Madness in Glasgow. Two paragraph get to the heart of the matter:

The problems arose from an earlier attempt to eliminate gender pay inequality. In 2006 Glasgow City Council adopted a job evaluation scheme with the aim of ensuring that men and women received equal pay for jobs of the same value… [J4MB: Jobs of the same value – an absurd feminist concept, completely ignoring issues such as supply and demand of labour for different jobs, working conditions e.g. indoors or outdoors, clean or dirty environments, risk of injury and death, social or unsocial hours, and more.]

Campaigners say workers in traditionally female-dominated roles such as catering or home care [J4MB: The roles that women are prepared to do at home, with no income] were paid up to £3 an hour less than those in male-dominated jobs such as refuse workers or grave diggers.

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Times caption: Sir Salman Rushdie dismissed any suggestion of a crisis in modern masculinity (ADRIAN SHERRATT / THE SUNDAY TIMES)

 A piece in yesterday’s Times:

Sir Salman Rushdie has criticised the “bleating” suggestion that men’s lives have become tougher.

The novelist dismissed any suggestion of a crisis in modern masculinity. “All this bleating about how hard it is for men, I don’t have time for. It’s much more difficult to be a woman,” he said. “The patriarchy is alive and well.” [J4MB emphasis]

The author of Midnight’s Children, a Booker Prize winner, said that he had always created strong female characters. “Sometimes they’re horrible, sometimes they’re almost monstrous. They’re not feeble. Sometimes they tear people’s heads off. Looking back at my books, a lot of my favourite characters have been female.”

Referring to Brexit, he said that Britain was hankering after a fictional “golden age”. “This whole tragedy that this country is going through is based on, in part, a nostalgic idea of British identity that is a fiction,” Sir Salman, 71, added. “It ignores that it was based on the exploitation of a quarter of a planet.

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A piece in yesterday’s Times:

The Duchess of Sussex has cancelled part of her programme on her tour of Australia with Prince Harry because of tiredness. [J4MB emphasis]

She missed an Invictus Games event in Sydney and called off engagements today on Fraser Island off the Queensland coast, on the encouragement of her husband. Kensington Palace said that it was making decisions day by day, and it remained possible that the duchess may fulfil one engagement today.

The duke, 34, began the day by dedicating a forest on Fraser Island, known as K’gari, to the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, which aims to preserve the world’s forests. He was greeted with a traditional Aboriginal ceremony from the local Butchulla people on the shores of Lake McKenzie.

The duke was, he admitted, not the first royal to dedicate the forest. “This is actually the second time this plaque has been unveiled, which I know is highly unusual,” he said. “The first time was by my father – the Prince of Wales – in Bundaberg earlier this year when he was visiting. I now have the privilege of unveiling it in situ. I know that my father came to K’gari in 1994 for a ‘day off’ during a Royal Tour so he has an appreciation of the importance of this place.”

Meghan Markle is 37. Queen Elizabeth, 92, doesn’t cancel engagements due to “tiredness”.

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Times caption: Tracey Curtis-Taylor has been brought down by a campaign to withdraw a trophy she won for an expedition over Africa [TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE]

A piece in yesterday’s Times, emphases ours:

A woman pilot known as the Bird in a Biplane was brought down to earth with a bump yesterday after losing a battle to retain a trophy she won for an expedition over Africa.

Tracey Curtis-Taylor, 56, told The Times that she was resigning from the Light Aircraft Association and would re-register her vintage aircraft overseas in protest.

The row has divided pilots as Ms Curtis-Taylor and her allies accused detractors of being “out-of-date misogynists” [J4MB: Not to be confused with up-to-date misogynists] while critics denounced her for making false claims about her achievements.

The argument began after Ms Curtis-Taylor paid tribute to the celebrated 1920s aviator Mary Heath in 2013 by flying from Cape Town in South Africa to Goodwood in West Sussex in a 1942 Boeing Stearman plane.

The next year she was awarded the Light Aircraft Association’s Woodhams Trophy for her achievement. She was then stripped of the prizein 2016 after the expedition’s logistics manager, Sam Rutherford, accused her of claiming that it was a solo voyage when she was frequently accompanied in her two-seater plane by her mechanic, Ewald Gritsch.

She was said to have described her expedition as a “solo flight” at a public event in Herne Bay in Kent and failed to correct similar claims in the media, including a documentary shown on BBC Four. Ms Curtis-Taylor admitted that she had been wrong to describe her trip as a solo expedition but said that it was a one-off mistake and not the basis of the award.

Yesterday she and her allies put forward two motions at the association’s annual general meeting at Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire, either of which would have returned the award to her.

One proposed by Stewart Jackson, vice-president of the association, described the 2016 decision as “vindictive [and] irrational” and blamed the board for “errors of judgment”. It added: “Injustice was done. Let’s admit we made a bad mistake that made — and will continue to make us, if we don’t do the right thing — look like an out-of-date club of misogynists.”

Voters in the association, which is 95 per cent male and has an average age of 61, were untroubled by the risk to their image. [J4MB: Excellent news.] They voted against the motion by 389 to 82, with 87 per cent of votes being cast remotely. A second motion with more moderate wording was also voted down, by 277 to 202.

Ms Curtis-Taylor said that she no longer wished to have anything to do with the association and would be registering her vintage Ryan Recruit plane in America. “It’s ignorance. It’s discrimination. This is how women have been closed out of aviation,” she said. [J4MB: “This” being what exactly? An expectation of honesty from women?]

“I’ve been a member for 14 years [but] they do not value what I’m doing. I am finished. This was two years of trying to right a wrong but the bigger struggle [to promote women in aviation] goes on.”

Mr Rutherford, a former army officer who fell out with Ms Curtis-Taylor during the Africa expedition, said that he had warned her not to accept awards.

“I contacted her twice. I said: ‘Keep going with whatever you’re doing but if you’re offered awards, please decline them.’ ” He admitted that he had engaged in an online campaign to encourage people to vote against her. “It’s fairly clear that both sides of the argument have been very active in trying to rally support,” he said.

“I’m all for more women coming into aviation — my wife and my daughter fly. They don’t need some sort of false support for that. It reduces the real achievements out there.”

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Last year Dr Balvinder Mehat, A Nottingham-based circumciser, was arrested on suspicion of causing GBH with Intent (maximum sentence – life imprisonment), but the CPS decided not to bring a prosecution. Our blog piece on the matter is here.

Mehat is a landlord as well as a criminal mutilator of male genitals. Some years ago he was convicted of breaching regulations in connection with a property he rented out to students. The Sun today reports on another of his properties – here. The start of the piece:

Furious neighbours claim their lives have been blighted by over twenty East Europeans crammed in a two-bedroom flat – owned by a GP.

They say they had to endure over-flowing bins and dumped garbage bags.

During the hot summer a skip was parked outside the flat which was often full of refuse, including human waste.

The flat’s toilet drain was frequently blocked causing a “foul pong.”

Neighbours claim the GP Balvinder Mehat the landlord knew the flat was over crowded and ignored their repeated pleas to tackle the problem.

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Janice on top form (video, 59:33).

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Victims of the disclosure scandal (Liam Allan and Samuel Armstrong) oppose Alison Saunders impending traditional damehood, as reported by The Telegraph.

A protest in recognition of her disasterous tenure will take place in London on October The 31st.

Sign the petition against her Damehood here.

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The last of three pieces from the current edition of The Spectator:

On 11 October 2017 an anonymous Google spreadsheet began doing the rounds of American newspapers and magazines — a document that would have far-reaching consequences for Stephen Elliott, a Los Angeles-based writer and editor. Called ‘Shitty Media Men’, the spreadsheet had been created by Moira Donegan, a former assistant editor at the New Republic, and named various men rumoured to be guilty of sexual misconduct. Donegan closed it down a few days later, but by that time it had been widely circulated and many names had been added, alongside a summary of their alleged crimes. The entry for Elliott read: ‘Rape accusations, sexual harassment, coercion, unsolicited invitations to his apartment, a dude who snuck into Binders???’ (Binders is a Facebook group for women writers.)

The spreadsheet contained a disclaimer: ‘This document is only a collection of allegations and rumours. Take everything with a grain of salt.’ Needless to say, that was largely ignored. Numerous articles appeared celebrating the list as a much–needed ‘reckoning’, with not many people pausing to consider whether the men on the list were guilty. Elliott had a collection of essays to promote, but interviews were pulled, readings cancelled and his book tour fizzled out. His television agent stopped returning his calls and some friends began to distance themselves. He found himself at the centre of a Kafka-esque nightmare.

Initially, Elliott decided it was pointless to fight back. For one thing, he’s a lifelong liberal and is generally sympathetic to the #MeToo movement — or he was at the time. If he spoke out and said he’d been falsely accused it might cast doubt on all the other #MeToo allegations, including those against Harvey Weinstein. In addition, he hoped that if he didn’t respond it would soon be forgotten — ‘least said, soonest mended’. Then, when it became clear that his career had been seriously damaged, he became depressed and started abusing various substances. His thoughts turned to suicide, which is a common reaction to a public shaming. Last year the Hollywood producer Jill Messick committed suicide after she was accused of being one of Weinstein’s ‘enablers’ — an allegation she denied.

But after a few months Elliott got sober and decided he could no longer ignore the rape charge. If he didn’t confront it, it would dog him for the rest of his life — and, according to him, he’s innocent. He wrote an essay for New York magazine, setting out the case for his defence, but after initially being accepted it was rejected. He passed it on to the Guardian and it was the same story: an enthusiastic reception followed by a change of heart. Eventually, a version of that essay found a home in Quillette, an Australian online magazine where I’m an associate editor. After it was published, two women came forward to accuse Elliott of having behaved badly towards them, but the charges didn’t amount to anything more serious than ‘unsolicited invitations to his apartment’ and, as he pointed out in his essay, it isn’t a rule that you have to wait for a woman to ‘solicit’ an invitation before you can ask her back to your apartment. No one has ever made an attempt to substantiate the rape allegation.

Last week the story exploded when Elliott filed a $1.5 million law suit in New York against Moira Donegan and some of the other women who contributed to the ‘Shitty Media Men’ list. The reaction was predictable, particularly as the news followed on the heels of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. One of Elliott’s former colleagues described the suit as ‘an outrageous act of violence against Moira first and foremost, as well as everyone who contributed to the list or found any measure of solidarity or hope or comfort or usefulness in it’.

It’s hard not to sympathise with Elliott if you give him the benefit of the doubt. When a woman accuses a man of rape, the default position should not be to believe her, particularly if there’s no corroborating evidence. That’s tantamount to a presumption of guilt, a fundamentally illiberal principle. In this case, we don’t know if the accuser is a woman and you would hope even #MeToo activists would stop short of insisting we should believe anonymous allegations. Above all, no one accused of a serious crime who protests their innocence should lose their livelihoods without due process being followed. I’m glad Elliott will have his day in court.

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A piece in the current edition of The Spectator:

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception.

But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress and demeanour I’d say they probably came from one of the more selective London day schools. One after another they stood up to denounce me, just like my own teenage female does most of the time when she’s at home and I venture an opinion. Except Girl is away boarding at the moment, so I did rather feel: ‘What did I do to deserve this busman’s holiday?’

My panel’s topic was gun control in the US. More specifically, it was about how since the Parkland, Florida school shooting, the debate appears to have been hijacked by photogenic teen survivors of the atrocity with their #neveragain campaign, their endless appearances on CNN and their nationwide protests featuring bussed-in parties of winsome, placard-wielding kiddies warning that next time it could be them.

Had I really wanted to wind my audience up I could have said — as I more or less believe — that every man, woman and child should be obliged to have a gun from the age of eight onwards. But because I was in an emollient mood, I decided instead to focus on a slightly more nuanced point about the way that, increasingly, kids like the slightly spooky Parkland survivor David Hogg are being used to advance political causes. My view is that it’s one of the more disturbing trends of our age.

Partly, what I object to is that the mere state of youth is being used as a substitute for argument: ‘Look at these fresh young faces! See their innocence and promise! They want guns banned/CO2 emissions radically reduced/animal cruelty ended/Britain to remain part of the European Union. What kind of monster would you have to be to deny our most precious commodity the brighter future they crave?’

Also, it’s yet another manifestation of the ugly identity politics which is causing such needless division in our culture. It has set women against men, ethnic minorities against white people, trans activists against the ‘cisgendered’, and — as was very much evident in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, where older people were repeatedly urged to hurry up and die for having voted the wrong way — the young against the old.

And I really don’t want to live in a world where I have to go round hating kids just because they’ve been trained up, like the Red Guard or the Young Pioneers, to strut round making themselves objectionable with half-baked, second-hand political opinions. Not — as I was at pains to stress — that I blame the kids themselves for this trend. I blame the adults, mostly on the left, who are taking advantage of those characteristics that make the young so ripe for exploitation: their naivety, their impulsiveness, their passion, their idealism, their vulnerability to peer pressure, their lack of restraint, the fact that by definition they are unwise because they have not yet had the experience to form a mature, considered view.

This was the point where — according to an audience member who was sitting among them — the girls’ ears started to blow steam. And when the time for questions came, they stood up, one after another, to tell me how very, very cross they felt, how totally entitled to their brilliant opinions they were and what an awful, stupid old man I was.

No doubt I’ll be accused of more patronising sexism by some of the girls when, inevitably, their parents draw their attention to this column. But I’m afraid that what I say is true: nothing that any of the girls said, not one thing, presented anything by way of a lucid, viable counter to my argument. It was pure ‘muh feelings’ emotionalism, laced with burning entitlement and more than a hint of cry-bullying passive aggression.

I’ve noticed this a lot. On school and university visits, in panel discussions, on social media, the kind of normal discourse that previous generations took for granted has been twisted to the point of unhingement by girls alternately sobbing like victims and then shrieking at you and trying to get you banned or — in their dreams — locked up. No one seems to have told them that if you’re going to chip in and you can’t make an intelligent point, then at least make a funny one. It’s as if young women these days have been encouraged to believe that righteous fury is enough: merely being angry is a moral act which relieves them of any obligation to truth, wit, logic, justice or indeed feminine grace, subtlety and charm.

Of course, girls have always had it in them, this tendency. But it’s only in the last few years that this consuming rage has been weaponised in the name of ‘empowerment’. Except that it’s not empowering. Far from showing women at their best, it often brings out their worst. Truly, I say, as the adoring father of a teenage daughter, our girls deserve better than this.

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A piece (the first of three) in the current edition of The Spectator:

We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won, in Herculean style, by the Canadian Rachel McKinnon.

Her appearance on the podium provoked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that she hadn’t even the grace to disguise herself very much. Usually when men transition, they put a bit of effort into it — maybe some lippy, a pair of staple-on breasts etc. It’s not usually very convincing but hell, at least they tried. Not Rach. She just looked like a large bloke in spectacles. If you rummaged around in her shorts, I wonder what you would discover — possibly the usual frank’n’beans, so to speak. Rach tells people she identifies as a woman, which allowed her to enter into the race (and of course win it, much to the very great chagrin of the bronze medallist Jennifer Wagner, who suggested it ‘wasn’t fair’).

Rachel McKinnon also identifies as a ‘doctor’, having completed a PhD in Specious Twattery at some dimbo college in Canada. His — sorry, Rach, I’m not going along with the charade any further — Twitter page also lists several other things he identifies as: ‘Public Intellectual, Trans Woman, Queer Chick, Strident Feminist, Athlete, Vegan’. Yes, of course, vegan. I think we’d get along terribly well. He was about 29 when he decided to tell people he was a lady and has subsequently decided that he is also a lesbian, which seems to me to be having your cake and eating it. McKinnon accepts that men have certain advantages over women when it comes to many, if not most, sports, but suggests that tall people or powerfully built people also have advantages over those who are short or feeble and so the issue of gender doesn’t matter one bit, really.

It is an absurdity of course. And yet this narcissistic idiot’s fragile sensibilities are totally indulged by the authorities, infuriating his female competitors and making a mockery of the sport. How did we get to this stage, where a shrill but microscopically tiny percentage of the population get to have things their way, to the detriment of everybody else?

The gap between male and female ability at sport is immense (and not noticeably narrowing): to take an extreme example, both the Australian and USA women’s football teams — among the best in the world — have been beaten by sides composed of 15-year-old boys. An average pub team would hammer the England women’s team. Unless, of course, the England women’s team was comprised of Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane, Jordan Pickford et al, who had suddenly decided to identify as women for the afternoon.

The authorities now try to police the issue by focusing on testosterone — but that is a red herring, and does not account for those other advantages enjoyed by men such as height, weight, spatial awareness, speed, musculature, and not being impeded by a pair of mammary glands bouncing up and down. There is only one meaningful test: what chromosomes do you have? Everything else simply evades the issue and does a huge disservice to the women who have trained long and hard for their sports only to find themselves outgunned by a bearded person who has decided to acquire the soubriquet Loretta.

Simply to say this, of course, is to be committing a hate crime. And yet it is also incontestably true. It worries me that many things you can say these days are both true and a hate crime. It speaks to me of a society which is trying desperately hard to distance itself from the most pernicious and inconvenient of things — reality.

Meanwhile, the government is thinking of expanding the term ‘hate crime’ until it covers absolutely everybody in society, even straight white men. [J4MB emphasis.] In other words, all crimes will be hate crimes, to the point where the term itself becomes utterly redundant, even if it wasn’t already.

In one sense this is fine — it means that people will no longer be treated as if they had ‘protected characteristics’, because it will be against the law even to hate people because they don’t have ‘protected characteristics’. That is, all characteristics, or a complete lack of them, will be protected. But it is also a further expansion of the lucrative anti-hate industry, which is doing the same as all other pressure groups and attempting, in the end, to encompass the entire world in its glorious victimhood.

You might remember that when the disability charities started out they were fighting for rights for a tiny proportion of the population who were both discriminated against and, of course, handicapped. They even used that word. But eventually, in pursuit of more money and having seen their early goals attained, and through the immense hubris which attends to people who run campaigning bodies, we were told that one in five of us is disabled, and then one in three. And disability was no longer about not having any legs, or being blind, but having a bit of a bad back. Just as the LGBTQI lobbyists — who once stuck up for a persecuted tiny minority — will tell you these days that one in three of us are gay or bi or, hell, something which Jesus Christ didn’t like very much.

In other words, we can all be victims of something. But if we really are all victims, then it seems to me that there are no victims at all. It is all just life, with its tiresome vicissitudes, its hurtful impositions, its utter unfairness. Someone tell Rachel McKinnon.

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