A piece in yesterday’s Times (£). An American woman, Suzanne Johnson, spent more than two decades in prison for the death of a child by “shaken baby syndrome” before scientific advances disproved the diagnosis. Four years later, her conviction was overturned.

Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson, 57, is scheduled to be the first person in the United States to be executed for SBS after the death of his chronically ill two-year-old daughter Nikki in 2002. He was two hours away from receiving a lethal injection last Thursday when a judge called off preparations. An interesting piece on Roberson’s case published in August by the Innocence Project is here.

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The Equality and Diversity page on the HMRC website is here. An extract:

“We will build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of all the communities we serve across all grades, groups, and regions. We will:

• increase the proportion of colleagues who voluntarily declare their diversity characteristics in our online HR system to 85%, to enable more accurate equality analysis of employee experience and outcomes
• increase diversity at our most senior levels, measured via representation rates of women, disabled and ethnic minority, Black and Asian colleagues at Grade 7, Grade 6 and Senior Civil Service roles [J4MB: we know from the MoD reply to a FoI request that the basic salary for a Grade 7 civil servant is £57,670 – £63,390 p.a.]
• ensure our promotion and recruitment processes are merit-based, measured by equality analysis of the outcomes of selection decisions”

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that objective #2 is in conflict with objective #3. As for the latter, how on earth can “equality analysis of the outcomes of selection decisions” measure that “promotion and recruitment processes are merit-based”? Nonsense on stilts.

Of course, the statement “We will build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of all the communities we serve across all grades, groups, and regions” is ridiculous. The unasked question, as always, is why the workforce should be “reflective of all the communities”. It’s a scam, in part, to increase female representation at the “most senior levels”. Female representation across the HMRC as a whole will surely already be in excess of that in “all the communities”, as it is across the public sector.

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Appalling (Mail, £). An extract:

“The members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union say it would benefit both employees and the Government by improving work-life balance while reducing sick days.

They are the second Whitehall branch to demand a four-day week after those in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs made the call first last December.

Last night Elliot Keck, head of campaigns at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Taxpayers will see right through this utter claptrap being pushed by work-shy pen pushers.

‘Public sector workers already work fewer hours and take more annual leave than private sector workers, yet somehow these spoiled bureaucrats have the gall to demand even more time off.

‘Angela Rayner should take this opportunity to stand up for the British people and demand that civil servants do a full week of work like the rest of the country.’

But PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote insisted: ‘A four-day week benefits both the employer and the employee. Employers offering a four-day week have better staff retention, find recruiting easier and lose less to sick days.” [J4MB: A one-day week with no loss in pay would bring even more ‘benefits’, on these grounds.]

It hardly needs pointing out that the majority of the employees, as in the public sector in general, are women.

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Interesting.

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Excellent. I couldn’t agree with him more.

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An interesting piece on Quillette, which starts with this:

“Victoria’s proposed hate speech legislation forces feminists to choose which is more important to them: the restriction of misogynistic speech, or the protection of their own political speech.”

I very much doubt feminists will be ‘forced to choose’. They have the power both to restrict “misogynistic speech” – in practice, criticism of women in general an/or feminists in particular – and to protect their own speech, misandrous though it invariably is.

I’m a subscriber to Quillette (USD10.00 pcm), but sadly there doesn’t seem to be any way even for subscribers to leave comments on the piece.

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