TW has ever assaulted a woman in a toilet.
Untrue. Lots of examples - here and in other countries. See Katie Dolatowski, for instance.
3. TW are not a threat to women.
Judging by the latest evidence from the MoJ a far greater proportion of TW prisoners are sexual offenders than male prisoners or female ones.
4. The SC judgment bans trans people from loos, changing rooms, sport etc.
No it doesn't. No-one is banned. They are simply asked to use the facilities for their sex or unisex ones. In sport they are required to compete in their sex category to ensure that female sport is fair.
5. Trans people have been using women's loos for ages.
This is the equivalent of saying that people have been committing murder or shoplifting for ages. It doesn't make it lawful.
6. No-one's complained.
Yeah right - a woman is going to complain to a man who is physically stronger than he and who has breached her boundaries. No - she won't. She will get the hell out of there because she knows how to risk assess even if the authorities have abandoned this concept.
7. Trans people are being denied rights.
No they aren't. They have exactly the same rights as everyone else. The right to be in a space, service or association for the opposite sex is not a human right of any kind. Demands are not rights.
8. Not everywhere has a unisex space.
Indeed not. Perhaps the last decade might have been better used to campaign for such spaces.
9. Men might not like having TW in with them.
They should learn to be inclusive and kind.
10. Men might attack TW.
Yes - male violence against violence against TW is a problem. It is not one which women are obliged to solve.
11. Everyone has a gender neutral toilet at home. What's your problem?
Good-oh: make your address public, opening hours, parking restrictions, cleaning regime etc., so anyone in the vicinity can use it.
12. Having men in women's sport is no different to having an exceptional sportsman or woman.
Someone does not understand the difference between categories separated on the basis of a relevant characteristic (age / sex / weight, for instance) and an exceptional member within that category.
2, 5, 6, 8, and 11, from the top five batsmen, is barely acceptable in schoolboy cricket.
I find it interesting that upholding rights can be delayed or set aside because of cost.
Think of the fun someone really nasty could have with that.
Schools teach pupils about wrong Caesar
Australian students spend a year learning about Augustus – not his adoptive father – in blunder noticed just two days before exam
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/29/schools-queensland-australia-teach-wrong-caesar/
David Lammy’s secret race for the leadership may have begun
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/30/david-lammys-secret-leadership-race-has-begun/
"One final point. When the government is seen as caving to those who threaten violence, the message it is sending is that violence works. Is that what it wants women to learn?"
Not just women. A Batley Grammar School teacher hiding for his life also springs to mind.
Worst job market for 40 years basically.
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/james-reed-graduate-jobs-no-longer-a-given-fhnjk70hp
Hmm. At some point I should re-read TA Dodge's Caesar biography. Got to say I'm really enjoying Peter Frankopan's The First Crusade: The Call from the East right now.
The govt want to change the law to allow Plod to gun down ‘trans’
Ooh Shabana's gonna be pissed about this. She's gonna change protest laws again so police can just gun down the transes and the climate protestors and those who disapprove of genocide, isn't she?
https://x.com/jolyonmaugham/status/1984251620079878561?s=61
One was done before the Equality Act was implemented in December 2009. It can be found here - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7ce15140f0b6629523c5ca/9780108508721.pdf
14. Men can be lesbians.
No they can't. This is the 21st century's equivalent of "you haven't met/been fucked by the right man yet, love. It is coercive nonsense.
- Greed
- Stupidity
- Complacency
- Hubris
- Cowardice.
Of these, cowardice is by far the most prevalent and the worst. As we see here.
It is, however, a disgraceful approach. There was no impact of the costs of removing women's rights nor would such a step now look at the costs to women and gay people of not enforcing the law. Those costs are significant and have been borne by individual women. They are not just financial but the public humiliation of women forced to explain why, for instance, on their periods or when changing clothes they don't want some bloke in their presence who knows he is making them "uncomfortable" but does not care (this was the precise evidence of Dr Upton in the Peggie case). It is utterly degrading and horrible and is intended to frighten women into staying quiet.
Utterly disgraceful. This is not a human rights movement. It is plain old fashioned bullying by men who cannot bear women saying no to them.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1984527037340495941
Oh well.
Trans-women and Trans-men exist, and in significant numbers. Accessing health care for surgical transition has become much more difficult, with the Cass report effectively closing down care as the waiting lists are many years long. Even fully "passing" post surgical Trans-folk would be restricted to use facilities of their biological sex. So these people are either forced back into the closet, housebound, or can not use public facitities. Its a very punitive approach.
Then there's the problem of enforcement. Who can check the biological sex of everyone in the workplace, restaurant or public convenience? Who is responsible for the offence caused when users are incorrectly challenged. It is facile to deny that these are real problems. In practice this law is going to be openly flouted, and a law that is widely ignored, particularly in avante garde or hipster parts of the country.
I was thinking the other night about @BlancheLivermore bad hospital experience when ill. There were several aspects to this, but one was the lack of privacy. We are unusual as a developed country to expect 6 or so people to share the same ward bay. In most similar countries hospitals have single rooms with ensuite. Similarly communal changing areas without cubicles are the norm in all the hospitals that I have worked in. This does not match modern cultural mores. Newly constructed facilities should be built differently, but we have a vast legacy estate that cannot simply be altered. Privacy includes much more than sex and gender aspects.
Yes, indeed, the powerful do pick and choose which laws they wish to obey.
“Doesn’t throwing people out of the country, without appeal, just because they are on a list, breach their human rights?”
“Probably. But appeals would be expensive, so we decided not to. All good”
When I asked about a separate room, the consultant explained that if people weren’t in a ward, they might get neglected. And if my father was moved to a private room, they would consider him outside the care of their unit.
Mind you, they managed, while he was on the ward, to let him get chronically dehydrated, despite repeated requests about a drip.
At least that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
In other news, one massive power substation close to Moscow got blown up by the Ukranians.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1984499071264895062
There’s a small but significant danger of this happening in the UK, as the people vote against what appears to be an impossibility in practice of deporting anyone without the Home Secretary’s personal intervention.
No-one is forced to be housebound because the obvious answer is to provide unisex facilities. Take some of the men's loos and make them unisex - problem solved. Or make the men's facilities unisex. There. This claim that it is impossible to provide unisex facilities is just nonsense. Organisations were quick to turn female facilities into unisex ones so they can just unscrew the sign on the door and replace it with the correct one.
As for employees - employers need to make clear what is expected and that anyone breaching the rules will be disciplined. They have in any case been under an obligation to prevent sexual harassment of their staff since October 2024 and permitting voyeurism and indecent exposure (both criminal offences) would be caught by this duty.
This is not a case of it's too difficult / we can't do it. Ot is not too difficult and it can be done. It is, frankly, a case we don't want to and we don't care if women are harmed as a result. This is unacceptable.
Example: Stevenage Council has recently opened unisex changing facilities at a new sports centre. There have been complaints of voyeurism etc and the police have warned the council of the risk. And the response? We don't care and there have only been 4 reported crimes. Oh well, that's all right then. Councillors should be asked how many crimes are acceptable and which of their female relatives should be subject to such crimes.
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
The Nazis’ legal officers were not slavering, half-educated monsters, but rather, men with higher degrees from top universities. Ditto, their Soviet equivalents. Ditto, the Justices who ruled on Dred Scott, and Plessey v Ferguson, and Trump’s partisan judges.
There are plenty of lawyers who see law as a weapon to be wielded against those they hate.
Though, perhaps ironically, the real Sir Thomas Moore used hearsay evidence in trials of heretics. And when one chap was found innocent, locked him up illegally*, in an attempt to get him to confess. “to save the Bishop’s credit”
*In his basement. Yes, Sir Thomas Moore tried running his own prison.
It is reported that the whole of the Russian electricty grid has been teetering for ages due to lack of investment/corruption. These Ukrainian strikes could push it over the edge. Just as Winter makes her presence felt.
What a shit show Russia is.
Any dispute resolved by law ultimately has a winner and a loser. Someone ends up boosted and someone ends up harmed. There are rules and constraints around that, sure; the dispute is settled on the more convincing argument based on published law and available facts. But strip that away and the heart of the matter is about a struggle between wills, rather than a disinterested seeking after truth. Only one of the reasons I didn't do law.
(Talking of which, however ridiculous and pompous Maugham is, likening him to a convicted Nazi war criminal is a bit of a low blow, isn't it?)
That may well be better than alternatives- even the worst of the worst deserve to have the best possible case made for them. But a legal truth isn't the same as a scientific one, or a philosophical-logical one.
Paradoxically, the contemporary institutions most likely to give you something that we might consider a fair trial were the ecclesiastical courts (the conviction of Joan of Arc was overturned on very modern-sounding procedural grounds).
These people need to be laughed at - for starters - inflicting flow charts on us and pretending that enforcing a long established law and well understood social conventions are too difficult.
What is a mess is the way activists have sought to embed self-ID and mislead so many people and organisations about what the law says. It has caused real harm to many and there really ought to be a financial and legal reckoning with those lobby groups who have behaved unlawfully, disgracefully, wasted taxpayers' money and abused their charitable status. It is an absolute scandal.
I did my time queuing at the job centre with all the others who couldn't find work. Eventually, and much against my better judgement (but out of financial necessity), I worked in a bookies (which I had through my student holidays) for a year or so and hated it. Marking the board on odd afternoons was a bit of a laugh but as your main employment (apart from the money), it was very different and not pleasant.
As an aside, it would be much worse now given the long hours.
I'll gladly join others and congratulate @Cyclefree on yet another excellent contribution.
There are many very serious and severe problems in this country - I quoted child poverty yesterday and this is another one - but we seem obsessed currently on small boats which, and I'll stand by for the flak, is essentially trivial in the grand scheme of things.
“Why are you a brigand?”
“Why are you a magistrate?”
Winter is coming to Russia.
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1975287290298835442
(Let’s hope so anyway, I’m well aware that I’m only ever reading one side of the story when it comes to Russia and Ukraine).
If he were representing a client in court, then of course they will agree between them the argument to be put forward.
Today you’re basically babysitting the machines on which the lowest in society are losing their rent money, and dealing with a bunch of idiots waving their phones showing better odds then you can give them. All for minimum wage, and with a fair chance of getting robbed for the contents of the safe.
Introducing clear guidance would remove the ambiguity in one direction. Legislating to amend the Equalities Act is a viable route if they wish to go the other way. Both would irritate a sizeable minority on the left.
I expect them to keep their fingers in their ears for as long as possible.
We had the old boys doing their 112x1p reverse forecast doubles on the eight race dog cards and when I worked the shops around Soho, the market traders (who knew) would come in on a Saturday morning and bet big on the Hackney dogs. The biggest (in terms of cash) punter I saw always came in with two strikingly beautiful women and I was told he was in the porn business - he once gave the shop manager £100 as a bonus after a big win.
Back in the day, atheist parents would do anything to get their children into CofE schools, because at that time they generally had very good records.
Do politicians not understand that ordinary people who are parents will do anything to protect their children from body-destroying ideologies? I have no children and I have the greatest sympathy for those with true body dysmorphia or other real problems. But personally I would rather be obliged to wear a burqa myself than have the children of my society ruined by this ideology.
Good morning, everyone.
And, somehow, a government has to manage to address the more severe problems and the symbolic ones, at the same time. One of the weaknesses of British politics in this era of weak Cabinets and all-powerful Prime Ministers, is that it is harder for a government to effectively multi-task. The emasculation of local authorities in favour of Whitehall centralisation has a similar enervating effect.
The government of a country of nigh on 70 million is too big a job for one person.
It's happened for a reason, and there's no point trying to undo the process. Things and services are cheaper and more abundant and more convenient, and we have mostly gained more on that side of the balance than we have lost on the other.
But there has been a cost, and I suspect it's one of the factors in left-behind populism. Perhaps we haven't used the gains from automation and tech-enabled management as wisely as we should.
Most of the soviet-era apartment blocks have central heating by the way, with a single large oil-burning heater in the basement. Supply of the oil for these is in many ways more important than keeping the power on, although one might also imagine that recent ‘upgrades’ to these rely on power, in the same way as your Western gas cooker won’t work without electricity.
Incidentally, one of the things I noticed in Ukraine this summer, which wasn’t the case a couple of years ago, was retail and hospitality businesses with generators outside. My suspicion is that Ukraine has been planning this for a while and buying up supples of the gennies.
(Again, I’m well aware of only seeing this from one side).
Similarly, Gender Reassignment is one of the protected characteristics under the Equalities Act. Under that Act Gender reassignment discrimination includes direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation.
A very substantial number of our laws are flouted, illegal drug consumption being one of many. The courts and police do not and never will have the capacity or funding to uniformly enforce them, and it would be a pretty totalitarian place if they did.
The vast majority of laws are in effect down to social convention and enforcement by bystanders. So smoking indoors is now no longer happening because of social pressure, though the same sanction is not applied to the smokers standing outside my hospital in their nightwear next to the signs saying "no smoking anywhere on hospital grounds". Civil disobedience also centres on flouting unjust laws, as we see with the ""Palestine Action" arrests.
Hence there will be spaces where the supreme court judgement will be enforced by social pressure, and other places where it will be flouted. Trans-men using male toilets being an obvious one.
The law is a mess and at times contradictory, a cynic might say to keep lawyers in well paid work.
Its an early kick off today, so I am signing off now, but best wishes for your health.
MY recollection was we (the Manager, the Cashier and I) did go for a couple of drinks after shutting up the shop at 6.30pm but we didn't spend the full £100 so what happened to it I don't know.
It's possible the Regional Manager (who was a regular visitor to the shop) got a share. I worked the West End Pool of shops for Mecca who had their regional office in Lower James Street. I would report there an hour before racing each day (so 1pm on weekdays and 10am on Saturdays) and be told where I was going - usually Berwick Street but also Panton Street, Wardour Street or even the Lower James shop itself). I'd walk round to the shop - they would call the Manager to expect me - and that would be my workplace for the day.
Berwick Street had a Manager and a permanent cashier but on Saturdays they'd have a second cashier as the shop was busier.
That was my first experience of work - basically pin money but it helped.
United States -6%
United Kingdom -11%
Ireland -7%
Germany -12%
France -16%
Canada +6%
So best to get into an argument with Trump and there will be a jobs boom
https://data.indeed.com/#/
The quality of some of the contributions here is extremely high unlike much wider debate these days.
I agree on the issue that our failure to bring up our children well is a major issue but the term poverty has become entangled with money. That is not the real issue as can be seen from the fortunes spent on children in care homes and the terrible outcomes.
The world is changing too fast for our government. From war where the way to fight has changed dramatically with drones, to automation in production, to the use of IT to systemise and automate a whole range of paper moving tasks a whole range of jobs are being redesigned. The small boats is emblematic of an incompetent government.
There was a recent poll on X which showed that the biggest change in voting behaviour recently has been in the poorest areas where the move has been from Labour to Reform. The poor dont want fancy words or ideals but real change to their life. I am not sure many of the middle class get this. Instead they try to label them as stupid or with bad morals for expressing their viewpoint. This is not going to work only real action will
They should offer to incorporate Washington, Oregon, California into Canada - if the residents vote for it. Maybe Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan too. New York and New England would surely follow. That would wrong-foot MAGA....
But those hard statistics don't reflect the emotional and symbolic power of these issues. In the north of Scotland, poverty has an ongoing and devastating impact on people. Yet the reaction of my friends to the the rape of a 17-year old in Elgin by an asylum seeker would suggest that this is far, far more important to people - notwithstanding the widespead sexual abuse that happens at the hands of people from Scotland. This particular assault of a vulnerable girl is a direct consequence of UK Government's approach to immigration and Moray Council's housing of asylum seekers.
A challenge for people like me, who live in spreadsheets and models, is to find a way to measure this. An economist would use revealed preference to do so, and would likely find a value in the tens of billions.
That said, we should perhaps do more to prevent refugees in the first place, but the zeitgeist seems to be moving the other way.
Besides, why would anyone with that much ability who isn't a holy fool or a swivel-eyed ideologue enter politics these days? I'm not thinking so much about the money as the sense that everyone else is out to humiliate you on a daily basis?
My understanding is that we were quite even-handed with POWs over the ages, who we might have had cause to despise. But once they were no longer a threat, they were treated with respect by most folks.
ETA this is one area where the legal establishment is on a sticky wicket. Of course police should stop rioters and arsonists but the government should take more care not be seen as protecting child rapists and murderers.
I agree; the toxicity of social media would put off anybody sane and capable.
Perhaps we need to put in place far stronger protections for our politicians from such vitriol. Better still, just give politicians cover under a wider protection from these vicious tw@ts.
The good news is it will pay almost as much as the state pension, but only if I defer taking it a few more years by which time I will likely be dead and the pot will likely have evaporated owing to inept fund management.
For example how friendships and informal networks (eg the OBN - who you know not what you know) are absolutely fine, to the extent that new mutual-promotion networks are being created every month.
What was the COVID VIP Lane but queue-barging and corruption?
The mainstream is perfectly capable of being utterly ridiculous (as per some questions put to Boris Johnson, of whom I am not a fan, during the pandemic, as if he could guarantee rates of infection declining).
Prime Mastermind
Instead we have the nonsense of a party with 5-ish MPs demanding a general election now, barely 15 months into a new parliament.
A very interesting Ashley Neal video of a viewer who has sent in 15 clips of offences he reported to Operation SNAP. The outcomes are quite reassuring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5_fO4zmxM
It is presumably illegal to do so with intent to evade immigration or customs.
So it is presumably legal to enter the country in a small boat and immediately turn yourself in to the authorities and claim asylum.
Of course if we intercept people before they do this they don't have the opportunity to claim asylum legally. It is possible that the majority want to fade into the black economy, but we just don't know.
So maybe we should set up a port on the south coast for legal asylum claims, and deport any people who do not take this route.
1 - That's what you and many others think. Many other people (including cis women) think differently.
2 - And that's obviously terrible. Someone like that isn't going to care about the law are they though?
3 - Trans women suffer terrible abuse, and it's been getting much worse recently. Most of them are not sexual offenders.
4 - It bans people from the loos they present as. There are trans people who you would never know were trans. How would you feel seeing a trans man who looks exactly the same as a cis man in the loo with you?
5 - A trans woman going to the loos and someone getting murdered are not remotely comparable. Some TW have been using the women's loos for decades. To be told "Actually no you can't do that anymore it's the law" might stop some trans people, it isn't going to stop actual criminals who don't care about the law.
6 - Don't know where you get the idea that people are saying that no one's complained. Hell, it's known that actual cis women are getting accused of being men in toilets.
7 - Private services (like a lesbian support group for example) absolutely should have the right to who their members are IMHO and if they want to exclude trans women then so be it.
8 - Many places, especially in a country like the UK with older buildings don't have the space to put in a separate toilet.
9 - Yes they should, but sadly that's not going to happen for a long time, if ever.
10 - I agree they aren't. Again, someone who wants to attack a women isn't going to care what the law says though.
11 - Never heard that argument either, and it's a stupid one (them not you).
12 - That's a separate issue and one where I would actually agree with you.
But Canadian Provinces can secede far more easily than US States - in the US there would be a military response.