Moira Deeming in Australia - thread 3

[TheSandgroper]

Following on from busy threads 1 and 2

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5167282-in-australia-moira-deeming-defamation-trial-now-on

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5172553-moira-deeming-defamation-trial-thread-2-from-australia

Keep on discussing, ladies. Change never happens in silence.

As an outsider looking in, Britain doesn’t have a shadowy elite - the elite is there in plain view and has been for centuries: there are parades with golden carriages and everything.

And below the monarch there’s the aristocracy (many of whom were or still are legislators in HoL or acting as govt ministers) and below them, suffused throughout institutions that make decisions (both political and cultural), are the Oxbridge set (including Russell graduates these days).

Britain, unlike other countries, is pretty open about having an elite and, nowadays, the elite displays performative guilt about their positions of influence but no-one’s really doing anything to change the traditional setup.

Every country has networks of well to do people at the top of society who know each other and help each other out - it’s not rocket science.

I recently read Christopher Lasch’s book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Elites-Betrayal-Democracy/dp/0393313719 it’s an interesting argument for how these self-reinforcing social structures can serve to frustrate democratic principles and function in countries.

The arts, the media and many organisations and institutions openly advertise the fact they are signed up to the Stonewall champions scheme. They all try very hard to rise up the ranks by implementing Stonewall objectives. The LabourGreen/Lib Dems are directly advised by people whose aim is to insatll gender ideology throughout society and replace the reality of sex with the concept of gender.

AlisonDonut · Today 07:28

Woman in park: I'm just going to take a photo of that flower, it is beautiful

Yes, the logic has a definite whiff of the playground, hasn't it?

This is what you'd call 'Institutional Capture':

https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/327publicbodiespayingstonewallover1millioneachyear

327 public bodies were paying into Stonewall's Diversity Champions scheme. Between 2018-19 and 2020-21, this saw Stonewall receive over £3 million of taxpayers’ money.

At least 20 organisations, including the House of Commons and National Assembly for Wales, signed up to Stonewall’s ‘Trans Allies’ programme or trans training/inclusion workshops.

Stonewall Influence

Stonewall is a highly influential LGBT campaigning and support organisation. It has received money from the National Lottery and private companies. Much of it's income comes from a huge range of organisations that pay to be a "Diversity Champion".
This gives Stonewall an enormous influence over HR policies within companies.
Being one of its ‘diversity champions’ involves being trained by Stonewall and implementing Stonewall-recommended policies.The list of organisations who have signed up is extensive.

https://whatisawoman.uk/StonewallLaw/

https://www.stonewall.org.uk/system/files/australia_global_workplace_briefing_2018.pdf

Australian political parties and institutions are also captured by Stonewall via their global diversity programme

The capture of the DfE by Stonewall is well documented. The senior civil servant being wined and dined as a reward for introducing mixed sex toilets to the DfE. (along with a special award). He openly wrote about developing links with them - didn't mention that this resulted in hundreds of thousands of ££££ in funding, DfE guidance pushing schools to Mermaids, Stonewall, DIRES etc.
All this resulted in numerous schools buying into Stonewall's diversity scheme, developing inappropriate "trans " policies for schools that sold puberty blockers to children and reversible, establishing mixed sex toilets, showers, dormitories and sports and invited unsuitable for children adults and adult groups into schools to sell their ideology.
All because the government department staffed by civil servants told them that this was the right thing to do.
And now tens of thousands of vulnerable children pay the personal consequences with all children having been told a lie - that sex change is possible and desirable.
The DfE was totally captured. Is it still I wonder?

The NEU certainly is...its leadership, anyway.

Bridget Phillipson does not inspire confidence, nor does she even seem to understand the issues.

Not sure how anyone can claim there's no institutional capture, when the police have a policy of men searching women, rapists are being put in women's prisons, children are instructed about the genderbread person and our prime minister can't define a woman.

If there was no wholesale ideological capture, we wouldn't be having any of these conversations because women's rights and child safeguarding would have been considered and have due weight when "trans" policies and laws were being drafted.

Dentons anyone?

This reminds me of a Triggernometry interview about the topic of the Civil Service.

Anyone who has worked with them knows they are captured. I worked with them in 2017 and it was clear they were working to a different agenda to the one they were supposed to be working to. The NGO I was working for had a different agenda to the one they were constituted to be addressing. Which is why when I could take a redundancy and early retirement I grabbed it with both hands.

Having worked in a couple of NGOs I recognise your description @AlisonDonut

Quite a few staff where I worked seemed to see interacting with the population they were supposed to be helping, or advocating for, as almost an imposition and, at times, an impediment. The staff mostly seemed to want the organisation to work at continuing to exist and they put more effort/interest into pet projects, career advancement, networking, and implementing HR fads. I was very disillusioned very quickly.

OK, so assuming the civil service/schools/state media are "captured", what do you all propose as the alternative? Disband the civil service and replace it with......what?

Enforce impartiality. Ban all lobbyists, charter marks, work place indices, lanyards, badges, flags of other countries, external trainers. Sack anyone who proposes actions that do not comply with the law - like suggesting men can use female spaces if they self ID or recording ‘gender ‘ instead of sex. Ban any civil servant from joining any political, lobbying or campaign organisation for two years after leaving the civil service. Or joining from such an organisation.

Yes!

And retrain the management in employment law, impartiality and public sector duty thingy.

I expect there are solutions in between keeping the status quo and abolishing the whole Civil Service, don’t you?

(Forgot quote, but never mind)

If you believe everything is "captured" by elites, surely it follows a radical change is required? Otherwise they will just stay captured

Yes!
It is incredibly simple to enforce impartiality. The guidance is all there, eg the Nolan Principles:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-7-principles-of-public-life

Schools have a legal duty to be politically impartial : Section 406 & 407 of the Education Act 1996. The last government even provided some new guidelines to help schools manage an increasingly difficult political landscape:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/political-impartiality-in-schools/political-impartiality-in-schools

Yet for some reason (Denton's report as Ereshkigalangcleg pointed out?), political activist groups, aided and abetted by civil servants, were able to drive a coach and horse through all this guidance & legislation for their own ends and to the detriment of children.

And the above just relates to education - take a look at social care, the NHS, prisons etc and exactly the same thing has happened.

Radical change is not the same as “disband and replace”.

No, capture simply has to be exposed, in the first instance, as it has been, gradually, through the numerous court cases which have been brought.

And still are. Including this one.

And then?
A paradox for me personally is the concerns about "capture" are the most strongly expressed today, whereas the threat from capture (Stonewall influence, self ID legislation etc) was greater in the past. Stonewall are a lame duck. Self ID is dead in the water. The Cass review has reduced the risk to teenagers.
Yet people like Truss are calling for the BBC to be defended and claiming the civil service is captured.

For me fact and fiction don't fully line up at the moment. What I observe in the arena of women's sex based rights is far less scary than it was. Yet the discourse has got more uncompromising and more insistent that there is some kind of emerging catastrophe.

When facts and rhetoric don't meet, that's when I start perceiving there to be a "culture war", where unfriendly actors (I.e. not people concerned about women and children) are using concerns for their own ends.

Unfortunately for me this trial looks like that. It's going to destroy the current incarnation of the Liberal party from what I can see. Who benefits from that? I doubt its going to be women and children in Australia - but it might be certain political factions and groups.

And still are. Including this one.

Quite. It's a good example.

Sorry to interrupt your flow but I wanted to post this episode of TerfTV here. Sall Grover talking about the Deeming trial

https://x.com/salltweets/status/1843288646860018056?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Most people want sensible people back in the room, and to do the things they signed up for. If they just stripped everything back to 'doing the job' and forgot about trying to right past historic wrongs then we'd be halfway there.