Gladys

Women's rights are human rights ♀️♀️♀️💜💚🤍 🇦🇫

[Gladys @GladKent]

@fem_mb My first crush was Jack Wild (the Artful Dodger in Oliver!), but it was the 1st photo of him that confirmed I was definitely heterosexual! Interestingly, the poster on my wall as I got older was of Roger Daltrey. There does seem to have been a theme..

[Gladys @GladKent]

@DreyfusJames Come to Kent!

[Elaine Miller | Venus Envy @GussieGrips]

A vulva is a collection of parts, and a vagina is an organ. If you can see it, it's your vulva - and if you, or a wee pal, are fishing about in there, that's your vagina. M'kay?
#DoYourPelvicFloorExercises

[Gladys @GladKent]

@ronmanagernottm Not the Nine o'clock News did a great spoof of this 🙂

[Gladys @GladKent]

@swearysnork Moomin wisdom 🙂

[Gladys @GladKent]

@latsot Absolutely 😀

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

A Year After The Supreme Court Ruling, Staffordshire Police Force Still Can't Say What Sex Means

In April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. Staffordshire Police read that judgment and then drafted new custody guidance in response to it. The result still commits to housing detainees "consistent with their gender identity" and lets people "self-identify their gender" in force records. This was not a policy written before the law was settled and simply never updated. It was written after, with the ruling fully in view, and it still lands on self-identification as the operating principle.

The document's own internal contradiction shows this isn't confusion so much as evasion. One clause states plainly that intimate searches "should be carried out by police officers and staff of the same biological sex as the detained person," a clear, lawful standard. The next section states that a detainee holding a full Gender Recognition Certificate has their "sex" become "that of a woman," directly undercutting the rule stated a few lines earlier. Asked to clarify which version actually governs, the force said a GRC doesn't "automatically" determine the outcome, retreating to "case-by-case" assessment rather than naming a rule at all. That's the same move seen elsewhere in British institutions caught contradicting themselves: state the correct principle, quietly undercut it in the next clause, then hide behind individual circumstances when someone asks which one actually applies.

The starkest detail sits in the National Police Chiefs' Council guidance underneath Staffordshire's policy, not in Staffordshire's document itself. It states that an officer who refuses to search someone of the opposite biological sex "will not suffer a detriment to their career." That sentence only needs writing if the institutional default already runs the other way, if officers who decline are the exception requiring formal protection rather than officers who comply. The guidance doesn't protect neutrality. It protects dissent from a presumed norm, which tells you plainly what that norm is.

Cathy Larkman, a retired police superintendent now with the Women's Rights Network, called it what it is: a failure that "indicates a level of ignorance with the law and a disregard for the rights of women." Terence Stock, formerly on the force's own Independent Advisory Group, went further, calling the continued use of self-ID "unforgivable" given the Supreme Court's judgment and the plain same-sex requirement already written into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Neither of these are outside critics unfamiliar with policing. Both know the institution from within, and both are describing the same thing documented across the CPS, Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey: a written rule stating the correct legal standard, sitting beside operational guidance that quietly does something else.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The Equality and Human Rights Commission's code of practice, the document meant to give police forces exactly the clarity Staffordshire's policy lacks, sat with Bridget Phillipson, the minister responsible for issuing it, for eight months before she finally laid it before Parliament in May. Even now, two months on, it still isn't in force. Individual forces have been left to draft their own interpretations in that gap, and Staffordshire shows precisely what fills it when no binding national guidance exists: not caution, but a continuation of self-ID, formalised in a new document that can now be pointed to as evidence of compliance.

Staffordshire Police says its officers act "in accordance with applicable legislation, national policing guidance and force policy." All three currently disagree with each other, and the force's own document proves it in a single contradictory paragraph. This wasn't a force struggling with an unclear ruling. It read a clear one and wrote around it.

Bridget Phillipson

[Gladys @GladKent]

@TheVikingDane Loved our visit to Skagen last year. Absolutely gorgeous place 🥰

[Gladys @GladKent]

@TheVikingDane Definitely! Whitney's is overdone - too much messing about.

[Gladys @GladKent]

@swearysnork I think this might be my spirit animal....

[Gladys @GladKent]

Hey @grok based on my posts which historical figure do I remind you of?

[Gladys @GladKent]

@Daily_Express @DailyMail @Telegraph @thetimes. She's due to rule soon on a massive housebuilding development in Kent, for which the infrastructure is simply not there (especially water). She called in the application when she was previously in post.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Rayner's £182,000 Masterclass In Hypocrisy

Angela Rayner spent years telling the country that MPs' second jobs were a racket. In March 2023 she wrote that being an MP "isn't a second job. It is the job." Labour, she promised, would put an end to the practice. Eighteen months later she resigned from Cabinet in disgrace over her own financial affairs. Within a year she had earned £182,376 from speeches, book advances and a severance payment she had no obligation to keep. Then she walked straight back into the job she had left.

The figures are not subtle. She earned £104,000 from speaking fees in ten months, on top of an MP's salary that rose to £98,599 in April. She took £61,500 as a book advance for a memoir about her own life. She kept a £16,876 exit payment while Wes Streeting, reappointed to Cabinet the same week, is serving his first three months for nothing.

One fee stands apart from the rest. Propertymark, a trade body representing the property sector, paid Rayner £20,000 for a two-hour speaking engagement. That is £10,000 an hour, from an industry lobby group, paid to a former Housing Secretary weeks before she was reappointed Housing Secretary. Nobody pays that rate for after-dinner charm. They pay it for access, and they got exactly what they paid for. This is not a speaking fee. It is a retainer with a lectern attached.

The woman collecting these cheques left the department with a housebuilding record to be ashamed of. Official figures published by the Ministry of Housing in November show England delivered 208,600 net additional dwellings in 2024-25, a fall of 6 per cent on the year before. New build completions dropped from 198,610 to 190,600. Labour's manifesto promised 1.5 million homes over the Parliament, a rate of 300,000 a year. Rayner delivered barely two-thirds of that. Housebuilding did not accelerate under her stewardship. It slowed.

She has an answer ready for all of it. The severance payment was earned, she told BBC Radio 5 Live, because she had genuinely left government for a period of time. That defence collapses under its own logic. The payment exists to cushion ministers against sudden unemployment. Rayner was not unemployed. She was the best-paid backbencher in Britain, drawing more from four speeches than most of her constituents earn in three years.

Joanna Marchong of the think tank Onward put it plainly: Rayner built her brand attacking Tory sleaze and demanding a ban on MPs' outside earnings, then pocketed £180,000 the moment the rules stopped applying to her. Lee Anderson called her year out a good little earner. Both are right, and neither goes far enough. The deeper failure sits in the housing numbers, where the gap between rhetoric and delivery is measured not in pounds but in homes that were never built.

Labour came to power promising a government that would look different from what came before it. Rayner's year off shows how quickly that promise curdles into the same old story: rules for the public, exemptions for the powerful, and a lobby group's cheque book standing in for genuine accountability. She missed her housing target by a third and was rewarded with reappointment. She broke her own stated principle on second jobs and was rewarded with £182,376. The voters who elected this government on a promise of change deserve to know that the change stopped at the Cabinet door.

"Rayner's year off shows how quickly that promise curdles into the same old story: rules for the public, exemptions for the powerful"

[Gladys @GladKent]

@moanaparte @latsot 💯

[Gladys @GladKent]

@swearysnork Kind of - East Yorkshire 🥰. My Mum's family were from there.

[Gladys @GladKent]

@TheVikingDane @elonmusk It's enough to make you run to the pub 😉....

[Gladys @GladKent]

@TheVikingDane @johnsowle The defaulting to For You is bloody annoying, and I can't see how to change it. And I've only noticed the old post stuff now you've pointed it out. Why do they do this 😡😡?

[Gladys @GladKent]

Husband has just found out that ale with an ABV of 3.5% only has 180 calories. Needless to say, he's absolutely delighted - "It's practically Ozempic!". He's working on his diet book as we speak....

[Gladys @GladKent]

@latsot Love her voice ❤️