My neglectful council is fixated on pronouns while my family lives in disrepair

[IwantToRetire]

... for residents in Wandsworth council housing, where roofs leak, lifts break and bins overflow, focusing on fringe gender views when basic services are falling short feels misplaced.

Chris Georgiou, 36, has lived in Wandsworth, south-west London, her whole life and moved to the Winstanley estate with her two daughters three years ago. “People here don’t care about that,” the teaching assistant says of the pronoun guidance. “It’s not time or money that should be spent.” ...

From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/22/taxpayers-money-on-bin-collections-not-pronouns/

Can also be read at https://archive.is/poUir

Keep telling yourself that. Voters in the US basically had to choose between the entire fabric of society and world order being destroyed and reframed in one vein vs. another. I didn't vote for Trump, but not bc I wanted the alternative I had no choice but to vote for the lesser of 2 evils. Not enough people agreed with me and here we are. But believe me no one in the US genuinely likes the Dems right now and it is primarily bc of how they completely abandoned their core principles over the trans nonsense.

The issue here isn’t that the council has produced cheap pronoun guidance (which I agree is misogynistic nonsense undermining the reality of sex based exploitation).

It’s that the council does not have the money to carry out basic repairs. Why it does not have the money deserves a more serious analysis, which the Telegraph does not want to give, but which would involve looking at both what comes into its coffers, and what goes out, in particular how care for the very frail elderly is funded. But that’s a political hot potato no one wants to pick up.

Back then before the LA sold off the stock most WC children had left school by 15 or 16 into work if there was work. College was not even an idea as nobody did it and and places were limited but that changed as policy moved from factory/manafacture to office focused jobs.

There was the issue that some WC areas were blacklisted so you would never get a "posh" job because of your address or school address and (accent🙊). But mostly its you had no mates whos could be hepl vai nepotism🤨

So snob value

Batshit.

This.

Pronoun guidance would’ve cost nothing compared to the cost of housing 1 family, and I say that as a gender critical woman.

Councils are going bust because of the cost of SEN and social care for the elderly, which has ballooned in the last 10 years while budgets have not increased due to our economic woes.

This is a fact, not a value judgement.

Fascinating and depressing to see Reform talking points being repeated uncritically on MN. Councils aren’t broke because they’re spending millions on ‘DEI’ (an American term, incidentally). They’re broke because of decades of deliberate underfunding, and because of ballooning social care and SEN costs. None of which is going to be fixed by firing some hapless ‘diversity officer’ on £30k, as Reform have recently discovered in Kent and elsewhere.

Let’s be honest it hardly helps though spouting pronoun nonsense when people are struggling. The last thing you want to hear is some stupid policy on using neo pronouns when there are much bigger problems at hand. Prioritise what’s important and leave the virtue signalling behind.

I do find it grimly ironic that people are accusing the side that isn't sending and has never sent in the Gestapo, sorry, ICE to racially profile and murder innocent civilians in multiple cities of being authoritarian.

Orwell would be very proud.

I agree completely

however what I would say is that time & energy is being spent by council officers on issuing guidelines and convening meetings on ensuring the pro noun ppl feel properly recognised , time & energy that should be being spent on the real problems of residents not the imagined victim hood of ppl with a tenuous grip on reality

And council staff time costs money

Fact. Recorded by hundreds of news sources at the time. The trans argument lost Harris the presidency.

Are you talking about me?

I don’t get any of my ideas on this from the press, as I said I personally know two different families living in the same layout type home but the council one is a quarter the rent and they’re allowed pets. Not sure what’s got your panties in a twist my parents privately rented for the first half of my childhood and then moved into a nice big housing association house for the second half. Much much nicer and cheaper.

Hence I’m just saying I’ve never understood when Z lister celebs write about growing up in a council house like it was the epitomy of a shit impoverished childhood. Exceptions being like really dangerous parts of London.

And people renting from the council are more able to save a little money for fixing things than someone privately renting because the rent is cheaper

If people think the reasons why councils are in disrepair and broke is because they often use pronouns in written communication I don't see how it costs money to write or say a pronoun. And who's spending hours and hours a day 'pondering' it other than the journalist who wrote this article?

Imagine that being the worst thing you could say about a public body was that some staff use pronouns? It's pretty desperate grasping at something to be enraged about when it's not the source of the problem AT ALL.

How do you think the decision making process went when the email tag line was changed?

Was the intern given access to IT core functions with no controls or supervision?

Or was it part of a wide policy which was not a "cheap" 10 min of IT staff time?

And as I pointed out ^ Wolverhamption pronoun policy was way more important than the women and children it should be serving when it came to changing their housing policy.

Think Wandsworth has low council tax, which to be fair to Labour they inherited from the previous long standing Conservative council.

That said, seeing pronouns on signatures makes me assume an organisation or individual has misogynist bias. Bit like I assume someone with an England flag out is racist.

Of course there are exceptions and I'm always happy to be proved wrong!

Did anyone bother to read the article.

The reference to pronouns was just an expression of exasperation.

The woman concerned has had housing issues, and also spoke about finding that a council job had not been advertised widely.

There may have been other points.

For her it is symptomatic of an organisation that is not in touch with, or making any effort to reach out to what she suspect is a certain section of the community.

I mean - you see the exact same thing with private rentals in terms of the changes in the size of apartments, that's mostly down to increased costs of land and especially building.

I would also point out, that there was a very serious argument at the time with regard to people living in council houses that they were essentially being shut out of one of the most important investments that people in the middle classes used to stabilise their wealth and particularly the well being of their family over time, and which they could then borrow against.

I'm not sure why that's dismissed, lack of capital can be a serious issue for people on the lower end of the economy.

In the UK?

If you want to look outside the UK yo will find plenty of "sides" have done all kinds of nasty shit.

What a complete and utter nonsense article - surely just written to rile people up without them even thinking?! Which is seemingly getting easier and easier these days!
I mean, where do you even start?! They do realise that there are different departments to councils, right?
Lift breaks and bin collections will be dealt with by different parts of the councils.
Using pronouns has absolutely nothing to do with either.
Go off at the bin collection dept for not collecting your bin, not because whether Alex or Alexandra is a he or she, how completely batshit!
The whole post and replies are giving off those on FB vibes who comment and complain under police posts going "what are you all sitting about on here for when you should all be out solving crime?!" 😡
like they think the social media team isn't something completely different 😕
But hey, any reason to get people frothing, right?!
Yet people keep falling for it.

But the same people who are doing pronoun guidance won’t be the same people as those working in housing or SEN. This is an entirely false and misleading narrative.

And people always say ‘well if they didn’t do X there would be money for Y’, overlooking the fact the amount spent on X would be like pissing in the wind for X and make zero noticeable difference

They do realise that there are different departments to councils, right?

Indeed which is why local community police turned up at planing meeting about a proposed LA Leisure Center and pointed out that mixed sex changing areas led to higher rates of sex offending and other crimes suggesting the LA adjust the design to provide for single sex spaces.

Using pronouns has absolutely nothing to do with either.
Go off at the bin collection dept for not collecting your bin, not because whether Alex or Alexandra is a he or she, how completely batshit!

That is what is suggested
That Alex or Alexandra and all the line managers involved focus on solving real problems eg streamlining the bin collection service rather than writing policy on what people can say or how they choose to classify others.

police posts going "what are you all sitting about on here for when you should all be out solving crime?!" 😡
like they think the social media team isn't something completely different

Who is paying for the staff time to run a social media team?

Who decided that the police needed a social media team?

Fife NHS spent the guts of ½ a million to try impose a contract term that a female staff member has a legal obligation to get undressed in front of any male member of staff who decided he wanted to watch her.

Pronoun policy is an indication of an organisation which is anti-women.

It indicates that senior managers will spend money on "office" role rather than spend money on a "handyman" role which can provide a tangable return to the service users "on the ground".

Who decided that the police needed a social media team?

Can't win, really - they update people and interact with the public by getting messages out there, and people moan.
They don't, people moan they're not bothered.
Also it's a very effective way of publicising say missing people, or for wanting to identify a suspect.
Anyways this is a digression, I was just saying that complaining about pronouns and thinking it has any affect on whether or not your bins are being emptied is beyond ridiculous.

But the same people who are doing pronoun guidance won’t be the same people as those working in housing or SEN. This is an entirely false and misleading narrative

Exactly.

Why is noticing that managers will fund an office job but not an extra truck ridiculous?