Month: February 2017

Theresa May’s racing certainty

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

An interesting piece by James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator. The opening paragraph:

There are few things more predictable than people talking about the unpredictability of politics. We live in an age, we are told incessantly, in which anything can happen politically — and regularly does. Yet there is one exception. Westminster is already sure about the result of the next general election: a majority for Theresa May. One long-serving Tory MP tells me the party has never been more certain of victory in his lifetime.

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Mary Wakefield: Why wouldn’t our NHS saints help a dying man?

/ Mike Buchanan / 4 Comments

A piece by Mary Wakefield in the current edition of The Spectator. The start:

We all think pretty highly of ourselves these days, free from old-fashioned ideas about sin. We’re good people. And yet… I read in a letter in a local newspaper recently a description of an event in the writer’s own home which shows that we might also be becoming monsters.

The letter-writer, Jane, was a lady in her late fifties who cared at home for a husband, Fred, with terminal brain cancer. As Jane’s letter explained, Fred had fallen recently on to the bathroom floor, and as she was unable to lift him, she telephoned for help. Seven medics arrived and rushed to the scene. All seven then stalled. Though Fred was not obese, though there were seven of them, they told Jane that they were not allowed to help him up.

Jane wrote: ‘I had two Marie Curie nurses, three district nurses, two paramedics and myself, all standing in a circle while they told Fred that he would have to try to get himself up from the floor… . Is this right, that in this day and age, a terminally ill man in great mental and physical distress, unable to comprehend why nobody would help him back to bed, is allowed to remain in terrible discomfort because the professionals involved are all too concerned about their own safety?’

Her letter ends: ‘I’m so tired of being told I need to look after myself, asked what my feelings and emotions are… and yet the patient, the person requiring practical assistance, my husband of 27 years, was just being talked over while he lay helpless on the floor for two hours.’

I simply cannot believe a woman with terminal brain cancer would have been left lying on a bathroom floor for two hours, by those seven people.

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Indian water minister Uma Bharti says she had rape suspects tortured

/ Mike Buchanan / 2 Comments

Our thanks to Jeff for this short article on the BBC. Excerpts:

An Indian minister says she made rape suspects [note, rape suspects, not convicted rapists – many (possibly most) will have been the victims of false rape allegations] beg for their lives and ordered police to torture them.

Uma Bharti, the water resources minister, claims she told the men’s accusers to watch as they were hung upside down. [How does she have the authority to do this, as the water resources minister?]

“Rapists should be tortured in front of victims until they beg for forgiveness,” she said.

“The rapists should be hung upside down and beaten till their skin comes off,” the minister is reported to have said.

“Salt and chilli should be rubbed on their wounds until they scream. Mothers and sisters should watch so they can get closure.”…

Ms Bharti said that when she was chief minister of Madhya Pradesh state from 2003-4, she took the same attitude.

The piece has links to other BBC pieces including a lengthy but fascinating one, Does India have a problem with false rape claims?. Written by a woman – inevitably – it drifts into feminist propaganda at one point, but before then it reports the views of some Indian men’s rights activists. An extract:

… when a body called the Delhi Commission for Women published a report in 2014 describing 53% of rapes reported in the city the previous year as “false” this was seized upon by men’s rights activists as evidence that the legal changes and noisy public debate had ended up making victims out of men.

“Of all the rape cases that are registered, only 1% is genuine,” says Gupta’s lawyer, Vinay Sharma, who regularly defends men accused of rape in Delhi.

“The rest are either registered to take revenge or to take advantage of the person in some financial matter,” he says.

Men’s rights activist Partha Sadhukhan takes a similar view.

“The reality at that point in time was that India had enough stringent laws to curb rape and punish the offenders,” he says.

“Today the definition of rape has changed so much and anything and everything is reported as rape.”

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Young men paid less than predecessors, says Resolution Foundation

/ Mike Buchanan / 6 Comments

Millennial pay deficit graph

Our thanks to Belinda for this. Two-thirds of private sector employees are men, two-thirds of public sector employees are women. Public sector income resilience surely contributes significantly to the gender pay deficit gap.

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