The first episode (video, 7:22) in a 10-part series on abortion by Paul Elam. I suspect from this episode that our positions on abortion are similar, in part because neither of us holds religious convictions. Our party’s position on abortion is outlined on pp.5,6 of our 2015 general election manifesto.

Our thanks to Francis for this. From the article about the cheery-looking woman:

Ms Mazo, who is right handed, says the August 2009 injury destroyed her lucrative career and left her with wrist scars she fears will make people believe she self-harms. The HR professional says the accident has also left her with ‘rollercoaster’ moods causing her to swing ‘from anger to sadness in seconds’.

After being awarded £150,000 in damages, she believes it should be 30 times more and her case is now set to go before three senior judges.

Now I’ve encountered many Human Remains people in my time, and if anyone can explain to me how breaking a wrist could destroy an HR consultant’s career, I’d be most grateful. If £150,000 – let alone £4.5 million – is the going rate for tripping outside a pub, I predict I’ll be tripping outside the numerous pubs on Bedford High Street this evening. Just £10,000 from each of them would do very nicely.

A tip of the hat to The Spectator for this (video, 0:37).

We’re big admirers of HEqual, and we thank him for the extraordinary amount of work he’s undertaken over the past nine months relating to his complaint to the BBC about the treatment meted out to us by BBC Radio Nottingham in the run-up to the 2015 general election. He’s just published this. The first link will take you to the radio hustings I attended, in which an all-female audience asked only questions about women’s issues. Every time I raised a men’s issue, the feminist presenter withdrew the microphone.

HEqual’s conclusions include the following, with which we concur whole-heartedly:

Ultimately the BBC complaints process is an utter farce and a total waste of time.

Our thanks to William for this. From the article:

A promising young female golfer was jailed last week for causing serious injuries to six people after weaving her car across the road as a joke. Shannon Ashcroft, 20, drove erratically and swerved into the wrong side of road at least twice as she took a group of friends in ‘high spirits’ to a party.

But her Volkswagen Polo crashed into a lorry and all five teens in the vehicle and two people from the lorry had to be cut from the wreckage and needed hospital treatment.

On Friday she pleaded guilty to dangerous driving at Truro Crown Court in Cornwall and was jailed for nine months.

The court heard Ashcroft took responsibility for the crash as she was driving dangerously and not paying attention, texting on her phone and veered around as a joke…

Joanna Martin, defending, said it was a significant error of driving and was the result of high spirits. She said: ‘This was a young girl who was clearly distracted by a lot of things going on in the car.’

Ask yourself this. If the driver had been a 20-year-old man, is it conceivable his defence counsel would describe him as ‘a young boy’? It’s a truly sickening example of not applying appropriate moral agency to an adult woman. The sentence itself is, needless to say, far too lenient. The accident led to life-changing injuries, and it was little short of a miracle that nobody was killed.

Regular followers of this blog will be well aware of the Thornhill Clinic, Luton, and the boast by the people running it, that it’s the largest private male circumcision clinic in the UK. Our protest outside the clinic during the afternoon of 22 March (details below) will relate specifically to the non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors (Male Genital Mutilation, MGM). Male minors cannot – legally – give informed consent to the procedure.

We strongly urge parents who are thinking of having their sons circumcised – whether at the Thornhill Clinic, or elsewhere – to explore the content of the website Neonatal Cutting.

Darrel Gregory is the Executive Director of the Thornhill clinic, and my recent email exchange with him is here. Details on Mr Gregory and the four doctors working at the clinic are here. The doctors have been placed by A Voice for Men on their Known Genital Mutilators directory, and our previous two posts on the clinic are here and here.

We shall be joining Men Do Complain at the protest – as we did in two protests in the autumn – and it will be held outside the clinic between 15:00 – 18:00 on Tuesday, 22 March. The clinic’s opening hours on Tuesdays are 15:30 – 17:30, and the address is 1-3 Thornhill Road, Luton, Beds. LU4 8EY.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the people running the clinic decided not to open it that afternoon, but no matter. Both national and local media will be attending and filming the protest, as will supporters of MDC and J4MB. It hopefully doesn’t need to be said that we’re planning an entirely peaceful protest, which won’t be directed at any religious group(s).

We’re confidently expecting an even larger attendance than we saw at the very successful protest last International Men’s Day, in Parliament Square. A video (6:30) of that protest is here. We’ll be ordering more placards etc.

We urge you to attend the protest, whether or not you’ve been personally affected by MGM. We have men at these protests who were themselves circumcised, and have no problem with that – but they believe firmly that in future, male minors should not suffer the procedure, and be allowed to make up their own minds after they’ve passed 18 years of age. MGM is, of course, only one of many areas where the human rights of men and boys are assaulted by the actions and inactions of the state. 20 such areas were outlined in our 2015 general election manifesto.

The reasons MGM remains our #1 campaigning issue don’t change over time:

1. MGM is an exercise in harming a minor’s body, and is duly illegal. This is not our opinion, but that of a prominent barrister speaking at a conference in 2013.

For MGM not to be illegal, there would have to be a parliamentary override, and no such override exists. There are no exemptions in the law of England and Wales for religious or cultural considerations. I recently had a 20-minute-long discussion with Dr Simon Hochhauser, one of the Co-Chairmen of Milah UK, a Jewish organization promoting the continued mutilation of the genitals of eight-day-old baby boys. The discussion was on BBC 3 Counties Radio, and it’s here.

2. MGM is unethical, for precisely the same reasons Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is unethical. (FGM has been specifically illegal since 1985.)

3. MGM is a human rights violation, and breaches Articles of UN and EU conventions. For details, click on the first link in (1) above.

4. The historical objective of MGM was to reduce the pleasure males would later derive from sex, to encourage their fidelity to their wives, as explained in an excellent article by William Collins.

5. MGM can lead to further physical and psychological harm and therefore suffering, and sometimes death – as a direct consequence of the procedure, or later suicide. Should anyone be in any doubt about the issue of physical and psychological harm, they are invited to watch a video (49:32) on Tim Hammond’s Global Survey of Circumcision Harm. Tim, an American, will be talking on the topic of circumcision harm at the second International Conference on Men’s Issues, London, July 8-10.

Last September I gave a presentation, ‘Why don’t politicians give a damn about MGM?’ at the 20th Annual General Meeting of an anti-MGM charity, 15 Square. The video is here.

Among our list of key posts are many about MGM, scroll down to ‘Male Genital Mutilation’.

I urge you to join us at the Thornhill Clinic protest, for which we’ve already been assured strong support by leading anti-MGM campaigners. We have every reason to believe it will be the largest such protest ever held in the UK. Please email me mike@j4mb.org.uk if you’ll be able to join us. Let’s have a protest on a scale that people won’t be able to ignore. It’s time for MGM to be consigned to where it has long belonged – the dustbin of history. Thank you.

18 months ago, the American Political Science Review published a 13-page-long paper by Rainbow Murray, Quotas for Men: Reframing Gender Quotas as a Means of Improving
Representation for All. The full Abstract:

Gender quotas traditionally focus on the underrepresentation of women. Conceiving of quotas in this perpetuates the status of men as the norm and women as the “other.” Women are subject to heavy scrutiny of their qualifications and competence, whereas men’s credentials go unchallenged. This article calls for a normative shift in the problem of overrepresentation, arguing that the quality of representation is negatively affected by having too large a group drawn from too narrow a talent pool. Curbing overrepresentation through ceiling quotas for men offers three core benefits. First, it promotes meritocracy by ensuring the proper scrutiny of politicians of both sexes. Second, it provides an impetus for improving the criteria used to select and evaluate politicians. Third, neutralizing the overly masculinized environment within parliaments might facilitate better substantive and symbolic representation of both men and women. All citizens would benefit from these measures to increase the quality of representation.

The Conclusion (p.11) ends with the following, which alone would have been sufficient for Dr Murray to win her Gormless Feminist of the Month award:

An important step in overcoming the pernicious effects of patriarchy is recognizing that its effects are detrimental to men as well as women, and mobilizing both sexes to seek the benefits that come from a more gender-equal society. The final benefit of quotas for men is that they offer a significant advance toward this goal.

It is a scandal that for decades British taxpayers have been funding legions of parasitic feminist ‘academics’ such as Dr Murray. I shall raise the issue at the next meeting of the Patriarchy Council (UK branch). I’m sure the Council will rule that these odious women are fired from their posts, and I look forward to Dr Murray being employed doing something more productive for society, e.g. stacking shelves at Poundland.

You can’t argue with logic (video, 1:08).

Dr Murray has just posted comments on Twitter, relating to what she claims was a ‘hateful email’ sent by me to her colleagues in the Politics department at Queen Mary University of London. She has thereby nominated herself for a second award, Lying Feminist of the Month.

Her tweet, and my email (which I hadn’t planned to make public, but her tweet has forced my hand) are here. Do I really need to explain that she seeks to perform the long-discredited feminist trick of conflating criticism of a feminist with misogyny? Hopefully not.

Dr Murray has barred me from her Twitter account @RainbowMurray, so I invite supporters to tweet her with a link to this blog piece, thereby enabling her Twitter followers to read the content of my ‘hateful email’. Thank you.

We recently posted a piece on Dr Rainbow Murray nominating herself for a GFOTM award with her very silly article about the Women’s Equality Party in The Conversation. After I informed her she was in contention for the award, she sealed the matter with some gormless comments on Twitter, which you can view at @RainbowMurray. She’s since blocked me from her Twitter account, but one of her tweets appears on her award certificate, an example of the relentless feminist conflation of criticism with misogyny:

I’m delighted to have been nominated as “gormless feminist of the month” by virulently misogynist @MikeBuchanan11

Her award certificate is here: