Posie Parker. For women and children. I adore her.

[Backinthecloset123]

That's all.

It’s also very easy to preach that kids should be home with their parents

But nobody has done this. I quite specifically pointed out my support for maternity rights and women's equal rights in the workplace.

ALL the talk of being a sahm has resulted from Sapphos criticising posie for being one, calling it unfeminist, acting like women are somehow letting the side down for choosing to stay and home with their children.

Lang, absolutely. The tactic is bait and switch. This is another indication that the ideology can’t handle any critical challenge

If Posie continues refusing to make a self-criticism despite having been declared an Enemy of the People then what's next?

Struggle session! Endlessly amusing that neither Posie nor the women of FWR will perform struggle sessions for the Woke - even those who went to radical feminism school down the pub - and this inevitably leads to thirty page threads of outrage.

It's the glee that people take in having an excuse to denounce their neighbors and the "do it to Julia not to me" aspect of the whole thing that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. The old cliche about those who don't learn from history being doomed to repeat it - not so much doomed as eager in some cases, it seems.

Freedom of speech does not equal freedom of consequence from speech.

Indeed it doesn't. One consequence may be being understood and believed. Posie is getting the message out there.

Since being condescending and bossy are apparently all the rage nowadays can I assign Wild Swans as reading material? For those who find reading too hard you could watch Farewell My Concubine instead.

As someone who was nearly forced into being a Sahm, despite me not being very good at it. Help with childcare costs is desperately required.

I gave up work when my 6 year old got a cancer related illness.

I certainly don’t want a system where every mother is forced into work because the state provides free childcare to all, that’s the road to hell that will be paved with your good intent.

Tax credits turned out to be shit because employers used them to justify paying less than a living wage for a full time job, free child care will do the same.

Stop thinking purely of yourself and open your eyes a bit.

It's a shame you didn't read the second part of my post Littlelamp456.

Prodigal,
It’s interesting that Harry cited 1984 was being used as a training manual, instead of a dystopian warning! The battle over language is absolutely definitional and it is straight out of newspeak. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are facing an aggressive onslaught from an ideology that can’t tolerate dissent.

All this talk just makes me very thankful for Maya's and Harry's court cases.

It feels rather like there's a revolution happening - but, not from a rising of the people - rather, it's being snuck in behind the peoples backs, and without their knowledge - and being enforced on them.

Suddenly, ordinary people are guilty of a hate crime, or a non-crime crime, for wrong-think - for saying something that was really a very ordinary fact of life a few short years ago.

She's a nazi and a 1950s housewife who is utterly reliant on a man, and is ineffective in the persuasion stakes, but has the uncanny ability to amplify the platform of a white supremacist purely by sitting next to him.

Quite!

The harder people try to shut Posie down the more convinced I become that what she's doing is working. I think certain wannabe Red Guard types have seriously underestimated the bloody minded stubbornness of the British population.

for saying something that was really a very ordinary fact of life a few short years ago.

I was looking at AIBU and Feminist threads from a few years' ago the other day issues of transgender women encroaching single sex spaces. As I wanted to see when this all started happening in earnest. MN rules certainly have changed since then - everyone was allowed to say "that's not a man!".

Sorry that first paragraph was supposed to be in bold - was an extract from zebra's post

The harder people try to shut Posie down the more convinced I become that what she's doing is working. I think certain wannabe Red Guard types have seriously underestimated the bloody minded stubbornness of the British population.

On a serious note - it's not untrue that Posie is a populist and populism has well known pitfalls. But this is what happens when the Great and the Good get a new - usually stupid and dangerous - idea and attempt to impose it on an unwilling population by capture of institutions and media. Don't want populism? Don't come for our children. Simples.

Freedom of speech does not equal freedom of consequence from speech

Indeed it doesn't. One consequence may be being understood and believed. Posie is getting the message out there

Well said Prawn!

Don't want populism? Don't come for our children. Simples.

And that's where the supposed "alliance" that people think they're seeing is coming from. If you come for people's children then they will work with whoever they have to in order to stop you, across whatever political boundaries you think ought to be sacrosanct.

Talking of which, has anyone noticed a shift in the meaning of the word "populism"? It used to be used in a "give them bread and circuses" sort of way to indicate a form of politics where over simplified "easy wins" and pork barrel economic handouts took the place of more nuanced discussions of the unintended complications of knee jerk responses to events and complex discussions of economic trade offs.

But now it seems to be used to indicate any situation where we proles are not blithely accepting of the ideological diktats of our betters and have the temerity to express this at the ballot box.

I genuinely get the feeling that there are now certain sectors of the political classes who view the democratic process itself as a form of populism and therefore too dangerous to be allowed. (Incidentally, this is for me an even more important reason than women's rights not to vote for the Lib Dems. By all means campaign for a second referendum - which I'm pretty confident Remain would win - but not for revoke. That just does so much damage to the principles of democracy that regardless of whether one is a Remainer or Leaver, I don't see how you can think this is a good idea.)

midcenturylegs - YY - the new restrictions on MN show just how far this has gone. We can no longer say some of those ordinary factual statements here - and one of datun's excellent posts explaining the whole thing, on 'Break it down for me' was retrospectively deleted.

Mumsnet didn't do that of their own bat. They also didn't apply the restrictions across the boards, or for all protected characteristics. Just trans. This came from a small pocket of TRAs on twitter - shouting very loudly, and targetting advertisers, that what we were saying is transphobic, and that MN is a hate site blah blah.

It has been enforced on Mumsnet HQ, and on us.

And that's where the supposed "alliance" that people think they're seeing is coming from. If you come for people's children then they will work with whoever they have to in order to stop you, across whatever political boundaries you think ought to be sacrosanct.

Precisely.

But now it seems to be used to indicate any situation where we proles are not blithely accepting of the ideological diktats of our betters and have the temerity to express this at the ballot box

Absolutely. And strangely, no matter what populist policies are promoted by parties on the left, it is only ever used as a derogatory to describe their opponents....

And yes, a significant percentage of both the political and the media class (and most especially those who belong to both groups, such as our friend Owen Jones) seem to regard democracy, as in the fact that the general population is allowed to vote and that vote determines what the political class can get away with doing on our behalf, as an unfortunate inconvenience that would be best replaced with a more sensible system in which our betters make decisions for us, like loving but strict parents.

I genuinely get the feeling that there are now certain sectors of the political classes who view the democratic process itself as a form of populism and therefore too dangerous to be allowed.

Yes. And I agree about the LibDems. It's all so Victorian. Dangerous ideologues on a mission to "improve the poor".

There's a LibDem here for a webchat at 2pm.

MNHQ have already asked "no more questions on self ID please"

But why - he should see the strength of feeling on here - from women with concerns about all aspects of transgenderism - from women's refuges, to women's sports, to the medicalisatiion of children, and NO to gender neutral everything. Bloody gender neutral = elimination of women's spaces

What's the point of hosting webchats with politicians if people are prevented from asking the questions they're most concerned about?