Only two days to go before what what will possibly be the most critical general election in my lifetime (I’m 62). In the early hours of Friday morning I’ll be awaiting with particular interest the count in Shipley, in West Yorkshire, where Philip Davies hopes to be re-elected, despite a determined campaign by the Labour party. In 2005 Philip was first elected with 39.0% of the votes counted. In 2010, 48.6%. In 2015, 50.0%, and in 2017, 51.3%. Sadly the Women’s Equality Party won’t be fielding a candidate against him this time. When Sophie “Doughnuts” Walker, then the leaderene of the party, stood against him in 2017, she lost her deposit.
At least two other contests will be of particular interest to MRAs. In Batley & Spen, also in West Yorkshire – the seat of the late Jo Cox – Mark Brooks (Mankind Initiative) will be standing for the Conservatives. His Facebook page is here. Elizabeth Peacock held the seat for the Conservatives from 1983 (when the seat was first created) to 1997. She was opposed to abortion, sometimes advocating direct action. Appearing on Sunday Politics in April 2019, she declared herself a Brexit supporter.
In Ashfield, in Nottinghamshire, Martin Daubney, currently an MEP for the Brexit party, will be standing. In 1997 Geoff Hoon won the seat with 61.5% of the vote. In 2010 Gloria De Piero – a former TV presenter, parachuted into the constituency – secured only 33.7% of the votes, and had a majority of 192 votes over the Lib Dems. In 2017 she secured a majority of only 441 votes over the Conservatives. Perhaps wisely, she’s not standing at this general election.
Ashfield is the seat where I stood for J4MB in 2015, while Ray Barry stood for us in nearby Broxtowe. We famously secured the same number of seats as UKIP at that election. Led at the time by Nigel Farage, UKIP contrested 624 seats.
We wish Philip, Mark, and Martin success.

Our last general election manifesto is here.
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If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Lionel Shriver is an American journalist and authoress who lives in the United Kingdom. Her piece in the current edition of The Spectator:

The pressure group Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) is oddly named. What their campaign opposes is pension equality.
Now, technically these activists born in the 1950s do not object to equalising the pension ages of men and women, so long as said activists don’t personally have to sacrifice for gender justice. Supposedly, the problem is insufficient notice.
Yet the UK bill to shift women’s state pension age from 60 to 65 was passed in 1995. That seems like pretty advance notice to me. Besides, government is not obliged to insure us against our expectations. The UK capriciously changes its tax policy every six months, and ‘but I didn’t expect a reduction of my capital gains allowance, so give me my money back’ doesn’t wash with HMRC. True, letters advising affected women that their pension age was changing didn’t go out until 2010, but the government wasn’t legallyobliged to send such letters ever. By 1995, the internet was taking off. For the past 25 years, a search on ‘women’s UK pension age’ has yielded enlightening results.
A little history: the first British state pension, the Old Age Pension, was introduced in 1909. It kicked in at age 70. It was means-tested. It paid 25p per week to those earning £21 per year or less, and tapered to nothing if one earned the princely annual sum of £31. (Obviously, given inflation, we’re not talking about Britons so impoverished that their entire annual income would only buy an immersion blender. I swoon with nostalgia for the days when the once-estimable pound was actually worth something.) Because life expectancy was then 48 for men and 55 for women, few made it into their 70s, and the pension cost the state mere bus fare.

Enjoy (video, 1:05:09).

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Enjoy (video, 5:08).

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Our thanks to Ian for this (video, 27:18).

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Enjoy (video, 9:27).

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Excellent (video, 33:16).

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

I rarely respond to jibes from feminists, but I sometimes do it if I think there will be some point e.g. an audience likely to have an interest in my points. Belinda Brown recently posted a piece on TCW, Let’s salute the men who fight the dark forces of feminism. William Collins and I were among the men she cited.
I made a point in the comments section about MRAs having some common ground with religious people, such as on the issue of abortion, to which “Women are People” replied to me, five hours ago:

Men’s rights activists are pathetic insecure man babies who are terrified of woman’s autonomy and financial independence. It makes them feel needed if they force women to depend on them. Sorry, but the 50s are over.

I replied:

Thank you for nominating yourself for our Gormless Feminist of the Month award. A few thoughts:
1. The days of feminists shaming men – and men’s rights activists (MRAs) in particular – into silence with shaming tactics (“pathetic insecure man babies”) – are over. Do you really not understand that? It’s time to check your female privilege.
2. Everything that feminists say is one or more of the following – a baseless conspiracy theory, a fantasy, a lie, a delusion or a myth. How do you know a feminist is lying? Her lips are moving.
3. As a feminist, you probably don’t know any MRAs. I know many and not one conforms to the feminist sterotype you present. Women’s autonomy and financial independence? Don’t make me laugh. Most women to this day are not financially independent of men, and don’t want to be. A record number of women may be in paid employment but they pay only about 25% of the income tax raised in the UK, mainly because they prefer to work part-time rather than full-time, a luxury enjoyed by few men.
4. Rather than forcing women to depend on them – how would you force a woman to be dependent, maybe by insisting she not work, and pay for all the household bills? Those evil patriarchs! – more men are going MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way). They’re sick to death of the toxic Entitlement Princesses that feminists have encouraged women to be.
5. You present MRAs as exclusively men. A substantial and ever going proportion of MRAs are women. Women alone organized the last International Conference on Men’s Issues in Chicago a few months ago. High-profile MRAs that spring to mind include Elizabeth Hobson (my political party’s Director of Communications), Erin Pizzey, Professor Janice Fiamengo, Karen Straughan, Alison Tieman, Hannah Wallen, Deborah Powney, Ava Brighton…
6. The truth is that women and girls in Britain today are highly privileged, and that privilege results from the disadvantaging of men and boys. I refer you to the book referenced by Belinda, William Collins’s “The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect”.
7. In our last election manifesto we explored 20 arreas where the human rights of men and boys in the UK today are assaulted by the actions and/or inactions of the state, almost always to privilege women and girls. I invite you tell me of ONE area where the British state today assaults the human rights of women or girls SPECIFICALLY. I’ve asked hundreds of feminists this question at Speakers’ Corner over the years, not one has ever been able to think of one area. Their cognitive dissonance can sometimes be a wonder to behold, believing women to be oppressed in the UK, but unable to come up with even one area where they actually are. But then feminists aren’t the sharpest knives in the block, to put it mildly.
Have a nice day.
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Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Just published.

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Two days ago we posted a piece titled Shelby Judge is a humourless feminist (but I repeat myself). The Metro newspaper has seen fit to give this latest member of The Whine Club a platform from which to whine some more – here. Her absurd witterings are all too predictable – and of course she finds common ground as a victim with other whiny feminists including Laura Bates (Special Snowflake of The Everyday Whining Project), Caroline Criado-Perez, and Caitlin Moron.

Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.