A disgusting piece.
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Month: September 2018
Divorce ‘fighting fund’ for spouses of rich (men)
Sunday Times caption: Pauline Chai, who was awarded £64m in her divorce from the Laura Ashley owner, would not have been able to fight the case without a loan, her daughter said DWAYNE SENIOR
A piece in today’s Sunday Times by Nicholas Hellen, Social Affairs Editor:
Women trapped in marriages to rich husbands are to be given access to a £10m “fighting fund” to protect them from being ground down until they accept derisory divorce settlements.
It will allow them to instruct eminent lawyers capable of taking on their spouses, with a promise to repay the sum when they settle.
The fund, announced by Vardags, a law firm for high net worth individuals, coincides with a government consultation on introducing no-fault divorce. But Ayesha Vardag, the firm’s founder, insisted that the fund was not intended to undermine marriage.
“The Access to Justice Fund is about giving equality of arms to the weaker party in divorce,” she said.
“The party who has been kicked out of their home, starved of finance and abused, economically or otherwise. The party whose spouse said, ‘I’ll get the best lawyers and I’ll destroy you — you’ll come out of this with nothing.’”
She said it meant the financially weaker spouse — which could be the husband [J4MB: But won’t be] — would be able to say: “You can’t bully me.”
The loan must be paid back regardless of the settlement because contingent fees (“no win no fee”) are not allowed in divorce cases.
Pauline Chai, 72, a former Miss Malaysia, made use of an informal version of the loan in her divorce last year from the Laura Ashley owner Dr Khoo Kay Peng, 80. She was awarded £64m although this is being contested.
This weekend her daughter, Angeline Francis Khoo, 35, said that without a loan her mother would have been unable to divorce.
“Nobody wants to get divorced. You have to be desperate to take that step. All this does is create a more democratic position.”
Her mother famously had a collection of 1,000 shoes, but Khoo said: “From the outside they have access to mansions, planes and luxuries but if nothing is in your name, there is no control over your life.” [J4MB emphasis]
It has also emerged that the crowdfunding website, CrowdJustice, has discussed opening its platform to people who want to seek donations for their divorce.
Jo Edwards, head of family at Forsters, a London law firm, who was canvassed by CrowdJustice, said it was “an interesting and arguably inevitable development” after legal aid for most family cases was withdrawn in 2013.
Julia Salasky, founder of CrowdJustice, said the platform — which had hosted an appeal for funds by a heterosexual couple seeking a civil partnership — would only consider campaigns for divorce cases “in accordance with high standards of privacy and ethics”.
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How to be a sex worker – Brighton University’s advice for freshers
A piece by Andrew Gilligan in today’s Sunday Times:
A university has been accused of encouraging its students into prostitution after hosting a stand at its freshers’ fair advising new undergraduates how to be sex workers.
Alongside the hockey team and Amnesty International, the freshers’ fair at Brighton University last week also included a stand run by the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project (Swop) Sussex, which calls itself an “advocacy” and advice service “representing student sex workers”.
Swop tweeted last week: “1 in 6 students does sex work or thinks about turning to sex work. We can help.”
The group publishes leaflets offering tips on how to be a prostitute, reassuring those who are considering it: “You cannot be prosecuted for just selling sex . . . it is not illegal to work as an escort or to sell sexual services.”
The leaflets offer a wide range of advice on techniques for “safer escorting”, including: “If you don’t have anyone to look out for you, fake it! Make your punter think that someone else knows where you are. Pretend to make a call . . . to make it look like you are confirming your arrival . . . put men’s shoes or clothes out.”
Free condoms and lubricant were available at the freshers’ fair stand and students as young as 18, many of them away from home for the first time, were invited to “come and play on our wheel of sexual wellbeing”, with prizes including underwear.
Last month, on the day A-level results were announced, the group tweeted: “Look out for us at . . . Freshers Fairs for information and advice around #studentlife and #sexwork.”
Swop defended its presence at freshers’ events, saying in a tweet, later deleted: “Rising living and tuition costs mean that more students than ever are turning to sex work and Swop believe that they deserve our help as well. Sex work is work.”
It added that it did not “idealise” or encourage sex work but offered “support and advice without judgment”.
However, one feminist activist, Sarah Ditum, said: “This is essentially a grooming operation, pitching prostitution as a manageable, desirable lifestyle, equivalent to joining the rowing club.
“It is preying on the naivety of young students. It is incredibly irresponsible to promote an industry that is the cause of massive violence and exploitation against women as if it was the same as working in a bar.”
Soliciting remains a criminal offence and a conviction has the potential to limit students’ future careers, or end them entirely if they are studying subjects such as law. It is also illegal for people under 18 to sell sex, even though the age of consent is 16.
Prostitution can be a highly risky occupation. In a 2001 study by the British Medical Journal, half of women engaged in street prostitution in three UK cities, and a quarter of prostitutes working indoors, reported having been subjected to violence by clients in the previous six months.
Swop is part of a charity, the Brighton Oasis Project, which last year received more than £150,000 from public bodies including the NHS, Brighton & Hove city council, the Home Office and other government departments, plus a further £400,000 from the national lottery.
A 2015 study by Swansea University found that nearly 5% of students had been a sex worker at some point in their lives, and more than 20% had considered sex work to help pay their bills.
However, senior academics at Sussex University, including Alison Phipps, a professor of gender studies, oppose what Phipps called “contemporary feminist opposition to the sex industry”, which involves an “emotionally loaded” attack on sex workers’ rights.
In response to the controversy triggered by Swop’s presence at freshers’ fairs, Phipps sent a tweet thanking the group for the “great work you do”.
Brighton University’s freshers’ fair was organised by its students’ union. Tomi Ibukun, president of the union, said: “Swop was at our freshers’ fair event to raise awareness of the specialist support they provide should it ever be needed.
“They were not there to advocate sex work as an option to our new students. It is unfortunate that some people have misinterpreted the attendance of Swop at our freshers’ fair.”
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Paul Elam: YouToo, Brett Kavanaugh
Excellent (audio and a little video, 13:04). Like so much of Paul’s work over the past 10 years, both insightful and moving.
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Woke Jokes: How Political Correctness Killed Comedy
Enjoy (video, 12:04). The man covers the utterly woeful BBC TV show The Mash Report over 7:55 – 11:17. I was interviewed for the programme by a desperately unfunny American “comedian”, Desiree Burch, earlier this year – here (3:14). The BBC filmed us over a period of two hours, in an unheated room in London on a very cold day in February, and broadcast just 194 seconds of material. The laughter was, of course, “canned”. I’ve watched entire episodes of The Mash Report without laughing once.
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You can’t have it all, admits Cosmopolitan editor Farrah Storr
Times caption: Farrah Storr said that she abandoned the struggle to have children in her mid-30s JAY BROOKS FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
A piece in today’s Times:
Magazines sell a “lie” that women can have it all, claims the editor of Cosmopolitan, who revealed that she gave up on having children to get her dream job.
Farrah Storr said she and her husband abandoned their plans for IVF treatment after deciding that having a career and a big family was a myth.
Storr told The Times Magazine that she abandoned the struggle to have children in her mid-30s. She admitted to her husband that “her ovarian ache” was not strong enough to justify the sacrifices necessary to raise a family.
She said that when she was younger she was told that she could be the editor on the train into work and the woman with the baby at home. “But it hadn’t worked out that way,” she said.
“Along the way, I had been forced to make uncomfortable choices. The notion that I could have or indeed would want it all was a lie. A lie sold to me by the very magazine I edited.”
Storr, who has worked on a range of women’s magazines including Good Housekeeping, Eve and Women’s Health, said that success in her and her husband’s careers meant having a family would come at a cost.
“Almost overnight, our lives became very full,” she said. “Getting to the top, I quickly discovered, was not so much about ambition and talent but more about hard graft. With two big careers and a marriage to nurture, the fabric of our lives felt stretched to capacity.
“I was 36. I knew that to be an editor of a major magazine would take everything I had. But then, so too would being a mother. I wasn’t sure my ovarian ache was enough to ask one of us to put the handbrake on our dreams. I never made the IVF appointment.
“As I headed into my 37th year, we laid to rest any notions about a family and thus ‘having it all’. I could, I decided, be OK with having it all-ish.”
Storr said she appreciated the irony that “having it all” was propagated by her predecessor, Helen Gurley Brown, in her bestselling book. She later learnt that Gurley Brown, who had no children, fought against the title that her publishers insisted upon. She had turned Cosmopolitan from a prim, failing guide on doing the housework and pleasing your husband to a glossy bible for aspiring young women.
Storr concluded, however, that her generation had been sold a lie. “The irony of choosing not to fulfil an ideal the very magazine I edited had created was not lost on me,” she said.
“In life you have to choose and choosing is uncomfortable. It means opening the gate to one path but closing the gate to the other. Few get to walk both paths. Perhaps, like me, [Gurley Brown] knew deep down the truth: you can’t have it all.”
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Son of ‘super’ sperm donor learns he has 1,000 siblings
A piece by Mark Bridge, Technology Correspondent, in today’s Times, emphases ours:
Growing up in Rotterdam, Ivo van Halen thought he had just the one brother. Now he hopes that DNA tests can help him find up to 1,000 other siblings he believes may have been fathered by the same sperm donor.
Mr van Halen, 34, who works in IT, was told five years ago by his parents that he was donor-conceived and has already used genetic ancestry tests to identify his biological father and almost 60 half-brothers and sisters in the Netherlands. However, he believes they represent only a small part of his vast immediate family.
After his initial shock at hearing his parents’ secret, Mr Van Halen was curious to discover his biological father’s identity, but could not obtain details from the donor clinic under anonymity rules. Like an increasing number of people who were donor-conceived or adopted, he turned to DNA testing companies that have databases of millions of customers’ genetic profiles.
He first took a £60 test from Family Tree DNA. It lists biological relatives who have also taken the test, with the estimated relationship based on the proportion of shared DNA. People share 50 per cent of their DNA with a parent and about 25 per cent with a half-sibling, for example.
Mr Van Halen was able to view his results online two months after providing a saliva swab and was fortunate that many relatives had also taken the test.
“I found my biological father and 42 half-siblings right away,” he told The Times. He spoke to several half-siblings before taking the “scary” step of contacting his biological father, with whom he has exchanged messages, revealing shared interests including a love of puzzles. He hopes they will meet one day.
He has already met a number of his half-siblings, some of whom grew up close to him. “Some of the others had known each other before they found out they were related and had almost dated. That’s one reason this sort of knowledge is so important.”
He said that one of the most interesting revelations for him was that his biological father’s father was from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, and of African heritage. He never suspected he had non-European ancestry and said it was not obvious in his appearance.
He has subsequently obtained test results from two other firms, Ancestry and 23andMe and found a total of 57 half-siblings. Some already knew that they were donor-conceived and had taken the test with the intention of finding their biological father’s family. Others did not know their background until they were contacted by siblings, but said they were relieved to find out because they had felt that something “wasn’t right”.
A Dutch government organisation for donor-conceived people estimates that up to 1,000 children may have been conceived from sperm from Mr Van Halen’s biological father, who donated regularly at three clinics over 20 years. This would make him one of the most prolific donors, surpassing the Austrian Jewish physiologist Bertold Wiesner whose sperm was used to artificially inseminate an estimated 300-600 women at a clinic in central London. The donor’s own estimate is a more conservative 200 offspring.
The clinics provided sperm across Europe, including in the UK, and Mr Van Halen suspects that he may have half-siblings in this country. He recently tested with Living DNA, a British company, with the hope of finding some of them.
He has used his experience to help others to identify their donors and siblings. “Often people only have second-cousin matches, for example, but it is possible to use those leads to identify closer relatives,” he said.
Testing companies typically warn customers that they make surprising or distressing discoveries, involving illegitimacy, adoption or donor-conception. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority suggested recently that firms should provide more comprehensive warnings and signpost counselling and other support services.
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Rev Jules Gomes (“The Rebel Priest”): Christine Blasey Ford is a victim of the toxic brew of psycho-feminism
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Dangerfield: I resurrect ‘Manspreading’ and slay it again.
Our thanks to Rod for this (video, 32:36).
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Why Dany Cotton, the London Fire Brigade commissioner, should resign (and why she won’t)
Times caption: Dany Cotton, the London Fire Brigade commissioner, with Theresa May the day after the Grenfell fire DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
In February we posted a piece with a link to a Guardian article, and we highlighted this passage:
Speaking at a event entitled “Gender Equality: will it take another 100 years” organised by the Young Women’s Trust, Cotton revealed the sexism she has faced throughout her 30-year career at the LFB.
Asked whether she supported quotas in industries dominated by men, she warned that women promoted during quota periods could suffer because of positive discrimination. “For every single rank promotion I’ve got I have been told, every single time, that I’m going to get the job because I’m the only woman on the panel – even the job I’ve got now. [J4MB emphasis] Which is quite bizarre, really,” she said.
Her narcissism is off the scale. The sexism she “faced” was anti-male, not anti-female. She admits she got her jobs, including that of Fire Brigade commissioner, through pro-female / anti-male discrimination. Yet her concern is not for the disadvantaged men, but the advantaged women – to repeat, “she warned that women promoted during quota periods could suffer because of positive discrimination”. Quite how the women who landed jobs they didn’t deserve, ahead of men who DID deserve them, is unclear. Maybe they don’t want reminding they’re token women?
Leaving aside that this genius suggested Fireman Sam be renamed Firefighter Sam, the woman is clearly considerable out of her depth. She’s not resilient enough for the job, and she relentlessly engages in virtue signalling rather than leading those who work in the fire brigade. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were at least 100 firemen in the London Fire Brigade who could do a better job than Ms Cotton.
If she has the slightest self-awareness, she would admit (if only to herself) that she’s not up to the job, and resign. But women in such circumstances rarely do, they seem to lack the sense of honour that is more the province of men. We’ve seen this many times with Social Services, where female Social Services directors refuse to take responsibility for the most appalling cases of abuse of babies and children.
Another factor disinclining her from resigning is surely the sisterhood. They will tell her that any feelings of inadequacy are merely “imposter syndrome”, experienced by women in senior positions – rather than a feeling of inadequacy being an honest self-assessment in this case, as in so many others.
They will also tell her she’s going a great job under difficult circumstances, and resigning would be a blow to other women, with their perpetual need for inspiration, celebration, role models… but who will be the role models’ role models?
Of course, in the absence of a resignation, Ms Cotton should be fired. But with Theresa “this is what a feminist looks like” May as prime minister, there’s little or no chance of that.
I can recall only one case of a woman resigning from a senior role, and being honest enough to admit she wasn’t capable of performing it well – a Labour Education Secretary, many years ago. Her name escapes me. Answer on a postcard, please.
A piece by Kaya Burgess and Will Humphries in yesterday’s Times, emphases ours:
The head of the London Fire Brigade has defended the “stay put” advice given to residents during the Grenfell Tower blaze.
Dany Cotton, commissioner of the brigade (LFB), said that the rapid spread of fire up the outside of the tower and on to other floors was so unexpected that firefighters were right to tell people to stay in their flats. This advice was only revoked at 2.47am, almost two hours after the blaze broke out.
She told an inquiry that LFB had not provided special training on how to tackle cladding fires because it was not a scenario they had anticipated and it would have been like training for “a space shuttle to land in front of the Shard”.
Shahin Sadafi, chairman of Grenfell United, a group representing survivors and bereaved relatives, said: “That’s a very imaginative response to something that we believe is not totally accurate.”
Ms Cotton was challenged when she was shown a presentation prepared by LFB engineers in 2016 at a time when Ms Cotton was director of safety and assurance. The slideshow, entitled Tall Building Facades, featured images of cladding fires from around the world and it warned that “new construction materials and methods … could affect the way fires develop and spread in a building”.
She was also shown a letter sent to the local council by an LFB assistant commissioner in April 2017, which warned that the composition of panels used on another building that caught fire did not meet safety standards.
Ms Cotton said that she was not aware of the presentation and no special training had been introduced to tackle cladding fires. “From the moment the fire left the flat on the fourth floor and started travelling outside the building there was no way they could have extinguished that fire,” she said.
“I wouldn’t expect us to be developing training or a response to something that simply shouldn’t happen.”
Richard Millett, QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, asked whether such training could have led firefighters to revoke the “stay put” advice earlier as they would have known that the fire would spread further.
Ms Cotton said that Grenfell Tower had only one narrow staircase and was not designed for a mass evacuation, adding that there was no way to communicate evacuation advice to all residents at once.
She also said the LFB has a policy where it does not call back those who rang earlier, even if they had previously been told to stay put and that advice had since changed.
Many calls were received from flats that had not yet been affected by smoke or fire and she said that sending them out into the smoke-filled stairwell would have brought them “from an apparent place of safety into a place of danger [that could] potentially kill them”.
Ms Cotton was so traumatised by the tragedy that she cannot recall all of what happened on the night of the blaze. She was present as a senior “monitoring officer” and was not in operational command.
She said she has received counselling to aid her recall of events but this had not been successful. She had suffered from memory blanks which she believes are “linked to the traumatic nature and sheer scale of the incident.”
She said in a statement to police: “I deliberately didn’t write any notes at the time of the incident. Because I had such poor recall of the night’s events and I’d hoped they would improve. I have subsequently undergone an accredited counselling technique called EDMR with a view to improving my memory recall.” This had not been “terribly successful”.
In the statement, made in February, she said: “I’m still finding it very difficult to look at visual images and have conversations about Grenfell. I’m still responsible for effectively running the London Fire Brigade, and everything else that’s involved in that. It would be no good for me to fall apart.
“Therefore, I have not spent huge amounts of time in my head [J4MB: As opposed to in her…?] looking and thinking about Grenfell Tower. In speaking to police to provide this statement, this will actually be the first time I have talked through the whole incident.”
The fire chief also said that she had blocked out a memory of a near-miss with a piece of falling debris on the night of the blaze.
She described arriving at the tower at 2.49am: “”Sitting in my car I could see the tower through my front windscreen. I was still on the phone to Tom [the director of operations] and said ‘What the f***? This can’t actually be happening; I can’t believe what I’m seeing’.”
She “was not a hundred per cent convinced in my mind that everybody was going to come out of there alive” on arriving to speak to firefighters on the scene.
She said: “For the first time ever, I had an overwhelming continuous feeling of anxiety, of responsibility in committing firefighters into a building where I could not guarantee their safety. I’ve never felt that way before, and I have been in charge at hundreds of large scale operational incidents.”
Some of the firefighters were “clearly terrified” on entering the building and she said in her statement: “It has truly damaged some people who witnessed some terrible things and who will never forget them. They will wear the scars for the rest of their life.”
“The building was so hugely involved in fire; you cannot help but compare it to 9/11.”
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Justice for Men & Boys 