Stephen Murphy

🇬🇧🇭🇰🇸🇬🇪🇸 Brit formerly in HK, SG & ES. Country, democracy, meritocracy, rule of law & free speech. Staunch HM Armed Forces advocate. Spurs.

[Wesley Hunt @WesleyHuntTX]

Hey Jasmine…

Black pilot here.

I think you missed the plot.
Then again, that’s becoming a pattern.

I graduated from West Point.
I went through Army flight school.
I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache.
I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.

Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color.

Nobody lowered the standards for me.

Nobody looked at me and said, “Let’s check a diversity box.”

That’s what people like you don’t seem to understand.

Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting.

I didn’t want a different standard.
I wanted the same standard.

And when you’re flying into combat, the American people don’t care what race the pilot is.

They care whether the pilot is qualified.

Merit isn’t racist.
Excellence isn’t discriminatory.

And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.

[Outpost Studios @OutpostStudios]

Don't be taken in by what you read today or tomorrow. The mainstream media are sugar-coating the truth. Colin Brazier explains how 👇

@ColinBrazierTV @OutpostStudios

[Stephen Murphy @smurphy31]

@TrevorPTweets and @ColinBrazierTV leading the charge this weekend on the tragedy of Henry Novak and the public services that failed him and so many others.

[Mark N @Cold8957]

The left.
Rob Kenyon is “inarticulate and uneducated”.

Also the left.
“Angela Rayner could be the next prime minister!”

The left.
“It’s great that Hannah Spencer is a plumber!”

Also the left.
“Rob Kenyon is JUST a plumber!”

I’m sick and tired of their hypocrisy.

[Outpost Studios @OutpostStudios]

The True Story behind the Murder of Henry Nowak.

The week's Brazier, with @ColinBrazierTV.

Only on @OutpostStudios.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Good news. My patriotic friend @LordWeirDUP won the Private Members’ Bill ballot, and has just introduced a Bill to prohibit any change in the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands without the consent of both Parliament and the Chagossian people.
We are going to win this thing.
🇮🇴🇬🇧

[Tal Hartuv @TalHartuv]

Hi Zack, I'm a British-born Israeli who was stabbed 18 times by a Palestinian terrorist. Another chopped up my friend in front of my eyes. One got out in the hostage deal. They were paid a salary for years by the UK gov.
Could you tweet: "all of this is a horrific crime. He should be held to account."
Thanks

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Unlike George Floyd’s death, Henry Nowak’s plainly does reveal an institutional bias in the police. So why the demented protests about the first and the near silence about the second?
Me in the @Telegraph. Paywall down. https://t.co/jTPwUAk1CM

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Well, @HantsPolice
Is it true it was two WOMEN officers who handcuffed and mocked Henry Nowak as he lay dying?
An eighteen-year-old student, helpless and treated like scum in his fear and panic.
Dear God.
No excuses.
Where is the bodycam footage?

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

The trial has concluded, the facts have been confirmed. As the prosecuting counsel put it, Digwa used his “trump card” by alleging he had been the victim of racist abuse when police officers arrived.
DEI has again proved lethal - literally lethal. Henry Nowak, like the victims of Valdo Kalocane, of Axel Rudakubana, of the rape gangs, was failed by a public sector that treats anti-racism as its supreme value.
Unlike the death of George Floyd, his death plainly did reveal institutional bias - a bias deliberately cultivated across state bodies by years of training sessions and seminars.
Where are the protests? Where are the knee-takings? Where are the corporate boycotts?
Sod it, let’s be more modest. Is anyone even calling for an overhaul of the police?

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

I have spoken to some of the world’s leading epidemiologists and virologists. The Covid jab is NOT a vaccine. Claims made for it were wrong. It neither protects against infection or transmission. At best, it modifies symptoms.
Why was the Astra Zeneca jab suddenly withdrawn? Because it killed people.
Giving millions an under tested jab - genuine vaccines take 10 years to develop and get approval - was crazy.
In years to come, we will see pharmaceutical companies paying out billions for false claims and injuries.
I am not anti-science! I am against giving people unnecessary injections that could harm them.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

A reminder that, under our soil, we have 1.5 billion barrels of oil, 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 300 years' supply of coal.

https://t.co/8dXQcd78or

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

No Afghan men should be allowed to stay in our country,
They come from a barbaric misogynistic culture where fathers sell their small daughters as sex slaves.
Yet Afghanistan is one country the UK can’t deport asylum seekers to.
Because it’s not “safe” for them.
We are so done with this warped human rights bullshit.
Protect our girls.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

In both cases, police were uncaring, but only in one case does Starmer bend the knee

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

“Why the asymmetry in coverage? Both men died after being restrained by the police. Nowak’s last words, like Floyd’s, were reported to be ‘I can’t breathe’. Yet there have been no riots over the white victim, no statues smashed, no corporate vigils. No one has been fired for saying that all lives matter.
Indeed, until @elonmusk took an interest, Nowak’s death was being reported as a local crime story.”
https://t.co/z6kllFtvZ9

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Well done, Elon.
Justice for Henry Novak!

https://t.co/L1FeLRcRHp

[Stephen Murphy @smurphy31]

Sublime @ColinBrazierTV - this speaks to every motivation I ever head for voting to leave. Thank you for what you do - and how - and may your late wife rest in peace.

[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.

[Al Murray 🇺🇦 @almurray]

Oh come on we were going to buy that