Our thanks to Martin for this. It’s a scandal that these Entitlement Princesses earn the same prize money as the men, despite playing matches that are on average half the duration of the men’s matches. They attract fewer viewers, tickets for the top women’s games cost less…

I see there are growing calls for the English female football players to earn a lot more money. On the television news this morning I caught the second of Japan’s goals against England in last night’s Women’s World Cup semi-final, the most spectacular goal I’ve ever seen in women’s football, and the goal that meant Japan won the match and reached the final. Unfortunately… er… it was scored by one of the top England players. Her fingernails were immaculately polished, I noticed afterwards. Which was nice.

Surely people who watch women’s football only do so for ideological reasons? If I wanted to watch football played at the same level as that played by the English women’s football team, I could watch teams of boys of 12 years of age playing the game, and I’m not about to do that, either.

Media reports are emerging about The Harris Review. The 283-page document is here.

The review, chaired by Lord Harris, considered the deaths in custody of 87 15-24 year old people in custody between April 2004 and December 2013.

We were naturally interested to find out the gender balance of these 87 people, given that 95% of the general prison population is male, and we know five out of six men currently in British prisons wouldn’t be there if men were sentenced with the same leniency as women.

We first looked at the Executive Summary, pp 8-13. No mention of the gender balance in those six pages. No mention in the ‘Concluding Comments’ section, pp 198 – 200. No mention in the Recommendations section, pp 201- 218 (108 recommendations, none relating specifically to males).

The first mention we could find was in Table 1.1 on p23. 85 of the 87 ‘people’ were male – 98% – including all four of the deaths of 15-17 year old ‘people’. From our first ‘speed read’ of the report, the 85/2 male/female ratio of the dead ‘people’ does not appear to have been considered a matter of the slightest interest.

We found the report on the website of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Its Chief Executive is Frances Crook. Two days ago her organization issued a media release, Thousands of women are criminalised needlessly, MPs and peers find. It ends with this:

Baroness Corston, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System, said: “This important inquiry considered issues that affect the lives of thousands of women. We are at a crossroads and decisions on resources being made today could make a difference for a generation.

“The APPG is calling on the new government to protect women’s centres that are centres of excellence. We can protect the public, use scarce resources effectively and economically and give better life chances to women.”

Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “Far too many women are being criminalised by a broken system. The evidence given to parliamentarians was overwhelming. Too many women are arrested, prosecuted, sanctioned and imprisoned.

“Change is needed and the report from the APPG on Women in the Penal System provides a route forward.”

Our thanks to Trevor for this.

I was deeply saddened to learn that the younger of Julie Burchill’s two sons – Jack (29) – committed suicide earlier this week. Today’s Daily Mail piece on the matter is here. Hopefully Ms Burchill will in future have more sympathy for young male suicide victims than she displayed in a callous Guardian article in 1999 – here. Jack would have been around 13 at the time the article was written. We can but hope he never read it, either at the time of publication, or later.

My thanks to Dave for the link to the Guardian piece. Two extracts:

That young men succeed in suicide more often than girls isn’t really the point. Indeed, the more callous among us would say that it was quite nice for young men finally to find something that they’re better at than girls…

To ask me to feel sympathy with suicides after witnessing this (the death of her father from asbestos-induced cancer) is, I suggest, just as unfeeling and ignorant as my callousness must appear to you – like asking a starving African to sympathise with an anorexic. In a society still beset with the most vicious social deprivation and rampant cruelty to the very young, the very old and the very weak, the voluntary exits of a few hundred able-bodied young men each year are best dealt with as private tragedies rather than a public concern. Let them go.

Suicide is the leading cause of death of British men under 50, in all age groups. The male:female suicide rate differential more than doubled in the three decades between 1983 and 2013 – very close to the period in which Jack Burchill lived – from 1.7:1 to 3.5:1. My recent International Business Times article on male suicide is here.

Tomorrow afternoon I expect to publish a second post about Peppa Pig, a preschool animated television series. The Daily Mail article about the matter is here. Extracts from the piece:

More gay characters are needed on children’s television to send out the message same sex relationships are of ‘equal value’ to any other, Lib Dem leadership contender Norman Lamb has said.

Mr Lamb, who is standing against Tim Farron for the party leadership, said having a gay Peppa Pig should ‘absolutely not be out of the question’.

The former care minister said the lack of same-sex relationships on children’s TV suggests there is a ‘limit’ to gay rights…

Mr Lamb said: ‘We have to be true to the legislation we’ve passed. The legislation very clearly says that a loving relationship between two people of the same sex is of equal value, so in everything that we then do, as a society, we need to reinforce that, not deny it.’

Asked if that meant there should be gay characters on the show Peppa Pig, Mr Lamb said: ‘It should absolutely not be out of bounds, which it appears to be at the moment.’

He added if gay characters were banned from children’s TV ‘it tells that teenager, who is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, that there is something not quite normal about how they feel’.

Note the cynical conflation of Peppa Pig with children’s TV and teenagers. If I had a teenage daughter (or son, for that matter) watching Peppa Pig, I’d be very concerned.

We wish Norman Lamb every success in his leadership bid. If successful, the Lib Dems will surely remain in the wilderness for another five years following the 2020 general election.

A tip of the hat to Guido Fawkes for the final sentence in this.