Anneliese Dodds: what has happened to her?

Oh please, no. Not Dodds. I can't believe these idiots.

Oh gawd. Dodds got Women and Equalities.

Please say she didn’t say that - does she have the awareness to know how that sounds?

Testeria. I like it.

And apparently Rachel reeves is very brainy and beat all the men at chess at some point.

She's saying that single sex spaces is protected in the EA, but the guidance needs to be clearer for prisons, rape crisis centres etc.

Then the bla bla about it being toxic and we can meet the needs of both 🙄

Around 10:15

Ah it was Harriet Harman .... worth a listen

On woman's hour today!

Nuala did ask whoever they've got on about who is getting the women and equalities role; whoever it is didn't know.

They're discussing it now - sorry I wasn't listening closely enough.

Nuala asked the direct q about trans women and women's only spaces.

You let it all out here. It’s very cathartic.

Oh for heaven’s sake, they’ve barely announced any ministers yet. We don’t have a Minister for Media, Tourism and Creative Indutries yet, or a Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education either. The Minister for Women and Equalities is a ministerial position within the Cabinet Office and is not a government department. They will no doubt announce everything in the next few days. They have only been in power since Friday, and yesterday was Sunday.

I’ll bet Keir doesn’t want to piss off JK Rowling right now. He’ll have enough fire-fighting to be dealing with eg the missteps that David Lammy and Lisa Nandy will make through their ideological naïveties.

And/or he could be trying to persuade a ‘compromise candidate’ to take the necessary seat in the Lords?

Or he doesn’t give a fuck.

My hunch:

Starmer told Thornberry she would not be AG and offered her women and equalities, she told him to go swivel. No one else is willing to touch it with a barge pole. It may have been offered to Dodds but she opted for demotion instead.

If Starmer had any balls he would indeed put country before party and look to Duffield or even Phillips. However he is not willing to be that progressive.

We are all watching. The longer he takes to fill this post the worse it looks. All about the optics and right now they don’t look good.

Tic Tock Sir Keir.

Yep. not going away. I do wonder seriously why anyone puts themselves up for gigs like this which are basically impossible. Everything you do is going to piss off half the population (if you're lucky) and every waking day will consist of nothing but a non stop stream of insoluble problems. all day. every day. You have to be some kind of weird to want to do that.

Looks like starmer is going to have to do it.

The funny thing now in having failed to fill the vacancy, is no one GC is going to believe Starmer is anything but anti-women

The point of legal definitions of sex, is the ability to protect women. If you can't define a woman you can't protect them. If there is no minister to over see equality rights, then where are protections from that and someone dedicated to women's rights? Where is the oversight and accountability?

It really does look like Starmer is trying to dodge this. If you can't legally define women, how can you have a minister for women?

This isn't going away....

Blimey-one for the teenagers there (not sure Dodds rhymes with Trotsky though)

Whatever happened to
Annaliese Dodds
She got an ice pick
That made her ears burn

Riffing off The Stranglers

Still no news?

I'm going to take a punt, firstly that someone who is accustomed to having his ear is lobbying very hard on behalf of their preferred candidate, and secondly that this 'someone' is not the Labour Women's Declaration.

Harriet "PIE-great bunch of blokes" Harman?

They already saw fit to elevate her and Hodge to the Lords.

Children just don't count.

Harriet "PIE-great bunch of blokes" Harman?

Just to address the Muslim vote in regards to gender politics.
The Muslim male population classes this subject as taboo, they're in denial that this nonsense is even happening so I wouldn't depend on them too greatly. Even the younger male Muslim generation are silent on this matter which is a huge shame.
The younger Muslim females are not as ignorant but I have found they're less likely to bother to vote so don't know how much we can rely on them.
It's a massive shame and something I mention alot when we're discussing voting and policies but definitely something that everyone wants to pretend is not happening.

You didn't seem to ask a question as such; more that you seemed to assume that all of these working class rebels had been manipulated by Nigel Farage and his wealthy crew.

I tend to think it can be helpful, or certainly informative, to view society through the prism of movements and patterns in the collective. You must be aware of that saying from the Tao Te Ching " When the student is ready, the teacher appears"?

......It is not so much that an individual appears, and then manipulates the masses, rather that the leader becomes the antennae for shifts in the collective - gives voice to them. It is a symbiosis.

I'm not blanket categorising working class people at all; I'm recounting what i've witnessed and observed where I live. Some working class people are very much identified with being Socialists, others not at all. Some have no strong political motivation at all - just like any other segment of society.

I do wonder how many voters opted for Leave after listening to the likes of Izzard, Bob Geldof and Will Self telling them why they shouldn’t. At the time there was a narrative about voters sticking it to Cameron, but I’m not so sure it was him they wanted to stick it to.