Some of our public challenges of ministers and others are associated with other documents we want them (or, more likely, their officials) to consider, and are therefore lengthy, and we sometimes choose to mail rather than email them. We will be very disinclined to do so in future. Some weeks ago we enquired about an overdue FoI response in relation to a challenge we’d sent to Sajid Javid, Business Secretary. We were informed the document hadn’t been received, so the 20-day period for a FoI response started that day.

We’ve just had the same charade happen with our public challenge of Theresa May, Home Secretary, in connection with the FoI challenge we posted on 14 July, in which we asked why the police aren’t prosecuting MGM practitioners, when the procedure is clearly illegal – here. The FoI team at the Home Office deny receipt of the document. A response is now due 21 September.

An insightful piece by Laurence Hodge.

I note the comments about female students having sex with 50-something unattractive male academics. Leaving aside the question of whether these very intelligent women have moral agency and may be – just may be – getting something in return which is denied to their male colleagues, the description of the academics reeks of ageism, objectification, and sexism.

Excellent. A tip of the hat to the indefatigable Bobby Smith and Terry Vooght.

Our thanks to Mike for this. It’s the same old story. Women aren’t held properly accountable for their crimes.

There are about 81,000 men in British prisons, and fewer than 4,000 women. The government is more concerned with reducing the number of female prisoners than male prisoners. It’s not just the government. The National Lottery Fund recently handed a grant of £1.2 million to the Prison Reform Trust to pursue the objective of reducing the number of women in prison.

As William Collins pointed out in an impressive piece, if men were treated as leniently as women in sentencing terms, five out of six men in British prisons wouldn’t be there. The male prison population would fall by around 68,000 to about 13,000. There, the prison overcrowding crisis solved at a stroke, by introducing gender equality. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong sort of gender equality.

On July 14 we sent a letter with associated FoI requests to Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions. We were seeking information regarding her dealings (and those of her predecessor, Keir Starmer, and colleagues) with organizations advocating for victims of domestic violence and/or sexual offences.

We’ve received a reply to the effect that the scope of our FoI requests was too large (and therefore too expensive in terms of staff time to process) so we’re about to email a new letter, limiting our FoI requests to Alison Saunders specifically. We’ll post the response, due within 20 working days, on this blog.

My thanks to Ray for this. It’s an online survey relating to the BBC charter review. Responses are invited from ‘anyone from any background’, the deadline is 18 September, and individual responses will not be published.

I urge you to join with me in responding to the survey, perhaps noting (in your own words) the relentless focus on women’s issues, seen through a feminist lens, and refusal to give appropriate coverage of men’s issues, and anti-feminist perspectives. Thank you.

Prostate cancer kills as many men as breast cancer kills women, but research into it has been poorly funded for most of the past 40 years. There’s a severe shortage of specialist NHS prostate cancer nurses, and prostate cancer patients endure long waiting times, a lack of access to drugs, pain medication, and trials. In our election manifesto (pp 61-65) we made proposals on the subject.

Our thanks to Tim for pointing us to this. Please contact Prostate Cancer UK if:

1. You were denied a treatment for prostate cancer because it either a) wasn’t available on the NHS or b) it was judged to be too costly; or

2. You live in Northern Ireland, Scotland, or Wales and have been denied treatments that were available in England.

We have a strong interest in the egregious crime of paternity fraud. It’s a subject covered in our general election manifesto (pp 52-54) where we considered two forms. Recently a mother and her gay best friend were jailed in connection with a third form of paternity fraud.

My thanks to David for emailing me in connection with an important piece on a Canadian website. He wrote:

Hi Mike,

I just came across this site which had a great deal of useful information:

Paternal determination by blood type.

I was particularly struck by the tables showing the blood types that are possible in a child, given the blood types of their parents.

For example two O blood type parents can produce a child with only O blood type. Two parents with A blood type can produce a child with either A or O blood types. Two parents with B blood type can produce a child with either B or O blood type. One parent with A and another with B can produce a child with A, B, AB or O blood types. If one parent has A and another has AB, they can either produce a child with A, B or AB blood types. If one parent has A and another has O, they can either produce a child with A or O blood types.

Given the difficulty and cost of getting DNA tests (need permission of the other parent) getting this type of information out to putative fathers might help them confirm whether or not they are indeed the father.

Perhaps you’d like to publicise this on your website.

Regards

In our manifesto we called for a simple and inexpensive measure to detect paternity fraud – compulsory paternity testing at birth. Then, if men financially and emotionally support other men’s children, they’ll know they’re doing so.

Shocking.

Agreed.