How to bore the boys and annoy the girls

Sun’s out, chaps and chapesses … time to get beach body ready, ha ha.  Also:

Remember When Universities Were Where The Smart People Went?

A ruling by the higher education regulator for England on freedom of speech breaches at the University of Sussex has sparked anxiety in the sector, as vice-chancellors scramble to review their policies to avoid potential violations. Two weeks after the Office for Students (OfS) handed out a record £585,000 fine, many university leaders are still not clear what it means in practice.

It seems crystal clear to me, but maybe that's because I never went to university? 

One of the few vice-chancellors willing to speak out condemned the OfS ruling as “a lesson in authoritarianism, with threats of more to come”.

No doubt they are from one of the universities featured in David Thompson's roll-call of authoritarian left-wing agenda pushers...  

Prof David Green, University of Worcester vice-chancellor and chief executive, said: “Using coercive powers of the state risks terrifying university leaders into a culture of compliance which is the very opposite of the democratic and free culture for which we should be working.”

The rise of no-platforming and speech codes in universities give the lie to that, Dave... 

Many university leaders have turned to lawyers, in some cases spending tens of thousands of pounds, to review not just transgender and non-binary equality policy, which was at the heart of the Sussex case, but a range of university statements, documents and policies. “I wouldn’t say that they were in a state of panic,” said one lawyer who did not want to be named, “but I think there is genuine anxiety they don’t know what they need to do to get this right.”

What are they paid their huge salaries for? 

University leaders are struggling to find the right balance between freedom of speech duties and a legal requirement to protect students and academics from abuse and harassment, and feel they have not been given enough clarity by the OfS.

You could always start by telling those fragile snowflakes that infest modern universities that stating biological fact isn't 'harassment' or 'abuse' and if they are at university, they shouldn't need protecting from it... 

Grandad

There aren’t many bloggers posting about their departing of this world so when you find one … pay attention:

For the young and/or uninitiated, it reads as if Grandad’s not there yet but see for yourselves.

Right, should I be criticising? I would have thought that philosophising is the last thing to be doing … rather, making one’s quietus with the triune God is the prime imperative … John 3:16. It’s all about faith in the end, more than the nitty gritty of life this side of the Styx.

As for the afterlife, there’s a 2000 year old, gradually collected series of books readily available in two testaments … the fierce opposition towards this paragraph out there is off the scale. Why?

I’m posting this in two places … also at Orphans. I’m also concerned for his wife but there is family around. Stay tuned at his place.

Employment Tribunals Again...

A counter-terror police officer who was sacked after he forgot his headphones was unfairly dismissed, an employment tribunal has ruled. Colin Bastin had been given a private room by a librarian to dial in to a call which he had been unable to take from home because of 'noisy' building works. He claimed there were no police stations 'within easy access of his home' where he could go for the meeting, the tribunal heard.

What about the police station he was assigned to? In other words, his office...? 

The National Counter Terrorism Security Office worker reportedly made a number of other mistakes during his probationary period, including accidentally booking a 'top secret' security level room for a team meeting which would have excluded one of the delegates.

Maybe the cops should look into getting a professional in?  

In April 2024, Mr Bastin was told he was facing dismissal and was invited to a meeting.

I wonder if he attended in person, or asked to do that from the library? 

He gathered evidence to show his performance had improved, but was told managers would only be considering his performance up to the end of the extended probationary period, which ended in early 2023. After taking his employer to an employment tribunal, a judge ruled his original dismissal was unfair because it was based on 'out-of-date information'.

Well, it would be. What's this judge's issue with that? 

'Mr Bastin's performance, which was the reason for dismissal, had been assessed over a fixed period that had ended over a year before the decision was taken,' the judge said. 'It was unfair not to allow him to bring evidence of his recent improvement. 'In conclusion, I find that the dismissal was unfair and outside the band of reasonable responses.'

The probationary period is just that - you're on probation. You'd think a judge of all people would understand the term... 

The problem of May 1st

Whilst I’m not putting up anything anti-grassroots-Reform itself, and I hope they take those mayoralties and council seats, I’m not sitting back while, say, June Mummery insults us, our concerns about Yusuf, Farage and Tice being well founded:

If in rental, you might be gone, mateys

You know doubt read of Starmer offering landlords up and down the country £5000 to house foreign freeloaders … on X earlier was a list of where:

Places where Serco is planning to house asylum seekers in rented accommodation: North West: Allerdale Barrow-in-Furness Blackburn & Darwen Blackpool Bolton Burnley Bury Carlisle Cheshire East Cheshire West and Chester Chorley Copeland Eden (Penrith) Flyde Halton Hyndburn Knowsley Lancaster Liverpool Manchester Oldham Pendle Preston Ribble Valley Rochdale Rossendale Salford Sefton South Lakeland South Ribble Stockport St Helens Tameside Trafford Warrington West Lancashire Wigan Wirral Wyre Midlands: Amber Valley Ashfield Bassetlaw Birmingham Blaby Bolsover Boston Bromsgrove and Redditch Broxtowe Cannock Chase Charnwood Chesterfield Derby Derbyshire Dales Dudley East Lindsey East Staffordshire Erewash (Derbyshire) Gedling Harborough Herefordshire County of High Peak Hinkley & Bosworth Huntingdonshire Leicester Lincoln Lichfield Malvern Hills Mansfield Melton Newark and Sherwood Newcastle-under-Lyme North East Derbyshire North Kesteven (Lincolnshire) North Northamptonshire (Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough) North Warwickshire North West Leicestershire (Coalville) Nottingham Nuneaton and Bedworth Oadby & Wigston Rugby Rushcliffe Rutland Sandwell Shropshire Solihull South Derbyshire South Holland South Kesteven (Lincolnshire) South Staffordshire Stafford Staffordshire Moorlands Stoke-on-Trent Stratford-on-Avon Tamworth Telford and Wrekin Walsall Warwick ( Leamington Spa, Kenilworth) West Lindsey West Northamptonshire (Northampton & Daventry) Wolverhampton Worcester Wychavon Wyre Forest East of England: Babergh/Mid Suffolk Breckland Broadlands/South Norfolk Cambridge East Cambridgeshire East Suffolk Fenland Great Yarmouth Ipswich Kings Lynn & West Norfolk Mid Suffolk North Norfolk Norwich Peterborough South Cambridgeshire (Cambourne, Sawston) South Norfolk West Suffolk (Bury, Newmarket, Brandon, Haverhill, Mildenhall)

So What?

StopWatch, a police reform charity that campaigns against the use of stop and search and which analysed the data, also found 10,450 cases of the tactic used against girls.

I expected this to be another fakecharity, funded by the government to lobby the government to do what they wanted to do anyway and give a veneer of 'the public's support, but it seems not. 

Jodie Bradshaw, policy and advocacy lead at StopWatch, said: “We don’t think that stop and search is fit for purpose. There are other strategies which are much more likely to bring about fewer crimes and for people to feel safe walking in public spaces and in the communities where they live.”

As always, the mention of 'community' gives you a big clue to where their real interest lies... 

The Home Office data also showed that police forces in England and Wales submitted 747,396 use-of-force reports in the year ending March 2024, a rise of 13% on the year before. Use of force refers to officers using handcuffs, batons, tasers, firearms, limb or body restraints, and irritant sprays, among other measures. Women were the subject of 18% of these incidents, with black women making up about 9% of the total, even though the latest census estimates they make up just 4% of the population.

Maybe that's because they can be relied upon to overreact and get violent in greater percentages than any other ethnicity? 

Bradshaw argued that the police are more likely to patrol areas where a higher proportion of black, minority ethnic and marginalised groups live, and such communities are more likely to be stopped and searched as well as to have force used on them.

Police go where the crime is. That's just fact. 

Deborah Coles, the director of Inquest, a charity concerned with state-related deaths, said: “We know all too well that the use of force on women – particularly those who may have experienced violence and abuse – can be really traumatising.”

She said the rising number of stop and searches needs to be understood within the context of “increasing inequality, poverty and criminalisation”, and specifically the crackdown on protests and shoplifting.

Some of the poorest countrie don't have a problem with shoplifting, so why do we? And let's not forget that shoplifters mostly aren't Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread...

At what point will the tide turn?

Positioned to ensure that no result can benefit the people of the land from any angle:

The obvious question is how to stop WEFer and EU communist Starmer before all is lost.

'We have been kept completely in the dark and treated like dirt on the bottom of the NHS's shoes.'

Ms Lindsay said: 'I thought that February 28, 2019, when Lewis was attacked, and the three months that followed before he died from his injuries, was the worst period of our lives. 'Little did I know however that that was just the beginning of our nightmare. As victims, we have been treated disgracefully. 

Haven't you read about any other cases, that this comes as a surprise to you, then? 

'We still do not know why the killer was released 10 days before he attacked Lewis, who made that decision and why, and who is going to be held accountable for it.'

Oh, we do! Nobody in the NHS. Just like all the other cases. 

'But as if all that were not bad enough, only six years on, we now get to live knowing that the killer is now allowed out at night-time and will surely be released permanently soon 

'What kind of a country is this that we live in where victims of killings are treated like this?'

We live in the sort of country where the people elected to serve the country and keep people safe aren't up to the job, sadly: 

The decision to release people on indefinite detention, such as Fleet, is made by the Ministry of Justice, acting on behalf of the Secretary of State Shabana Mahmood.

In fact they can't even control the people who nominally work to them: 

Sharon Daniel, Hywel Dda University Health Board's director of nursing, quality and patient experience, has said the board would not be making reports public.

Why not? What have they got to worry about? 

St George’s Day today

The national day of England.

There will always be an England.