Lt. Columbo of Scottish Politics

Absolutely. They just laughed when so many of us had to go near him on our way into Parliament during the post Brexit shenanigans in the Commons and be verbally abused

No fan of Thomas Kerr really but he’s bang on here.

@Neilsocialist They need cut - Scotland has a bloated and lazy public sector.

He for got to mention the 11,000 jobs he wants to cut

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday: Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer. The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted. Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right. As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces. Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t. In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue. This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls. What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected. But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics. First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life. In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different. Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination. Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage. But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black. I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families. I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box. So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

An organic Farmer from the Scottish Borders, attempting to sound like a working class Dundonian. And sounding nothing like one (unsurprisingly).

🚨NEW: An alleged plot to fix an election result so a Labour candidate would win was discussed in Angela Rayner's kitchen while she was at home, a former activist has claimed [@DailyMail]

You won’t get the truth on Sky, sadly. Only forgot to mention they’re all Afghan illegal migrants and 5 of them came over across the channel. Can only imagine what was going through the producer and editors head when the decided not to put that in the autocue.

Why is it acceptable that schoolgirls are being issued rape alarms due to illegal migrants? Dumfries deserves answers - and as your MSP I intend on getting them.

😂😂😂

Great!

16% of Muslims in the UK openly tell pollsters they support Islamic State, or roughly 600,000 people. Should we not be talking about this a bit more than we are? mattgoodwin.org/p/why-is-nobod…

Said former SNP CEO & husband of Nicola Sturgeon is due in court on Monday facing charges of embezzlement. I understand said NEC member has never received an apology for the horrific pile on she was subjected to. But yeah-Oswald is the best candidate for the position.🤦🏻‍♀️

It must be such a difficult decision… said no one ever… #ProtectTheProtectors

At what point does the British State realise that by circumscribing the word "invasion" it has denied itself the ability to respond to one.

Ladies & Gentlemen I give you our Minister for Victims and Community Safety. What a time to be alive.

NEW: “Trans women must be barred from female toilets, changing facilities and sports teams, new official guidance is to state.” telegraph.co.uk/gift/6522d8ebd…

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN!!!! The United Kingdom has a long and proud history of women fighting for our political rights but when you watch these videos it's like that never happened.

You are taking the fucking piss. You can break a coppers nose in an airport and walk free, but hurty words on the internet will get you three years. This country is done. There's a different justice system in play depending on who you are.

Where is Starmer’s speech about this disgraceful failure of policing?

I live in Nottingham, England. Right near me recently we've had a 13 year old school boy attempt to murder a 14 year school girl with a knife and a man in a car run over a group of other men killing one, not long ago we had the Nottingham Attacks, 3 killed many others injured. These terrible incidents happened 130 miles from London in Nottingham, the Met police released no statement. Why then do the Met police put out statements about awful things happening 5000 Mile's away in San Diego? #SanDiego #NottinghamAttacks