A short but insightful new piece.

Our thanks to Steve for sending two screenshots from last night’s University Challenge. The first was taken five minutes before the end:

Then the man on the Brasenose College (Oxford) team – which included three women – answered questions to raise the team’s score from 5 to 35 at the end:

Given the BBC’s stated intention to stop having all-male teams on panel games, which sometimes leads to embarrassing ‘contributions’ from token female panelists. the lesson the BBC will take from last night’s programme is obvious. There must be an end to all-male teams on University Challenge. Perhaps, for good measure, gender-balanced teams in future. After all, the government is leading the way with its plans to force FTSE350 companies to have gender-balanced boards in future. What could possibly go wrong?

In the election manifesto we’ll be writing at length about the anti-male bias of the criminal justice system, including the CPS, which has become yet more anti-male under the leadership of Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions. The CPS is enthusiastic about spending taxpayers’ money pursuing men – notably prominent elderly men – for alleged historical sexual offences, whilst having little or no interest in pursuing women for historical sexual offences. We know that over 25% of sexual offences are carried out by women against men. All else being equal, the ratio of men being charged with committing sexual offences against women, compared with women committing sexual offences against men, should be a little below 3:1. The actual figure is 146:1. Information backing up these numbers will be in our manifesto, in the section about the sexual abuse of men and children by women.

Paternity fraud (‘PF’) – at least the form in which women lead men to believe they’re the biological fathers of children, when they’re not, or don’t reveal the truth to men – is not only a common crime, whether accomplished or not, but one that has long been illegal in the UK, as an act of fraud. PF is a grave assault on the deceived men, the children, and the actual biological fathers of the children.

Just how common is the crime? Estimates range up to a figure of 30% of children in the UK being raised / financially supported by men deceived into believing they’re the biological fathers of children, when they’re not. If a man discovers he’s the victim of PF, unusually for a fraudulent act, he won’t be entitled to any financial compensation from the child’s mother. The most he can do is to seek financial damages for emotional distress. In the last successful case we heard of, the woman settled out of court for around £19,000. Surely a small proportion of the sum the man had expended on the child, at this time a young man, who disowned him, while his mother resumed her relationship with the man’s biological father.

And people wonder why, in our election manifesto, we’ll be calling for compulsory paternity testing at birth…

We know from one of our FoI responses that for many years the CSA alone has learned of 500+ cases p.a. of PF, after men have demanded paternity tests. So the state knows the identity and addresses of some of these criminals. And we have to ask, how many men naively accept they’re the fathers of the children in question, and pay large sums of money over many years to support children to whom they’re biologically unrelated?

How many women are charged and convicted of the crime of PF? That’s what one of our recent flurry of FoI requests set out to discover. This afternoon we received this response from the CPS. The letter simultaneously provides little information, and reveals an astonishing fact:

The CPS has no idea how many women (if any) it has charged with paternity fraud in recent years.

Or if it knows, it isn’t saying at this stage. Well, the victims of the crime are all men, so why would the CPS take any interest, or keep records? Our strong suspicion is that the CPS never prosecutes women for PF.

The legislation under which women could be prosecuted for PF is the Fraud Act (2006). The CPS guide to the Act is here. No specific mention is made of paternity fraud, so far as we can see. In the same vein, the CPS issues sentencing guidelines for fraud, but not specifically for PF. Well, what would be the point of producing sentencing guidelines for a crime for which women are never prosecuted?

The CPS letter states that the number of PF prosecutions can’t be disaggregated from the number of prosecutions brought under the Fraud Act (2006). The work required to answer our questions would allegedly exceed the FoI maximum (3.5 days = £600). We certainly aren’t prepared to pay towards any additional time required to discover information that the CPS should be willing to release at no charge – especially if the simple truth is that women are never charged with PF – so we’ll send them a new FoI request this evening, asking them to spend up to 3.5 days checking through recent case files to establish the number of Fraud Act (2006) prosecutions attributable to PF, relative to the number of prosecutions attributable to other forms of fraud.

Good news.

We’ve started to review the area of PTSD, and quickly realized our interest needs to go beyond PTSD to all mental health disorders suffered by former Armed Forces personnel. The MOD issues an interesting report every year, UK Armed Forces Mental Health, downloadable here. The PDF of the 2013/14 report is here. The MOD has no responsibility for the mental health of former Armed Forces personnel, so we’ve sent a FoI request to the Department of Health to learn more about their strategies and programmes.

The 2013/14 MOD report shows that Neurotic Stress Disorders are the most prevalent mental health disorders among serving personnel. PTSD has accounted for 8-12% of all neurotic disorders since 2007/8 (p.26). 6.2% of female personnel presented at MOD DCMHs (Departments of Community Mental Health) with mental health disorders in 2013/14, compared with 2.7% of male personnel (p.10).

What a grim world feminists are creating. They won’t be content until everyone is as miserable and dysfunctional as they are. Can any rational person today doubt that anyone identifying as a feminist has at least one personality disorder?

An excellent new piece from Mr Purdy.

An excellent critique of an enduring feminist icon.

In 2010/11 British men collectively paid £64.2 billion more income tax than British women – the phenomenon known as the ‘gender tax gap’. In the following year they paid £68.2 billion more. It seems unlikely that the gender tax gap reduced in the subsequent two tax years, it probably rose yet further – we have a FoI request at HMRC to get the numbers – but we’ll use the 2011/12 figure of £68.2 billion for the purpose of this post.

What is the £68.2 billion spent on? While people imagine that the National Insurance and other taxes they pay later fund their pensions and other benefits they receive as pensioners, the plain truth is that benefits paid to pensioners are paid from current tax receipts, most notably income tax.

We’ve just received this FoI response from the Department for Work and Pensions. Unusually for a FoI response, the letter writer isn’t identified, and it arrived by email with an apology. We note the date on the letter is 24 September, only nine days earlier than the true date. I digress. The letter provides interesting data for the three main benefits pensioners received in 1993/94, 2003/04 and 2013/14, by gender. The benefits are:

– State Pension
– Income Support (Minimum Income Guarantee) / Pension Credit
– Winter Fuel Payment

We’ve analysed the numbers – here. It turns out that in 2013/14, female pensioners received £13.7 billion more in benefits than male pensioners. So that’s 20% of the 2013/14 £68.2 billion gender tax gap accounted for.

When it comes to human rights following family breakdowns, UKIP are speaking more sense than the three main parties combined – here. The key sentence:

UKIP will also support families by introducing an assumption of 50-50 shared parenting rights when relationships break down, and give visiting rights to Grandparents.