An interesting article on one of Glen Poole’s websites.

Our thanks to V for pointing us to this from 6oodfella.

A fascinating and inspiring piece from the estimable Paul Elam.

With 60 days to go before polling day – May 7 – we need to even more strongly focus our efforts on the campaign in our three seats in Nottinghamshire (Ashfield, Broxtowe, Sherwood). There’s a great deal of work to be undertaken, including the tortuous administration surrounding successful nominations as candidates, which we can’t afford to get wrong.

Among the time-consuming activities which are already underway is the door-to-door distribution of 40,000 A3 leaflets across the three seats.

We’ll shortly be launching a crowdfunder to raise the funds required over the coming 60 days. We require almost £6,000 to pay for the 140,000 A3 leaflets which will be distributed by the Royal Mail (at no cost to J4MB) to every household across the three constituencies, in which 230,000 registered electors live. One side of the leaflet is an A3 size window poster. The design for the 140,000 leaflets will have to be modified very slightly to comply with Royal Mail guidelines, but you’d be hard pushed to tell the differences from the current leaflets.

If you can afford to donate anything now, we would be very grateful – here. Thank you.

With the pressing need to focus single-mindedly on the campaign, some things will inevitably have to go on the back burner. Starting tomorrow, we’ll be publishing fewer blog posts, and I’m sorry to say we’ll have to cut back on responding to emails from supporters, and publishing links to materials they suggest. There simply won’t be enough hours in the day to deal with these worthwhile but time-consuming activities, and I hope supporters will understand our reasoning, and not be offended by the lack of responses.

Onwards and upwards!

An interesting piece from the head of the Campaign for Real Education which we somehow missed two weeks ago. It’s long been impossible to keep up with all the excellent material being published.

Our thanks to AVfM for this. Belgium has 460 taxpayer-funded refuge places for female victims of domestic violence, and the two places for male victims might prove to be tokenism in time, but at least it’s a start. The longest journey starts with a single step…

Today is International Whining Day, and Theresa May (Home Secretary) is quoted in a government statement on domestic violence against women and girls – here. She says:

Violence against women and girls is a terrible form of abuse that this government is determined to tackle.

Wouldn’t it be something if she had the integrity and courage to say the following on International Men’s Day?

Violence against men and boys is a terrible form of abuse that this government is determined to tackle.

Pigs will fly before that happens.

Six months ago we publicly challenged Theresa May over a highly flawed Home Office consultation exercise on extending the law on domestic abuse – here – and later sent a 154-page submission to the consultation, detailing the anti-male bias of politicians and public bodies with respect to domestic abuse – here. We had acknowledgement of receipt of both documents, but nothing more. Does anyone still seriously believe that rational arguments alone will win the battle for the human rights of men and boys? They’re a critical weapon, for sure, but the battle is ultimately a political one, and can only be won at the ballot box.

It’s about damned time the government and public bodies in general recognised this:

Education is one of a number of professions now dominated by women – almost two-thirds of secondary school teachers are women – and the result has been predictably harmful to boys.

In our election manifesto on pp15-17 we cover the issue of education. A number of studies have shown female teachers give higher marks to girls than boys for the same quality of work, and we thank Ian for pointing us to a new OECD report on education in more than 60 countries which confirms it. The government won’t take the slightest notice, of course.

Feminists often whine about the academic achievement gap between girls and boys – around three out of five university students are women – and compare it with the small proportion of women at the top of major companies, in politics etc. It’s as if after getting a university degree, there should be automatic entitlement to a FTSE100 board position or a parliamentary career. So some remarks towards the end of the article about the OECD report are perceptive:

Teachers are said to reward “organisational skills, good behaviour and compliance” rather than objectively marking pupils’ work.

The findings suggested that teachers needed to be aware of “gender bias”.

It also raised questions about whether this really benefited girls.

“Is it a good thing? Maybe in the short run, you get a better school certificate,” said the OECD’s education director, Andreas Schleicher.

“In the long run, the world is going to penalise you because the labour market doesn’t pay you for your school marks, it pays you for what you can do.”

The J4MB campaign battle van continues to impress the good citizens of the three Nottinghamshire seats in which we’re standing. We’ve just published this on our YouTube channel, along with some background information, and we invite you to leave comments there rather than here. Thank you.

It’s not often that the worlds of politics and glamour come together. Our thanks to the indefatigable Claire for tracking down this, published in January. You’ll need to scroll down to the very end of the page. It’s an emotional moment for us…