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Showing posts with label Heartlands Tribune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heartlands Tribune. Show all posts
Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

NHS Single-Sex Guidance: Why Did It Take So Long?

NHS England has finally ruled that hospital wards and changing rooms must follow biological sex. The scandal is not the decision. It is the six years, the two court cases and the million pounds of public money it took to arrive at it.

At three in the morning on an acute medical ward, dignity is not an abstraction. It is a curtain that closes properly. It is a nurse who knocks. It is the knowledge, as you lie in a backless gown with a cannula in your arm and no strength to argue, that the person on the other side of the thin partition is not a man. Women have understood this forever. It took the National Health Service the best part of a decade, two employment tribunals and a Supreme Court to catch up.

Yesterday, NHS England published two guidance documents, one covering same-sex accommodation for patients and one covering physical facilities for staff, confirming that single-sex provision must follow biological sex. Trusts are told to audit their estates for gender-neutral and single-occupancy alternatives, to record in writing any departure from the rule, and to report it as a breach through the Strategic Data Collection System.

Continue @ Heartlands.

Biological Sex Returns To NHS Wards

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

On 21 October 1966, a mountain of colliery waste came down on a Welsh village and killed 144 people, 116 of them children. The National Coal Board had been warned in writing, three years earlier, that it would.

The last ordinary sound in Pantglas Junior School was children’s chatter about half-term. The holiday started at midday. Library books had been put away, the first lesson had begun, and when a rumbling came down off the hillside, low at first and then louder, a teacher told his class not to worry. It was only thunder.

It was not thunder. It was Tip No. 7.

Earlier that morning mothers had stood in their doorways and watched their children go up the wet streets into a fog thick enough to hide the mountain. They waved. It costs nothing to wave. You do it a thousand times without once thinking about it, and that is the particular cruelty of Aberfan: nobody got to say a proper goodbye, because nobody knew that a goodbye was required.

At around a quarter past nine, roughly 300,000 cubic yards of liquefied spoil, slack, broke away and went down the valley at speeds of up to 50mph. 

The Aberfan Disaster

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

You Cannot Protect What You Cannot Define 🪶The Green Party’s Language Ban

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs. 

MPs have defeated the assisted dying bill by 286 votes to 270, a majority of 16. Support fell by 44 as Andy Burnham faced his first big Commons test.

MPs rejected a fresh attempt to legalise assisted dying on Friday, defeating the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by 286 votes to 270.

Support for the bill fell by 44 MPs on last year’s vote. Three Labour opponents, including a minister who resigned after her own terminal diagnosis, said the result reflected a bill that was “unsafe and unworkable”, not a change of heart on the principle.

The result brings to an end, at least for this Parliament, a two-year campaign to change the law. MPs had twice backed the legislation before: at second reading in November 2024, by 330 votes to 275, and at third reading in June 2025, by 314 votes to 291. Both times the bill, sponsored then by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, went on to the House of Lords. Both times it stalled there. An unprecedented number of amendments from peers meant it ran out of parliamentary time before the 2024 to 2026 session ended, and the bill fell without becoming law.

Assisted Dying Bill Falls As Support Collapses

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs. Recommended by Mark Hayes. 

Broken Rules, Silent Leaders: The Institutional Rot Inside UNISON

When UNISON allowed a biological male to stand for a seat reserved for disabled women, it broke trade union law and its own constitution. When seven nurses were harassed in their changing room, it looked the other way. Britain’s largest union has not merely lost its way; it has actively turned on the female members who fund it.

An institution is never truly tested by the glossy rhetoric of its annual conference, nor by the high-sounding platitudes of its press releases. It is tested by its rulebook. We understand instinctively that when a person breaks a solemn promise, that failure becomes the measure of their character. Yet we extend a strange, forgiving leniency to our institutions, whether they are governments, churches, or trade unions. We allow them to wrap themselves in the language of moral righteousness while ignoring the binding contracts they wrote when nobody was striking a pose.

UNISON, a union built on the dues of more than 1.3 million members, three-quarters of whom are women, wrote its constitution with unusual precision. Its drafters knew exactly what they were doing.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

The Ideological Capture Of UNISON 🪶 A Crisis Inside Britain’s Trade Unions

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

The Met Commissioner called it a mistake. Four months spent investigating Jack Grove, a journalist for asking questions of a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday and never once speaking to him, tells a different story.

Scotland Yard Didn’t Drop the Ball. It Picked a Side.

Sir Mark Rowley went on LBC this week and said the quiet part out loud. Asked why the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating a journalist for the crime of asking questions, the Commissioner told Nick Ferrari: “We dropped the ball on that one, let’s not beat around the bush.” He added, more revealingly, that the complaint should never have got past the front desk in the first place.

It was meant to sound like candour. It reads more like a confession.

The journalist is Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education. His offence was emailing Professor Jason Arday, a sociology of education professor at Cambridge, with questions about his academic record, after academics tipped him off to apparent similarities between parts of Arday’s PhD thesis and another student’s work. Grove also asked about Arday’s claimed fundraising total and his ultra-distance running feats. Ordinary reporting. The kind of thing journalism exists to do.

Somebody, and it still isn’t clear exactly who, rang the police. Cambridge University has since said flatly that it never made a complaint and wasn’t aware of one being made. Whoever it was, the Met treated a plagiarism inquiry as a potential crime and sat on it for four months. Grove was never interviewed. He learned he’d been under investigation only when officers rang to say the case was closed, and told him not to contact Arday again because the professor’s “mental health” had been affected. Arday’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, then wrote to Grove’s editors suggesting the paper’s scrutiny of a Black academic “may be” racially motivated, a charge that dissolves the moment you notice the questions were about a PhD thesis, not his skin colour.

Continue @ Heartlands.

The Case Of The Journalist, The Professor And The Police Investigation

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

From Cradley Heath to Liverpool: The History of Unions Betraying Female Workers

UNISON, ASLEF, USDAW and the Musicians’ Union are boycotting Labour’s Women’s Conference because its formal proceedings are reserved for women.

The Oldest Story in the Labour Movement Has a New Chapter, and It Stinks…

In 1874, a bookbinder named Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Trade Union League because the unions of her day would not organise women. This is not a new story. It is, if anything, the oldest story in modern history, and not only in the labour movement. Men shut the door. Women build their own room.

Those rooms worked. Mary Macarthur built the National Federation of Women Workers for the women the established unions would not take, and in 1910 the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath struck to force employers to honour a minimum wage the law had already granted them. They won. The movement absorbed their victory into its mythology and has been proud of it ever since. That is the pattern, and it repeats: women organise separately because the general movement has neglected them, they win something nobody else was fighting for, and afterwards the movement discovers it had always believed in equal pay. 

Continue @ Heartlands.

The Empty Delegation 🪶 How Four Trade Unions Sold Out Their Female Members

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

On This Day In History . . . 
Paris 1889: The Second International’s Founding Principle

On 14 July 1889, socialist delegates from across the world gathered in Paris to form the Second International. Their principle was simple: “The worker’s struggle has no borders.” because capital crossed them too.

Modern liberals have spent decades twisting that principle into an argument for the unrestricted movement of cheap labour. They are wrong.

Ask them what internationalism means today and you will hear about open borders, labour mobility and the free movement of people as an unquestionable good. What you will rarely hear is the word that mattered most to the socialists who met in Paris: capital.

Nearly 400 delegates from around 20 countries attended the founding congress. They did not meet to abolish nations. They met to stop capital using nations, and the workers within them, as weapons against one another.

That distinction has been buried. The left has paid dearly for it.

Modern internationalism asks workers to celebrate a system in which corporations move money, factories and labour wherever wages are lowest. When that movement drives down pay and weakens unions, we are told the resulting competition is solidarity.

Continue @ Heartlands.

Internationalism Was Never About Open Borders

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