JustaScribbler

Ex-newsdesker now in military charity comms. Royal Navy parent and dogparent to Newspup Nelson. Navigating widowhood.

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

Up with the larks to beat the #heatwave #Norfolk

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday:

Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer.

The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted.

Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right.

As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces.

Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t.

In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue.

This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls.

What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected.

But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics.

First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life.

In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different.

Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination.

Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage.

But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black.

I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families.

I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box.

So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@John_ForemanCBE @joshglancy @thetimes My son's Captain had to do that for 6 months, so did my daughter-in-law when sending Familygrams. It was a huge emotional burden for her to bear. My son says he had his dad for 6months longer than us & the anniversary of his bereavement is the night before the boat returned.

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@ReynardCity @JohnSimpsonNews This! 👆

[Hiroshi Suzuki @AmbJapanUK]

AR YA REET BOR!!😁

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@AmbJapanUK Love this! I was weaned on Adnams.

[Tom Jamieson @jamiesont]

Keir Starmer has been a disappointment, but anyone calling him 'Britain's Worst Ever Prime Minister' in a world where Liz Truss & Boris Johnson exist must have been kicked in the head by a horse

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

I’ve been and voted. Nelson looks as jaded as I feel about it all. #DogsAtPollingStations #dogsatpollingstations

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

Reform must be spending a fortune on personal letters to the electorate. I’ve just disposed of my third. My recycling bin has been defiled 🤮

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@NavyLookout @MichaelJWC626 Welcome home. Thinking of the crew and their families..

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

Oh dear. It does seem that he’s not fully in control of his emotions. Maybe it’s his hormones? He’s definitely not suited to an important job like running the country.

[Brendan May @bmay]

This compilation shows Farage clearly has more than a few anger issues with women reporters. Also, you can’t have someone this thin skinned and tetchy in charge of defence, let alone nuclear codes. Wholly unfit for office.

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@AlbanCossard @ArmchairAdml Any many British, including my father-in-law.

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

When I was at the Echo giving people the opportunity to reply was expected. By the time I left the industry I was tired of having to nag some reporters to pick the phone or email for a response.

[Jo Bartosch @jo_bartosch]

Dear @GlosLiveOnline, I started in journalism writing a column for you (or the Gloucestershire Echo, as it was) about feminism. You could have approached me for comment, rather than combing through my social media.
https://t.co/jS9ZFsum1O

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@BhavaniVadde @metpoliceuk This is awful Bhavani. Glad you've reported it, not that I've any confidence the justice system will deal with that creature properly. Hope you're OK.

[Financial Times @FT]

FT Exclusive: A broker for the US defence secretary attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter. https://t.co/EO0HBlfd6b

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

In a pub car park waiting for family to arrive for a birthday lunch. Just waved at what I thought was a relative and was actually a complete stranger. Now I have to be engrossed on my phone to avoid eye contact until they out of sight 🙄

[curt @casbeataol]

The crew of the Artemis are currently further away from Trump than any other humans.

Lucky bastards!

[Royal Navy @RoyalNavy]

125 years of the Royal Navy Submarine Service.⚓️

Here’s to all who have served below the surface - past and present.

They protect. They deter. They defend.

#SM125

[JustaScribbler @JustaScribbler]

@QcWynter When we moved into our old house we thought it was on the sewer network & the concrete pad over the “redundant” septic tank was a perfect spot for the kids’ playhouse ….. until I went outside one day and discovered a large & foetid swamp with floating fecal matter & bog roll.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Kellogg: Zelensky is a hard ass. He is a lot like Trump, very direct. The Russia-Ukraine war is not a business deal.

Putin has been the aggressor. The U.S. needs to apply the pressure on Putin to finish the war.