I Thought They Said ‘Diversity Is About More Than Colour’..?

It looks like that idea's gone out of the window now...

As Ursula von der Leyen sweet-talked and bullied EU leaders to send more women to Brussels over recent weeks, I kept hoping she would also make her incoming team of European commissioners more racially diverse. Thanks to an unexpected twist of fate involving (very) complicated Belgian politics, Hadja Lahbib, Belgium’s foreign minister, could soon make history as the first ever EU commissioner who is also a person of colour.

The person writing an anguished column in the 'Guardian' about the awful fact that a lineup of EU Commisioners is nearly all white (but could have gay or non-visibly disabled members) is none other than Shada Islam (a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company). 

We can just imagine what sort of 'advice' you get from such a company...

If she gets the parliamentary thumbs up, Lahbib and the incoming EU Council president, Portugal’s former prime minister António Costa, who is of Goan and Mozambican heritage, will give a much-needed reputational tweak to an EU that boasts about being “united in diversity” but whose institutions still keep no data on their staff’s ethnicity and are visibly and notoriously “all-white”.

Now do Nigeria's government.  

Why Do They Love The Dangerous Breeds?

Police were searching Jade Hubbard’s house in Gregory Street in Sudbury for the suspect of another crime when her dog bit one of the officers on the arm. The defendant, 36, was “obnoxious, abusive and obstructive”, Judge Martyn Levett said, and she refused to tell police where the suspect was - but they found him hiding in a cupboard.

The dog is to be destroyed, and an order was made for Hubbard to be disqualified from owning a dog.

Sadly, they can't disqualify her from associating with criminals. And it's a toss up who was more of a dangerous breed anyway: 

Hubbard was also sentenced for a “devastating” assault on another woman in Sudbury.

Judge Levett said Hubbard screamed “do you want me to rip your nose off?” and then bit the victim’s left arm and would not let go.

Perhaps she should be taking that final trip to the vets too? 

Hubbard previously admitted all the offences and the court heard she has a very extensive history of criminality. Judge Levett described her 113 previous convictions as “record breaking” and added this was her 56th court appearance.

“I know of no other case where the courts have passed every conceivable sentence but nothing seems to stop you from reoffending," said Judge Levett. For the dog attack, Hubbard received an eight-month jail sentence and for the assault she received a consecutive 16-month sentence.

Well, I'm sure that'll sort her out... 

H/T: TedHectorMess via Twitter

Have You Run Out Of UK Sob Stories Then, Frances?

It is breakfast and I reach for a painkiller dropped off by a Boots delivery van. The sleep apnoea machine by the bed is beeping and I plug it in to the mains to charge. I can’t stop thinking about the disabled and ill people in Gaza; the dialysis patients who were halfway through their treatment when the power stopped, the children surviving off animal feed who can’t find bread, let alone a wheelchair.

I guess now Labour's in power, everything in the UK is rosy, and you have to look further afield, eh, Frances?

There is one aspect that is rarely talked about: what is happening to disabled Palestinians. That adults and children with disabilities are often the worst affected by conflict is an atrocity as old as war itself. If you are paralysed, you cannot run from shrapnel. If you are deaf, you don’t hear the sirens warning you to take cover. More than a decade of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel mean disabled people in Gaza were living without treatment and equipment long before the first missiles fell.

Congratulations, Frances, you've finally found a truly deserving cause, and you only had to go abroad to find it!  

I unplug my sleep apnoea machine and I wonder if the real darkness will come when any of this seems normal.

No doubt you'd demand we ship them all over here, eh, Frances? Or is that next week's column?

No, Maya, They Only Executed Him Once…

Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve, said that Alabama was typical of the increasingly extreme lengths to which death penalty states are prepared to go.

Such as? 

“They’re telling themselves that executing people twice is fine, no matter how much the person suffered the first time. And that a man thrashing and gasping on the gurney for 10 minutes as he desperately fights for life is a ‘textbook’ nitrogen gas execution.”

No-one gets executed twice, Maya. And is he alive now? No? Well then, that's indeed a 'textbook executuion', since that's the entire purpose of one.  

I Must Be Slipping...

...unlike Matt I never thought of that when my weather app went haywire on Thursday morning:

Surely Another Typo, 'Mail'?

 

Shouldn't it be 'the worrier'?

Sunday Funnies...

And you thought it was just China! 

*spoiler, it is mostly China.

It's All Fun And Games Until You Realise You're Paying....

This is Pablo, the ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund at the centre of an 18-month long legal battle against a woke council, which has cost taxpayers more than £63,000. Lesbian social worker Lizzy Pitt was accused of voicing ‘transphobic’ views by her colleague, Gleicon Analha who is Pablo’s owner. He chaired a Zoom call for LGBTQIA+ employees of Cambridgeshire County Council where he said he identified his dachshund as ‘gender fluid’, and put a dress on the animal to prompt debate about gender.

The reporting on this has focussed entirely on the absurdity of a 'gender fluid dog', as expected, and not on the cancerous tumour of allowing a Zoom call for whingers, activists and nutters during worktime.... 

Brazilian-born Mr Analha, who is a young people worker on the council’s Targeted Support Team, complained about Ms Pitt’s comments, and that of another lesbian employee on the Zoom call. In submissions for the case, he described Ms Pitt’s colleague, who also worked in the social work department declaring ‘Your dog is male’ in response to his claims about its gender fluidity.

In an email to his bosses and the council’s HR team, he added: ‘We collected statements of the individuals; we want to take this further. All the LGBTQIA+ peer group agreed to share their statements and take this further.’ Later, he added: ‘Regarding the mental health impact, these transphobic and deeply hurtful attacks touch deeply my values, this is the second night that I couldn’t sleep thinking about the cruelty. This made me wake up overnight and use Saturday morning to write this email.’

This person is clearly utterly unfit to be employed even in this limited capacity. And it seems the council has enough like him to make regular Zoom calls to whinge and snipe at each other a thing! When do they do any actual work? 

Ms Pitt and another lesbian colleague were reported for their 'really aggressive tone' with views that were deemed to be 'non-inclusive and transphobic'. But when Ms Pitt was disciplined by bosses and banned from contacting members of the group or attending meetings, she took them to a tribunal for harassment.

Now, Ms Pitt has been awarded over £55,000 and won £8,000 in legal costs after a judge said records showed she suffered because of her 'gender-critical beliefs'.

Ah, if only that money came out of the pockets of Mr Analha and his line manager. But no, of course not. The taxpayer's paying! Again. 

On his LinkedIn bio, Mr Analha, who is also the council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee Vice-Chair, says : ‘I grew up in Brazil seeing inequalities in my community, for example, on the same street millionaires' houses and "favelas" made of cardboard, I have seen friends dying of transphobia.’

And no 'journalist' challenges this statement? No-one dies of 'transphobia'!

Ms Pitt, who raised £51,529 for her legal case on a crowdfunding page from 2,121 donations, said: 'Let's hope that other employers will start to learn that it's a bad idea to try to stop lesbians asserting their boundaries and silence staff who know that sex is real, and sometimes matters.'

Well, yes, if that happens at least it'll be taxpayers money well spent, I suppose. But who thinks it will? 

A council spokesman said: 'We strive to create a safe, inclusive and compassionate environment for people to work in and recognise this needs to be balanced with everyone being entitled to express their own views and beliefs.

'We will reflect carefully on this final outcome, as well as undertaking a review of our policies and procedures accordingly.'

Doesn't sound like it to me. I suspect the Zoom meetings of the 'B' Ark candidates will continue, at our expense. 

World Class Transport System?

TfL's woes continue:

New trains that were due to be introduced on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) from the end of the year have been delayed indefinitely.

Great! Can this wretched company get nothing right?  

Transport for London said that signalling problems that meant the existing fleet of DLR trains had been going “too fast” made it impossible to keep to timetable for the phased introduction of the new fleet of trains, which boast air conditioning and walk-through carriages.

The country that once built railroads in Africa and India can't run one properly in its own capital.... 

No new date has been set for the arrival of the new trains, which Mayor Sadiq Khan saw when he visited the DLR’s Beckton depot in February 2023. The Standard revealed in June that the £880m new fleet of trains, which is being built in Spain, had run over budget by £61m and was facing delays.

'No date',,? Sounds familiar. 

A 'Cruel Policy', Ruth? I'd Say It's Not Cruel Enough...

This morning, about 300,000 children woke up in households affected by the benefit cap. Lots of these children – enough to fill more than 1,000 primary schools – will be living in cold and damp homes, with food cupboards near empty; in deep poverty that leaves normal childhood activities, such as after-school clubs, swimming lessons and family days out, far out of reach. Since 2020, I’ve been working with colleagues at the universities of York and Oxford and the London School of Economics to investigate the impact of the benefit cap and the two-child limit (commonly referred to as the two-child benefit cap) on families with three or more children.

She doesn't mean the effect on us, the long suffering taxpayer, of course.

In our research with families affected by the benefit cap, we have spoken to parents such as Lucy, who pays £1,375 a month to rent a mould-ridden, rat-infested property. At times, the cap has left her family with as little as £65 a week to survive on once the rent and some of the bills are paid. £65. For five of them. It is simply not possible to get by on that.

We spoke to Lucy four times over four years, and she was always doing all she could to move out of that property. But as our analysis of Zoopla listings shows, the housing just isn’t there.

How far afield was she looking? That often proves to be the stumbling block. 

But there is a complete absence of affordable housing in many areas.

In the areas that these people want to live, usually. They don't see the wisdom of cutting their cloth to meet their funds. 

Statistics released today reveal that 123,000 households in England, Scotland and Wales were affected by the benefit cap in May 2024, a rise of about 46,000 in just three months according to government figures. Introduced by George Osborne in 2013, the cap means the most a family without regular work can claim is £25,323 in London and £22,020 in the rest of the country.

In many countries, you wouldn't get anything if you didn't work for it!  

Both the benefit cap and the two-child limit sever a foundational principle within our welfare state that people should be entitled to support based on what they need.

'Entitlement' is the real issue here, isn't it? 

Lifting the benefit cap would provide immediate relief to hundreds of thousands of families such as Lucy’s and Zauna’s, who are currently facing a long, cold winter. What better way, after all, to start investing in our future than by ensuring children’s basic needs are met?

We do. There's a little thing called 'child support'.