Layla Moran on Nick Robinson's Political Thinking on Radio 4

I just had a Yougov where I was asked to identify two "famous politicians"
Ed TWAW Davey
and
Labour are there poor people Moran

I'd LOVE to know what the outcome of that survey is

If she thinks female/male is biology and woman/man is gender , maybe she should say transfemale. If she dares.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3435643-Womens-Hour-today-Michelle-Moore-and-Layla-Moran-on-safeguarding?

Previous thread - check out page 5.

The reference to disadvantaged kids was about this, which I posted earlier:

Another thing she said in the interview was that it wasn't until she was doing a masters in education that she realised that there were poor people in the UK, and that the outcome for children from impoverished backgrounds was strongly linked to the socio-economic background of their parents.

Maybe her idea of particularly disadvantaged kids was those without a second home in the cotswolds?

Did she teach at some particularly disadvantaged schools then? I looked at Wikipedia, and it didn't seem to be the case, but I'm just off to bed, so didn't look in detail!

Ah, thanks for the reminder. I'm not sure that rang true with me, which is why I forgot it. I may have been temporarily distracted, but I don't remember her talking with any great passion about her students or this sudden realisation that not everyone is middle class.

I don't know why she's gone into politics.

She said in the interview that it was because she wanted to influence education policy (having just realised that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were also disadvantaged when it comes to education).

You are a better person than me @Shedbuilder. You're quite right too, I think, in your reading of how she's come to be the adult she is now.

But I cannot feel sympathy for a woman who is prepared to throw every other woman under the bus. I just don't have it in me.

I do feel quite sad for her - she’s had a difficult upbringing (I only think of it as privileged if she had parents that did the right thing for her - otherwise it is just dysfunctional with extra money) and it has clearly had an impact on her but she does need to understand that her place is not in politics if she has such a poor understanding of people and such little empathy.
I wonder what drove her to enter politics- it is a punishing life by all accounts especially for a woman.

You can listen to it yourself: I wasn't taking notes, but the more she revealed the more vulnerable I felt her to be. My parents moved several times during my childhood for work and I know the dislocation involved: the settling into a new place, making friends and then being whisked away to do it again, so perhaps I'm projecting my own stuff on her.

I don't know why she's gone into politics. Possibly because of her father. Perhaps being a science teacher wasn't important enough. I certainly don't think she's got what it takes.

Gormless? Or - as we say in Scotland - glaekit?

Goodness @Shedbuilder if that's her background it is quite sad. I know a few people with similar boarding/international school upbringings, and they all share a desperation to belong. Well educated but quite otherworldly and gullible as their experience of the world is so narrow and without context. The ones I know are rudderless and so latch onto any passing political cause and often become real adherents and make it part of their identity. I've also thought of it as a desperate hunt for belonging and a tribe.

A background where you are protected and coddled and SAFE. And she lacks the empathy required to put herself in the shoes of women who are not protected and coddled and safe. And can't see that a politician's job is to look out for those whose lives aren't as nice as hers, whereas she's more for those just like her.

I think to be honest this sums up the entire political class these days (with a few honourable exceptions). And that's why we're in this fix, because when working class people genuinely think - for actually quite understandable reasons - that the Tories are their best bet, we're probably quite fucked. When reality bites (which it is already doing but add coronavirus and brexit) then we're really in the shit. It's why it's important to push back. Science matters, facts matter. Politicians should be held to account.

If what's written about her history is true I can see why she might sympathise with transpeople. What I can't understand is why she is throwing away any protections that young girls - like she was - have. Throwing them away: making the overweight, sad young girls in state schools have no-where safe to go no-where to turn, no sense that they are important and matter. Shame on you Layla.

I worked with a woman who went there (was expelled - but then she was expelled from quite a few schools for being a very naughty girl). She sounded like Peggy Butcher.

Even going through school in that kind of environment you would have to be spectacularly dim witted not to know that you are incredibly lucky and privileged and that others are not.
I've met gels who went to Roedean and its competitors who genuinely thought the school was diverse because pupils came from all over the world

I taught in two private schools and several state (did a bit of supply between babies). Even going through school in that kind of environment you would have to be spectacularly dim witted not to know that you are incredibly lucky and privileged and that others are not. I can think of a handful of kids who would have been in the "gosh, are some people actually poor then?" camp. None of them should have been going anywhere near politics. Because they were insufferable.

I was listening while I was doing admin work, so it's possible that I didn't hear or take in every word — but yes, she did talk about those things.

Was that her story then? Still doesn’t explain lack of basic knowledge.

I was musing on what it must be like to grow up as a little fat girl (and a morbidly obese young woman from the sounds of it) whose body became a problem in the eyes of the family and the world. I was thinking about the reality of being moved from country to country and school to school, being very 'clever' in the cello-playing and passing exams sense but possibly not brilliant socially. Lots of the details are the kind that ring slight alarm bells. Dropping out of college at one point, going home to mum and dad — and mum and dad fixing everything by arranging for her to have her stomach stapled. I was surprised to find myself thinking how vulnerable and unworldly she sounded.

Suddenly the weirdness and awkwardness became understandable. Someone who's grown up with interesting, high-achieving but unstable roots, someone whose schooling was sporadic and possibly problematic. Someone whose issues arising from her unhappiness (the overeating) were fixed by medical intervention.

She'll know what it is to feel like an outsider. She'll know what it's like to feel uncomfortable and unhappy with your body. So she'll be all sympathy to the nice transpeople she encounters. It won't have occurred to her that people like Karen White exist.

She just isn’t very... observant. And she wants to represent ‘the people’ (that she didn’t know even existed until she was an adult). Wowzers.

I don't think she ever taught in schools where it would have been blindingly obvious tbh.

Another thing she said in the interview was that it wasn't until she was doing a masters in education that she realised that there were poor people in the UK, and that the outcome for children from impoverished backgrounds was strongly linked to the socio-economic background of their parents.

What the actual fuck?? How thick is she?

Not really that they are her genuine friends.

I wonder if you can get a GCSE in naivety, because there's shed loads of people out there acting like they've got one