Iris Walker 💜🤍💚

All views my own.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

I still can't work out why it is apparently essential that Andy Burnham, and ONLY Andy Burnham, *must* be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom without any member of the public having a say in the matter.

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

Nothing screams “establishment” harder than every Westminster party having no issue whatsoever standing at the Makerfield by-election to legitimise the appointment of Andy Burnham and then clubbing together to try & delegitimise Nigel Farage at a by-election in Clacton.

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

@AndrewSmithXD1 Yes! Haven't had a chance to use it yet though 🐦🦜. Thanks for the reminder.

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

@AgentP22 @2351onthelist What she's talking about is what devolution was supposed to deliver- decisions made at the most local level. I can understand why folk want devolution scrapped altogether (I sometimes do too) as the SNP has centralised everything and hollowed out local government.

[Stephen Daisley @JournoStephen]

The EHRC guidance is not legally binding. It is drawn up to help organisations ensure policies and practices are lawful. If Edinburgh City Council thinks it knows better, it has the option of proceeding as it sees fit. Might want to bump up its legal budget first, mind you.

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

@LucyHunterB He's a good lad. Parliament needs more like James.

[Becky Argyle @ArgyleBecky]

Starmer is not just disliked, he is loathed. His duty is to call a General Election, he called for an election when the Conservatives changed PM. Burnham wasn’t elected as an MP at the GE but a Labour stitch up is foisting this man on the British public.

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

Age 11 - feel free to block puberty.

But whatever you do, don’t go on social media until you are 16.

We have lost our bloody minds. 🤯😵‍💫

[Becky Argyle @ArgyleBecky]

Although this man was by far the worst PM in British history, he was aided & abetted by the Labour MPs sitting in parliament and who are now jumping ship to support Burnham. It is now a case of out of the frying pan and into the fires of hell with Burnham, a Corbyn clone.

[euan mccolm @euanmccolm]

“Too wee, too poor, too stupid” used to be an SNP straw man, now it’s an ambition. My @scotonsunday column on the damage wrought by Scotland’s sleazy government: https://t.co/4Mp0B0GXtQ

[David Wolfson @DXW_KC]

You can agree or disagree with the Sup Ct judgment (but the law must be followed).
But to say you agree with the judgment, and then to attack the guidance is simply unprincipled.
That’s not upholding the rule of law. It’s trying to secure your preferred outcome *despite* the law.

[Stephen Daisley @JournoStephen]

Every minister in the UK Government should be legally compelled to spend one week each year shadowing their Scottish Government counterpart.

Devolution would be abolished within a month.

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

@NeilDrysdale Today being the 9th anniversary of his death, the article you wrote for dad popped up in my FB memories today! Good luck for your next chapter!
https://t.co/X9l8QkxvSZ

[LBC @LBC]

‘This is the kind of dirty dealings that are only supposed to happen in SW1.’

@Ella_M_Whelan challenges Nicola Sturgeon’s self‑portrayal as ‘holier-than-thou’.

[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.

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

@ShahrarAli @scottishgreens I wonder who she might have been displacing or competing with on the list. Was it the North East region? 🤔. Maybe explains the difference in treatment between her and Q?

[Laila Cunningham @policylaila]

So ministers are campaigning to win a seat they already had, for a candidate that wants to replace the PM that they have full confidence in and claim is going nowhere.
And we are meant to pretend this is all perfectly normal.

[Normal Island News @NormalIslandNws]

BREAKING: Man optimistic he can replace hated prime minister and win over the public by doing the exact same policies, but in a Mancunian accent ♥️

[Iris Walker 💜🤍💚 @iris_tweets]

100%. "The oath is meant to be a universal commitment- a binding, connecting moment, not a personal soapbox"

[Levi Pay @soppystern]

I was one of three parliamentary staff members at The Scottish Parliament who got together in a room to draft the Parliament's first ever Language Policy back in 2004.

Here's an archived copy of the policy, as it has obviously been replaced by more recent versions since then: https://t.co/O5fcF5kk3B

The policy was designed to support use of Gaelic in the work of the Parliament, and to overcome genuine barriers that a minority of people might face in accessing the Parliament or its work because they were not fluent in English.

This policy was not designed to prompt politicians to speak any language they liked in the chamber to score points relating to their own identity or ideology. @MaggieChapman would seem to be able to speak English fluently, and therefore I struggle to see any access-based premise for her speaking in Shona in this context.

I feel constantly embarrassed by the way in which genuine good-faith work to address genuine barriers to access has been used by people for ideological and political reasons.

I feel sad that it has now become difficult to defend inclusion-based activity because it has become associated with virtue signalling and with undermining, rather than strengthening, human connectedness.

I wish I had been able to foresee what would happen, so I could have detached myself from equality and diversity work even sooner than I did.

This is before we get onto the political symbol Maggie Chapman is wearing around her neck. This whole thing is so unprofessional and embarassing.

[Becky Argyle @ArgyleBecky]

The Labour government prove daily that they are clueless. No government in the world is stupid enough to kill the goose that lays the golden egg & to leave an ignoramous like Miliband in charge. Labour’s destruction of the oil industry will cost billions of pounds of investment.