If you’d like to save £40 on the full ticket price (£265.00) for ICMI18, by ordering an Early Bird ticket (£225.00), you have just two weeks left to do it – the deadline being 24:00 GMT 31 December. Ticket sales are already above expectations, you can order your ticket(s) here. The deadline for ordering full price tickets is 24:00 GMT on 31 March.

An entertaining piece by Quentin Letts in the Xmas edition of The Spectator. He’s virtually the only major columnist unafraid to poke fun at female MPs. Excerpts:

Europhile successors to Heseltine and Gilmour now gather around the fourth and fifth benches directly to the right of the Speaker’s chair. Simon Burns (who retired in 2017) and Keith Simpson began this ‘naughty corner’ cluster in the 2010 Parliament; it has grown like a wasps’ nest. Anna Soubry sits there hour after hour, twitching, obsessed. Nicky Morgan comes waddling in occasionally, all avian bulgy eyes, an overfed puffin in search of mates. Give her and Soubry League of Gentlemen headscarves and they could be Blackpool ladies awaiting the tram to Cleveleys…

Jacob Rees-Mogg bags the end seat on the third bench, reclining like a man balancing a cocktail olive in his navel.

Our thanks to Ray for this. An excerpt:

The Tory government has demanded that 50 per cent of all 5,500 public appointments in Britain go to women, and 14 per cent to ethic minorities.

Constitution minister Chris Skidmore unveiled the targets, which the government wants to see met by 2022, as part of the Cabinet Office’s 10-point Diversity Action Plan on Thursday…

Of the five and a half thousand public appointees currently in post across large institutions and public bodies, 43 per cent are women and 10 per cent are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Mr Skidmore said that while he welcomed the soaring numbers of female appointees since the first targets were put in place, [J4MB emphasis] “there’s more we need to do across all aspects of diversity.”

Launching the Diversity Action Plan, which he said “will make public appointments even more open and accessible to all”, [J4MB: The unsubstantiated implication being, of course, that the public appointments aren’t already FULLY ‘open and accessible to all’] the constitution minister said:

“We need diverse ideas and perspectives at the helm of our public bodies, so it is vital that public appointees truly reflect the society they serve.” [J4MB: The classic self-serving argument used to justify the appointment of ever more women to cushy well-paid jobs, regardless of their merit.]

Breitbart London has previously reported instances in which the Tory government has made this assertion about diversity, as part of its drive to reduce the number of white men across British institutions. [J4MB emphasis]

All this from a Conservative government. Mrs T must be spinning in her grave.

Wikipedia has had an entry on J4MB since April 2015 – here. Since April 2016 a large number of edits have been carried out by ‘The Vintage Feminist’, and yesterday she – we assume it’s a woman – posted an entry specifically relating to me – here. Philip Cross, who has spent a lot of time maliciously editing the J4MB page, has already been active in editing the new page. One of our posts on malicious editing of our Wikipedia entries is here.

Our thanks to Ken for this. Extracts:

Sentencing at Chelmsford on Thursday, Judge Morgan told Batchelor: ‘I hope as time goes on you can reflect on your behavior.

‘I have read a great deal about you in the papers, not all of it throws a good light upon you as an individual, you are to a degree too naive, you had many advantages at your age [others] don’t have – had a business and a good family…

The judge said the online messages showed Batchelor in a ‘rather awful light’, while her defence lawyer argued on behalf of her ‘age, naivety and good character’.

The model, of Helena Road, Rayleigh, Essex, was given a 12-month suspended sentence, suspended for a year and a half…

The decision on how much she will have to repay has been adjourned to a later date. [J4MB: We’re guessing £100.00, at £1.00 per month.]…

Her ex-boyfriend Anis Ben-Sghaier , 25, of Chelsea Way, Brentwood, Essex, was branded a ‘lead player’ in the scam and given a total of five years behind bars, including six months for intending to supply cannabis.

Outstanding. And of course Justine Greening, our lesbian Education Secretary and Minister for Women & Equalities, does not see the education gender gap as a problem to be addressed. To Greening and other feminists, it’s something to be celebrated.

Some rare good news in The Guardian. The start of the piece:

The Ministry of Justice has rejected calls for a ban on rape complainants’ sexual history being revealed in court, saying cross-examination should continue to be allowed in exceptional circumstances.

The MoJ report did however recommend that the Crown Prosecution Service update its mandatory training for prosecutors and asked the criminal procedure rule committee to review the relevant courtroom rules.

Concerns about the way section 41 of the 1999 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act was being operated emerged after the acquittal of the footballer Ched Evans last year.

Evans’s retrial heard evidence from two other men who testified about the complainant’s sexual preferences and the language she used during sex.

The Labour MP Harriet Harman proposed altering the law in order to prevent those who make allegations of rape from being questioned in court about their past relationships and sexual history.

Some months ago a feminist organization – I can’t remember which – claimed to have undertaken some research showing that it was customary for rape complainants’ sexual history to be revealed in court. I assumed it was fraudulent feminist research – they would presumably have had a bias to selecting such trials, exaggerating their proportion of all rape trials – and the Guardian article proves me right. Another extract:

Section 41 restricts the circumstances in which evidence relating to a complainant’s sexual history can be introduced. It was claimed that victims of sexual offences could be discouraged from reporting attacks to police if they were at risk of having intimate details exposed in court, albeit anonymously.

The defence has to make an application to the court to introduce any evidence or questions about a complainant’s sexual history. The application is then decided upon by the judge in the case.

The inquiry, carried out by the Attorney General’s Office and the MoJ, found the law on such lines of questioning in sexual offence trials was working effectively. The report analysed more than 300 rape cases completed in 2016 in England and Wales.

It showed that in 92% of them, no evidence of the complainant’s sexual history was introduced by the defence. Applications to introduce such evidence were only made in 13% of the cases. Of the 40 applications made by the defence, in 12 cases the prosecution either agreed or partially agreed.

Our thanks to Nigel for emailing us in relation to the UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admission Service) ‘End of cycle report’, published today. He writes:

I note that the new head of UCAS chooses not (at least in the BBC report) to continue her predecessor’s policy of highlighting this point. Hover the annual report is here; https://www.ucas.com/file/1…

And in it we find: “For 18 out of the 26 subject groups, more women than men were accepted. Within certain subject areas significantly different ratios between men and women exist” and “Elsewhere, 18 year old women were more than a third more likely to enter than 18 year old men”. Interestingly this is skated over and UCAS has a new composite “equality measure” “MEM” that obscures this big disparity. The cynic in me suggests the big gender disparity is being deliberately obscured, given the wider Political push to make much of “Gender Gaps”.

In the more detailed report too one has to hunt for the Gender data, but it is there and the bottom line is the gap again increased.

” As with application rates, women are over a third (36 per cent) more likely to enter a HE provider through UCAS than men, with the percentage point difference in entry rate widening, to 9.9 percentage points in 2017. This difference in 18 year old entry rates between men and women equates to 37,780 fewer 18 year old men entering higher education this year than would be the case if men had the same entry rate as women.”
https://www.ucas.com/file/1…
I hope men’s Groups and those concerned about Boys education won’t allow this obscuring to end the debate about the still growing gap.

More extracts from the report:

Although entry rates increased for all ethnic groups this year, the increase for the White ethnic group was smaller than for the other ethnic groups. This means the gap between the White ethnic group and all other ethnic groups continues to widen, and that those from the White ethnic group remain the least likely to enter HE.

Within certain subject areas significantly different ratios between men and women exist, the most contrasting of which are Education, with over 6 women for every man, and Computer sciences, with over 6 men for every woman accepted to study.

Our thanks to Mike P for this. Excerpts:

It is fondly known as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. But the Bank of England may have to lose its nickname under plans for the 323-year-old institution to go gender neutral.

The Prudential Regulation Authority, part of the bank which polices financial firms, said it wants to ‘remove gendered language to encourage equality and diversity’.

It will ditch the title ‘chairman’ and instead use the gender-neutral ‘chair’ and also plans to stop using ‘his’ and ‘her’ when referring to senior figures in its reports…

Nicky Morgan, a Conservative MP and relentlessly sexist blithering idiot, the former Cabinet minister who heads the Treasury select committee, has twice warned in recent months that the Bank needed to improve diversity at the top of its organisation.

I may have added a few words there, but I don’t think anyone with an IQ above that of an intoxicated fruit bat would find them inaccurate.

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