In March 2013 A Voice for Men published my article about British men paying considerably more income tax than women, and in return getting a state that assaults their human rights and interests on many fronts. In 2010/11 British men had income tax liabilities of £108 billion (71.2% of all income tax liabilities), women just £43.6 billion (28.8%).

A government minister recently boasted that there’s a record number of women in paid employment, and the proportion of such women has increase markedly over the term of this government, which (through its tax policies) is hostile to stay-at-home mothers.

So women must be paying an increasing proportion of income tax revenues, surely? Er, no. We’re working on the election manifesto, and checked out the following year’s (2011/12) figures which are downloadable from the HMRC website – the key table is here. Men paid an additional £4 billion income tax in 2011/12 compared with 2010/11, women paid an additional £0.2 billion. The proportion of income tax revenues paid by men rose from 71.2% to 71.8%, the proportion paid by women declined from 28.8% to 28.2%.

Men paid £68.2 BILLION more income tax than women in 2011/12.

The proportions haven’t moved greatly, it must be said, it’s the overall numbers and direction of travel that matter. If the gender balance were the other way around, can you imagine the headline of the Fawcett Society press release on the matter? Maybe something like:

Working women crippled by income tax payments, yet sanitary products still taxed.

An interesting piece from an unimpeachable source.

Interesting new article in the Daily Telegraph. We don’t know if the headline writer was being ironic with ‘Bullying husbands face jail..’, rather than ‘Bullying partners…’, but it surely reflects the inevitable reality –  virtually all the people targeted by these proposals will be men. We see the Home Office is working with a number of organisations, one of them Women’s Aid, whose CEO Polly Neate comes out again with the often-discredited lie that two women a week are being killed by partners or ex-partners. In 2011/12 88 women were killed by partners or ex-partners, a fall of 25% in just ten years.

In our election manifesto we’ll be making proposals in the area of paternity fraud, so in Detroit I was much looking forward to a presentation by Carnell Smith on the topic. It turned our to be one of the highlights of the conference. The video (with a short introduction by Attila Vinczer) isn’t short (40:10) but it’s well worth catching in full. Enjoy. And be prepared to explain to anyone who ever uses the word ‘cupcake’ in your vicinity, why you laughed spontaneously.

We’ve just received a donation of £100 from Harry, a pensioner on limited means living in the South-East of England. He tells us he’s delighted to support our cause because of his concerns, stretching back through nearly four decades, over what feminists have been doing to many aspects of society. He first got in contact with us a couple of years ago when he found out about one of our websites, Campaign for Merit in Business, and we’ve been in regular touch ever since. He was one of a number of supporters who travelled to watch me give evidence at a House of Commons inquiry, ‘Women in the Workplace’, in November 2012. How long ago that seems now. Dr Catherine Hakim (developer of ‘Preference Theory’) and Steve Moxon – author of The Woman Racket – were on the same panel. A video of that evidence session is here.

If you’re able to follow Harry’s example and make a donation to our work, we can promise it will be put to good use. You can do so through this link. Thank you for your support.

In recent months we’ve had a number of comments on our blog pieces from Herbert Purdy, often lengthy, but always well worth reading in their entirety. So it came as a pleasant surprise this afternoon to learn he’s been running his own blog for some months, and we’ve just checked it out http://herbertpurdy.com. We think it’s an important addition to the list of blogs and websites concerned with the assaults of feminism on the human rights and legitimate interests of men and boys – as well as the rights and interests of the majority of women and girls – and we invite you to check out the site and join us in subscribing, so you’ll get his new posts as soon as they’re published. We confidently predict this blog will become ever more influential over time.

When it looked like the Detroit Conference on Men’s Issues might not proceed due to a demand from the conference venue – a Hilton hotel in Detroit – for $25,000 to cover security costs, just two or three weeks before the conference was due to start, the sum was raised by AVfM in less than 22 hours. The conference subsequently went ahead at another venue, and was a triumph on many levels. The people who attended it will cherish their memories of the event for the rest of their days.

Sage Gerard (Victor Zen) is well-known to followers of AVfM, and we’ve featured quite a number of his wonderful videos. He runs KSUM – Kennesaw State University Men – and is much admired as an indefatigable activist. He wished to run a conference on 1 November – ‘Male Students in Crisis – and needed $13,000 to fund it. We’ve just learned that the goal has been reached, due in part to a generous female donor who sent in $5,000. Sage’s short video on the matter (3:08) has just been posted on AVfM, and it’s here.

We’re busy working on our election manifesto – J4MB staff will be taking no weekend breaks during this critical period – and continuing to develop proposals in the area of education. We’ve found plenty of solid information on the website of the Campaign for Real Education – a voluntary organisation founded in 1987 – and this essay (published in 2006) struck us as particularly interesting. It was written by Irina Tyk, then as now the headmistress of Holland House, an independent preparatory school for boys and girls between the ages of four and eleven. How lucky the pupils are to have such an estimable woman in charge.

Our thanks to Jim for pointing us to this surprising piece.

Another fine blog piece. We recommend you subscribe to Karen’s excellent blog.