Month: January 2018

Sadiq Khan, London Mayor: “As populism rises, gender equality risks ‘going backwards’ “

/ Mike Buchanan / 22 Comments

A piece on the Fabian Society website. Extracts from Khan’s planned speech, the emphases are ours:

In his first major speech of 2018, Sadiq Khan will warn that for the first time in his life gender equality could stall – or even go backwards – as populism gains strength.
Addressing the Fabian Society New Year conference this morning, Sadiq will point out that populism “plays on people’s worst fears and creates space for extreme views on immigration, diversity and equality.”

He will condemn the idea that campaigns for equality and diversity are political correctness gone mad, he will point to the example of the US which has seen a recent rise in anti-feminist movements. Across the Atlantic, the use of ‘snowflake’ or ‘social justice warrior’ have become pejorative terms that effectively shut down debate, and more and more people have tried to dismiss the gender pay gap as a myth…

“Anti-feminist movements are on the rise – as part of a concerted attempt to roll back progress on rights for minority groups…

“We’ve seen the impact of this in the US and we cannot allow this narrative to take hold in Britain. It’s the responsibility of us in this room to redouble our efforts and to fight back. We all have a responsibility as progressives to continue the fight for gender equality.”

“Another cultural shift we need to see is for men to become better allies so that when women speak out about sexual harassment – men listen, believe and act.

Alternative Anglican church looms large in the shadows

/ Mike Buchanan / 3 Comments

The Rev Jules Gomes (‘The Rebel Priest’) will be speaking at the conference in July on the topic, “Singing in the ruins: How feminists have destroyed the Church of England beyond repair”. You can book your ticket(s) here until 31 March.

A piece by Tim Wyatt in yesterday’s Times:

Last month a group of hardline conservative Christians ordained nine men as deacons and priests in the clearest sign yet that they are threatening to set up a breakaway Anglican church.

The Anglican Mission in England (Amie) was founded in 2011, but until now it has acted largely as a pressure group behind the scenes. Its first ordinations, which were open to the public and streamed live on Facebook, signal a more defiant approach.

Lee McMunn, an Amie vicar in Scarborough and the group’s mission director, says: “People will now see that we are actually serious about Anglican ordination. This may be the first, but it will not be the last. It will encourage more people to come and talk with us and things will grow.”

The disaffected low-church evangelical priests who make up Amie and lead its ten congregations have until now been defectors from the Church of England, angry at what they see as its drift towards liberalism. [J4MB emphasis] By ordaining their own clergy — not previously Anglican priests — who will minister outside the Anglican communion, the group took its first steps towards creating a new denomination.

Amie sees itself as representing true Anglicanism, despite being outside the structures of the established church. It describes its vision as creating and supporting healthy Anglican churches that preach a traditional, conservative evangelical Gospel. It insists that it does not seek to break up the Church of England, but also openly admits that it will work outside the church if it feels that its aims are being held back by hostile bishops.

The nine men will be sent to lead the growing number of independent Amie churches, all of which have been “planted” — or started from scratch — over the past five years in places such as Scarborough, the Sheffield suburbs, and Bude in Cornwall.

The impetus behind the fast-growing faction is dissatisfaction with the Church of England’s compromises over gay marriage, transgender issues and other disputes involving sexuality.

The traditional Anglican solution to tricky issues — generous helpings of fudge all round — has not appeased the breakaways. Most recently, the church’s leadership delayed decisions until 2020 by establishing another committee of bishops to look at questions about sexuality for the next three years. The church, therefore, officially endorses marriage as between a man and a woman, but some Anglican churches are holding services of “prayer” for gay couples, where rings are exchanged.

The traditionalists also rejected the introduction of women bishops in 2014. The recent announcement that Sarah Mullally, a junior bishop in Devon, would become the Bishop of London, the third most senior cleric in the church, has only heightened the tensions between the factions.

Defections to Amie and similar breakaway groups have been kept to a few thousand. Plenty of vicars and congregations sympathetic to Amie have decided to stay inside the Church of England for now, but some give money to the breakaways. However, a few conservative churches, such as the 1,000-strong St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in the City of London, have inched closer to the exit by publicly warning that they will not collaborate with priests or bishops in their diocese who do not adhere to their traditionalist teachings.

The ordinations last month were carried out by the group’s bishop, Andy Lines, an ordained Anglican minister who works for a missionary agency. Lines was made a “missionary bishop to Europe” by an allied breakaway church in North America last summer, although he has been privately warned by the Archbishop of Canterbury that this does not give him any more authority in Anglican churches.

Lines has emphasised that, despite the group’s growing stature as a church in its own right, it does not intend to replace the Church of England. “This is not a threat to people in the structures [of the CofE]. This is to cater for those who are already outside,” he said.

While plenty of conservative evangelical Christians have walked away from the established church before, Amie poses a new challenge to Archbishop Welby’s hopes of holding his fractious flock together.

The faction is organised and well funded, with wealthy benefactors within the Church of England and overseas. It plans to start 25 churches by 2025, and 250 by 2050. Mr McMunn said that there were already another ten people ready to become Amie priests this year.

Amie also has deep ties to fellow conservative, but official, Anglicans overseas, including the Gafcon (Global Anglican Future Conference) movement, led mostly by archbishops from the developing world who strongly oppose more liberal western churches’ moves to include LGBT people.

Some observers suggest that Amie, despite its insistence otherwise, seems to be rapidly turning itself into a shadow denomination, with its own bishops, priests, churches and institutions that will be ready to break away for good if the Anglican church goes “too far”.

So far, Archbishop Welby has quietly tolerated Amie’s activities. How he responds to the latest developments could define the rest of his time leading his fractious and disunited church.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Emma Duncan: “Why, aged 19, I didn’t rebuff a sleazy boss”

/ Mike Buchanan / 4 Comments

Emma Duncan is the Associate Editor of The Economist. Her piece in yesterday’s Times, the emphases are ours:

When I was 19 I had an internship at a firm in which I rather fancied getting a job when I left university. One of the big cheeses was an ancient chap who was probably about the same age as I am now. He would sometimes take me out to lunch or along to meetings, telling his colleagues that it would be instructive for me to watch him in action.

The action, however, mostly happened in the back of the taxis that took us to and from meetings. He would stick his bristly chin into my neck and kiss me. I hated it. Even writing about it now makes me grimace with disgust. But I let him do it.

I suspect that this year has been one of those social turning points when behaviour that has been widely approved, or at least condoned, suddenly becomes unacceptable. Stephen Lawrence’s murder, and the country’s visceral reaction to the indifference of the police, had a similar effect on racist attitudes in this country to the one the revelations about the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein and many, many other abusive men will have on sexual harassment in offices all over the world.

I am delighted that we seem to have reached this point. Women need to know that they can rise without fear of having their careers sabotaged by men to whom they have refused sexual favours; men need to know that they cannot use their power to pressure women into having sex with them.

But like Catherine Deneuve (and, sadly, the similarity ends here), I am uncomfortable about the good-and-evil, aggressor-and-victim version of the story that has dominated the media. As my colleague Jenni Russell argued in her excellent column about Twitter on Thursday, we have a better understanding of the world if we accept that morality comes not in black and white but in shades of grey.

As far as the men are concerned, every case needs to be judged on its merits, and every person judged on their individual demerits. Harvey Weinstein is at one end of a very long spectrum, at the other end of which is the weird guy from IT who gets a bit too close to people in the lift. On the basis of the evidence that has been made public, some of the people who have recently been “let go” — in these euphemistic days nobody seems to be fired any more — did not, in my view, deserve it. So far as I can tell, on the basis of what has been published, Michael Fallon, the former defence secretary, patted somebody on the knee. The worst he did was to kiss somebody who didn’t want to be kissed. That is bad, but in my book warrants warning before sacking.

My experience made me realise that the woman’s side of the story is also nuanced. The standard explanation for why victims don’t complain about abuse is that they are afraid that their powerful abusers will victimise them. That was clearly true in the case of Harvey Weinstein’s victims but it wasn’t in mine. It didn’t occur to me that the beard would bad-mouth me if I removed his bristles from my neck, nor that, if I resisted him, he would turn me down for a job for which I was the best candidate. I don’t think that was just the naivety of a 19-year-old. He may have been a sexual harasser but he was also dedicated to his profession.

So why didn’t I push him out of the door and into the moving traffic? Partly because of social embarrassment, something that afflicts the British more than most. The ability to say “Oi! Stop that!” is bred out of our children, and particularly our girls, at an early age. To point out that somebody’s actions are less than exquisitely desirable is in breach of the codes of behaviour that have been drummed into us since we were toddlers. If we don’t like what’s going on, it’s easier to pretend it isn’t happening than to risk the embarrassment of saying something that might stop it.

That, I think, has changed somewhat since I was young. The country has become less polite, which is bad, but franker, which is good. Workers are less inclined to defer to managers than they once were, women less inclined to defer to men, and the insertion of beards into necks is tolerated less than it used to be.

But there was another factor at work, which is not entirely to my credit. Going round with the beard gave me a kick. I was flattered by the attentions of a powerful man, however unattractive his bristles: seen in his company, I was no longer just an unremarkable undergraduate, indistinguishable from the rest of the aspiring crowd. I was beginning to be somebody. It also gave me a competitive advantage. I got to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t have. And I probably hoped that if a job came up (which it didn’t) he would have looked as favourably on my candidacy as he did on my neck. By letting him inflict his bristles upon me, I was maybe gaining ground over others in the field.

This does not excuse his behaviour. What he did was appalling and a great deal worse than what I did. Yet I don’t think I’m entirely in the clear. It’s certainly wrong to use power to get sex but it’s also, in my view, wrong to use sex to get power.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Police dog tests are too hard for women: Forces must change handler fitness assessments after Pc Kim-Louise Carter wins £15,000 damages because she couldn’t run as far as a man with one on her back

/ Mike Buchanan / 13 Comments

Our thanks to William for this. Excerpts:

However the defence for the forces said that in order to succeed as a dog handler it is vital to be physically fit as tracking criminals over long periods of time in debilitating conditions and then arresting the criminal was especially challenging…

Judge Street said: ‘Where a standard test had negative impacts on members of a protected group, here women, then it either needs to be changed or objectively justified.’ [J4MB: Didn’t the police forces in question “objectively justify” the test as it stands (as above)? And if not, why not? The influence of senior female police officers, perhaps? So what will happen in a real-life situation where the dogs need to be carried  by their handlers for some distance? Will only the male handlers go ahead, while the women – on the same pay as the men, obviously – stay behind and do nothing? If only a female handler – or handlers – are available, will the criminals escape arrest by the simple expedient of crossing ground where the Special Snowflakes would decline to go?]

The judge agreed women were at particular disadvantage compared with men and awarded Miss Carter a total of £14,930 for indirect sex discrimination.