the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There was a story in Saturdays ‘Guardian’ which if it appeared anywhere else, ’The Guardian’ would lambast and rip to shreds.  Unfortunately it didn’t appear anywhere else, which means its my lucky day and it falls to me to do the honours.

The story concerned, drum roll please, Brexit.

If there’s one topic above all else that makes me despair about ‘The Guardians’ fall from that it was in my former years – even-handed and honest – to what is now – partisan and hypocritical – its Brexit. Or more specifically, the way that it frames every story it runs about Brexit in a way that reinforces its readers pre-existing narrative, that of Brexit being an avoidable disaster if only it was left to the grow-ups to decide and not the children. You know, because being children they were more susceptible to believing lies, more easily scared and unable to understand complex issues.

With a headline like,’’Three and a bit years after Brexit, are border checks finally here?”,one might be forgiven for imagining it was going to be a a examination of what the checks were before and after Brexit. The implications of the differences and difficulties that those changes might represent and the noticeable effect of said changes upon consumers. 

Possibly throw in a bit about how the changes were negotiated, how they sit within the broader global regulatory framework and the likely impact on UK exports. That sort of thing. Boring yes, but more importantly, informative, 

“‘When Michael Gove announced the first delay to post-Brexit checks on plant and animal products coming into the UK from the EU, he was keen to make one thing clear.

“Although we recognise that many in the border industry and many businesses have been investing time and energy to be ready on time, and indeed we in government were confident of being ready on time,” the then minister for the Cabinet Office said, “we have listened to businesses who have made a strong case that they need more time to prepare.”

Hold on, isn’t government listening to and refining their plans so as to arrive at the best possible solution a good thing? To delay implementation until such time that as situation arose?

That was in March 2021. Three years and four delays later, Tuesday will finally see those checks brought in. Or will it? 

Taking the time to ensure those checks are as good as they possibly can be and having the sense to delay implementation until they are, isn’t that too a good thing too, something to be lauded, not sneered at? Or would it suit ‘The Guardian’ if the government just blindly pressed ahead with implantation, ignored calls from business to make changes and allowed the consequences of doing so make life worse, much more difficult and cripplingly expensive and for citizens already suffering from the cost of living crisis?

‘(The Guardian) understands the inspection process will begin with more “intelligence-led” checks, focusing first on the highest risk products in all categories. This would see consignments chosen for inspection based on factors such as the country of origin and the company delivering them, and any additional intelligence on certain products coming through the border. The enforcement levels will also be adjusted based on compliance of goods and disruption levels.

Is it just me that thinks this a both prudent and common sense approach to take, to try ‘intelligence led ‘ checks first, to avoid long delays at ports of entry into the UK and ease the bored on border staff. Wouldn’t ‘The Guardian’ be criticising the government for not doing precisely that if it wasn’t doing that, using strategic planning and technology better maximise the efficient use of manpower? 

The first phase, which began at the end of January this year, required importers of most meat, dairy and plant to secure health certificates for products before they could enter the UK. This has already created problems for some importers.

Not only has it added extra costs to orders – the certificates can cost up to £200 for each product line – but some suppliers have struggled to find vets to carry out the checks or simply turned their backs on supplying the UK, unwilling to deal with the added bureaucracy. The result has been gaps on some deli shelves.

Boo-fucking-hoo. Who cares about deli’s in the real world? If it was a choice between getting my hands on some artisanal chutney from Austria or being a citizen of the first country in Europe to have a Covid vaccination programme, I know which one I’d choose.   

World Trade Organization rules state that UK trade borders with the EU need to match those with the rest of the world, so as not to give the bloc a trading advantage.

So one massive cartel has rules that another smaller cartel is only too willing to enforce, because it highlights the risks to the smaller cartels members should they too wish to leave. Think of Pablo Escobar telling cartel members they are free to leave as he calmly loads a pistol.

But trade will be more costly. The government itself has admitted that businesses will have to pay £330m a year, which could add 0.2% to food inflation over three years. 

The key word there is could. Sure it could add 0.2% to food inflation over three years, of course it could, but the sky could also fall in, water could be turned into wine and pigs could fly. And 0.2% over three years is functionally meaningless anyway. How stable has food inflation been or not been since Brexit, is that 0.2% figure large or not and anyway inflation projections are as we know, famously reliable.

And might not the ongoing brouhaha in Ukraine, and with it the rise in the cost of the fuel across Europe, the fuel that’s needed to help produce, store and transport this food, be more of a causative factor? How about climate change and its effect on food production? Or farmers across Europe, in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Ireland protesting about the EU’s increasingly burdensome environmental regulations, might that also be involved?

No, its all because of pesky Brexit. 

Brexit is in the fever-dream imaginings of ‘The Guardian’ like the lighthouse keeper in ‘Scooby-Do’, inasmuch as it views everything that happens to the UK almost exclusively through the lens of how awful Brexit was and continues to be.

Ah,”The Guardian’, which imagines that its readers exist in a world of a Woolworths style ‘Pick n Mix’ democracy, one where they believe in democracy, of course they do do, but only up to a point. And that point is when the democracy they cherish so very much, interferes with how they want to live their lives. 

This was perfectly summed up in yesterdays headline, “ ’Confined to this little island’: Britons criticise rejection of EU youth mobility deal”, because it was tailor made to bolster their never ending sense of entitled grievance about Brexit. 

‘Hundreds voice dismay at Sunak and Starmer, accusing them of misreading UK attitudes towards Europe. Last Friday, the prime minister rejected the post-Brexit youth mobility deal, which would have allowed Britons aged between 18 and 30 to live, study or work in the EU for up to four years, after Labour declined the offer the previous day.’

Never mind that only an incredibly small proportion of people aged between 18-30, would have, I’d wager, the necessary qualifications, skills or experience that EU employers would want for this to become a reality. Never mind that one of the EU’s fundamental principles, the free movement of people, which was one of the reasons why the majority of Britons for voted for Brexit, would be reinstated were this deal to go ahead. 

“This scheme seems like a no-brainer – I cannot think why anyone would disagree with it,” said Elena, who works in the healthcare sector in north-east England.” Doesn’t say she’s a nurse or junior doctor, care worker or ambulance crew does it though? ‘Healthcare sector’ reads to me like deliberate obfuscation, to conceal the fact that she has exactly the skills that an employer in the EU would be invested in.  

‘She dismissed concerns that people could end up trying to overstay and settle in the UK permanently. I have friends who have taken advantage of such schemes with Canada, Australia and New Zealand and none of them ended up moving permanently to those countries.”’

Only someone so wilfully obtuse could be unaware of the utter irrelevance of this reasoning. English is spoken in all of those countries and whilst English might well be spoken at some levels of European society, it is far from universal. In the Netherlands, you’d be fine but good luck to an  English person who can only speak English trying to to order a drink in Toulouse, to get help from a shop assistant in Palermo or to order a meal in Koblenz. 

“I suspect the resistance from the Tories and Labour is based on a belief that a sizeable chunk of the British public would balk at the idea of eastern Europeans freely crossing our borders again.”

And there we have it, the belief never far from the mind of a ‘Guardia’ reader, that everyone who voted for Brexit was to some extent xenophobic, if not actually racist. 

Because the idea that perhaps concerns about increasing pressure on already struggling public services and the NHS might be more of a issue doesn’t accord with a negative narrative. Instead of viewing doubts over the ability of schools and the housing sector to cope with rapidly growing demand as a positive, which it is, it is much easier to dismiss them as somehow rooted in racism 

As I’ve pointed out many times before on this blog,, “The Guardian’ has managed to monetise the saying ‘I’d rather be a hypocrite than be the same man for ever.”, by pandering to its readers unbelievably selfish notion that that their anger over Brexit has greater value than anyone else’s feelings on the matter, and to that end the staff at Guardian at constantly run stories that will bolster that narrative.

“Improved mobility did not just appeal to graduates and their employers: scores of people, many of them parents of sons and daughters in their teens or 20s, said such a scheme could restart the funnelling of young baristas, waiters and au pairs into countries on either side of the Channel”

See! Not only can foreign workers have McJobs here, but British nationals can have McJobs in Europe too. And it fulfils one the EU’s primary objectives, that of lowering wages for businesses whilst increasing the financial obligations of the state.

Oh, I’ll just point out once again that I voted to Remain, but, you know democracy, losers consent…. 

Only in a world where words no longer have an objective meaning could the Iranian drone and cruise missile attack on Israel last night, where 99% of the 300 launches were destroyed before they reached Israel, be described as ‘a success.’

And only in a world where the state ruthlessly enforces the narrative it wants to present to its people and where access to independent news sources is non-existent, social media is banned, and internet is use is restricted could this happen.

Such a state could then present its attack as self defence claiming it was response to the air strike on an Iranian consulate building in the Syrian capital Damascus, which killed 13  senior Iranian commanders. 

In such a world, a precise and well planned operation would be somehow equitable with a wholly indiscriminate and massively disproportinate attack.

That would be in a world that has largely forgotten the root cause of this current conflict, the pogrom inflicted on Israel by Hamas last year, which resulted in the the largest single number of Jewish deaths since the Holocaust.

A world in which Iran feels it is acting in a restrained manner when it threatens a bigger attack should Israel retaliate and warning that if the United States backs Israel, Iran will target their military bases.

Which in turn would lead to this shocking article in ‘The Guardian’  which effectively blames Israel for the attack ‘The Damascus embassy attack looks like a premeditated escalation designed to fortify Netanyahu’s domestic political position, silence criticism from the blind-sided Americans and deflect international pressure to halt arms supplies to Israel. And it has worked. Overnight, the criticism in Washington of the Gaza debacle has dried up.’

And only in a world where the Western political class has allowed the transient moral authority of social media and vocal activists to steadily supplant any pretence of effective, mature and consequentialist leadership, could this happen.

And a world which, to these eyes at least, seems increasingly more unrecognisable.

Of all the many egregiously self-promoting performative displays of concern over the Israel/Gaza situation, the ‘Cinema for Gaza’ silent auction which ends tonight at midnight, is perhaps my favourite. It both perfectly sums up the fashionable posturing of ‘celebrities’ and also how that word has become practically meaningless over the years.

Granted, alleviating the suffering by means of raising funds to buy humanitarian aid is in and of itself a good thing, there’s no denying that, but there’s no shortage of countries where war has caused a similar need.

Yemen, for example, remains among the world’s worst humanitarian crises with an estimated 4.56 million people displaced by the conflict and over 70,000 refugees and asylum seekers (based on UNHCR figures.) At least 17.6 million people currently face food and nutrition insecurity while half of all children in Yemen under the age of five are suffering from moderate to severe stunting due to food insecurity.

Nigeria, despite being one of the worlds biggest oil producers, still has an humanitarian crisis in its north western region. An estimated 8.3 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, of whom over 80 per cent are women and children. Violence, malnutrition and disease have only to exacerbated its problems, whilst a lack of engagement from humanitarian groups and donors, and formal UN recognition of the crisis, haven’t exactly helped either.

What also hasn’t helped the many millions in need of the same humanitarian aid, the same focus and attention by Western media on the crisis and the same concerted international political action as the Palestinians receive, is that their crises, and the causes of them are complicated. So to is the Israel/Gaza crisis, but it has been simplified down to an absurdly binary level, one where there is only the blackest black and the whitest white.

Which brings me back to the ‘Cinema for Gaza’ auction. Now you would think that such a humanitarian crisis, one that has been unfolding in front of our eyes thanks to the news media’s obsessive coverage and social media’s objective analysis, would attract the very cream of Hollywoods greatest and good. After all, they’re not known for their reticence when it comes to urging others to support causes they care about, and no cause in recent years has become such a talisman of virtue as solidarity with the Palestinians.

So therefore when at the looking at names of the donors, I am struck by the fact that none of them are what you might call ‘A’ list. Even its most notable donor, Susan Sarandon, in her prime wasn’t an ‘A’ lister, and her prime was nearly 30 years ago. Where are the big hitters, and not the stars who are only stars in the minds of themselves and their PR teams, I mean the actual genuine articles, the Meryl Streep’s or the Tom Hanks’? The Scarlett Johansonn’s or George Clooney’s?  

Aside from the extremely charitable interpretation of ‘star’, they seem to use, I can’t help but notice that quite a few are offering to something via Zoom. A writing mentoring Zoom meeting with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, current bid £195, a directing mentoring zoom with Stella Corrad now £165. You can share a virtual coffee with Matt Whitecross, current bid £175 , Rajesh Thind £165 or Lenny Abrahamson £475.

Not exactly the chance to spend the whole day with Jennifer Lawrence, or mentoring with Martin Scorsese is it? I had thought we were really getting close to the big bucks when I saw that one item was the promising sounding ‘A night to remember with Guz Khan’. My hopes were no sooner raised than they were dashed, as details of this supposed ‘night to remember’ emerged. It offers the successful bidder the chance to ‘pick an activity of your choice: becoming Guz’s Fortnite duo partner on the PS5, joining him and his mates for a munch at The Farmhouse in Coventry; or doing donuts in a car park in a Porsche 911.’

So near yet so far.

Why not raise much more money by combining the opportunities that Zoom offers, the proven success of OnlyFans and ‘celebrities’ desire to help. Who wouldn’t want to see someone off the telly cover strip naked and unhurriedly cover themselves in whipped cream before taking requests as to put what fruit to put where. How much would that raise? They could double up. Offer to either mud-wrestle naked for an hour, or else to re-enact  the naked male wrestling by firelight scene from ‘Women in Love’. Or, they could offer a selection of which acts they’d be willing to perform with possibly an interactive element, whereby bidders could suggest something and the price they’d be willing to pay. Some ‘celebrities’ would be busier than others, but as it’d be for charity..

We could then see which ‘celebrities’ were willing not so much to put their money where their mouth was, but put their mouth where the money was.

Anyone reading my post yesterday may be forgiven for mistakenly presuming that the contempt that I hold for ‘The Guardian’ – namely that they their frame stories to basically bolster their readers pre-existing narrative – is exclusive to them.

This is not so. They’re all at it, the media – well, what I consider to be media, anyway which is possibly indicative of my age, but so what – in choosing not just how to tell a story but much more insidious, what stories to tell in the first place.    

 And with impeccable timing one story, reported in at least four national newspapers yesterday, many more provincial and local ones probably, and the BBC, proves it to be undeniably true.

“Bulgarians pocket £50m from taxpayer in Britain’s biggest benefits fraud”

Was the headline in “The Daily Telegraph’, with ‘The Daily Mirror’ equally appalled by the fact that;

“Wood Green Crown Court heard how between October 2016 and May 2021, the organised crime group made thousands of false claims for Universal Credit using either real people or hijacked identities. The claims were supported by an array of forged documents, including fictitious tenancy agreements, counterfeit payslips and forged letters from landlords, employers, and GPs.”

Not be be outdone in frothing at the mouth anger stakes, The Daily Express added this,

“Over a period of four and a half years, the gang ran a cunning scheme via three corner shops in Wood Green.…If a claim was knocked back, they would simply have another go until it was accepted…The Universal Credit landed in a range of more than a hundred bank accounts before being withdrawn by the crooks at the bank.”

And with a tedious predictability, ‘The Daily Mail’ chipped in with

“Prosecutors said the gang used the benefits system ‘like a cash machine’ and on one of the seized mobile phones was a video showing the fraudsters showering their flat with hundreds of £20 notes.”

The BBC quoted specialist CPS prosecutor Ben Reid who said;

“These defendants conspired to commit industrial-scale fraud against the Universal Credit system,” he said. Submitting thousands of false claims, the organised criminals enriched themselves from government funds designed to protect and help the most vulnerable people in our society.”

But rather than vilifying them, should not the press have lauded them for their ingenuity in seeing the potential for enriching themselves and using the system against itself. And also, they’re fucking amateurs at this whole benefit scam thing anyway. 

What did they net? £54 Millions. How much work did that take? Setting up shops as fronts, opening false bank accounts and whole palaver of making a Universal Credit claim in the first place. It can take the best part of an hour for them to even answer the ‘phone.

No, when it comes to a gang who used the benefits system ‘like a cash machine’  then the true criminals are The Royal Family. £86.3 millions they netted last year by the much less stressful method of simply being given it. Both main political parties, normally so keen to be seen as tough on welfare cheats and demonise those who live their lives solely on benefit payments when it happens at one end of the social spectrum, give a free pass to those at the other end.   

The press, who think that £54 millions is a scandal see no hypocrisy whatsoever in forensically examining every detail Royal Family’s stolen booty. Somehow, they own £15.6 billions worth of property and land in the UK, yet we pay for their weddings. They get sick and somehow we pay for their private treatment. They wear expensive hats and yet we pay for their holidays. They can have more than two children and yet are not subject to the same benefit cap as everyone else.

It’d be laughable except its an costly joke on us.

I’m big enough to admit that I may have been wrong for the years I’ve been writing this blog. Specifically in regard to posts lambasting “The Guardian’ for what I perceived as a craven surrendering of journalistic ethics to better pander to ‘the hypocritical self-delusions of its readers.’

I now realise that it may be nothing of the sort, that it might in fact a highly principled stance, one that not only upholds but perfectly exemplifies the standards of modern journalism.

‘Labour urged to end two-child benefits cap as research reveals policy pushing families into poverty” thundered a headline, reporting on demands that NotHardie, if elected as PM in the next election, scrap a policy introduced by the Conservatives, one that limits benefit payments to a maximum of two children per family.

Or to be more accurate, scrap a decision he made last year, not to scrap the policy. 

‘The Guardian’ has been a quite vocal opponent of this policy, about how this and that it is, and quotes statistics from some totally impartial think tank to underline the fact that the villain in all of this is the government. But the real villains here, the ones who are actually causing the hardship that ‘The Guardian’ considers so unpalatable, are the parents themselves.

It was made abundantly clear when the policy was announced in the budget of 2015, that if you were claiming certain benefits and already had two children, that after April 2017 when the policy was to be introduced, no benefits would be paid to a third. This then wasn’t a huge secret, nor was it devious plan announced one day and enforced the next. It was both well publicised and its implications therefore understood. 

Except by those who were on benefits and decided to have a third child anyway, it seems, because 

“ Analysis of official data reveals that 25% of all households affected by the two-child limit are currently single-parent households with a child under three years old. About 106,000 families fall into this category” 

The maths here are quite simple. Its not difficult, 18 months between announcement and implementation, and 9 months for pregnancy means that any child conceived after July 2016 is nobody’s fault other than the parents. How is it the governments fault if some people not practice better birth control?  If ‘Guardian’ journalists and their readers can’t work that out, then they must have a special moral compass that allows responsibility for this to shifted away from the guilty and onto an innocent in order to bolster a pre-existing narrative. 

One that allows it continually propagates the incredibly simplistic notion that everything the Conservative government does is bad, whereas it’ll all be milk and honey once Labour take over. A narrative that manages to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable propositions, namely that you can have children and be excessively concerned about climate change. One that allows for foreign holidays and increased consumption, just as long as they’re the right sort of holidays and the right sort of consumption.

Anyway, back to the article and the immoral compass.

‘Analysis also shows that 20% of households affected by the policy have at least one disabled child. While there are exceptions if the third or subsequent children are disabled, there are no provisions in place for the disability of other children. About 87,500 families with a disabled child are affected.’

I know this next observation might upset some people, but the fact people are offended by something doesn’t make it less true. So possibly if I was living on benefits and already had two disabled children then I might think twice before having a third. Again maths, again birth control, again blame. Writing of blame, lets head on back to the article shall we, and find out what we should blame.

‘Over recent years, several shadow cabinet ministers have been severely critical of the cap. Jonathan Ashworth, when shadow work and pensions secretary, said last year: “We are very, very aware that this is one of the single most heinous elements of the system which is pushing children and families into poverty today.”’

Really? That’s the cause? How blind to anything other than his own career must someone be to say something so utterly partisan and how wilfully obtuse must anyone reading that be to think ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’

And not to think ‘Mmm, maybe it isn’t that easy to identify one single thing as the main culprit, perhaps there are many causative factors at play here, and that there all somehow interlinked. Possibly my life style may have contributed to it in some way?’

The gig economy and zero-hour contracts. Uber, Deliveroo and Just Eat, Amazon and DPD, babysitters and dog-walkers?

Other things, way outside governmental control like domestic violence, substance abuse and illness. And things within governmental control, like education, housing and crime?

And this is where the ‘highly principled stance, one that not only upholds but perfectly exemplifies the standards of modern journalism‘ kicks in. “The Guardian’ doesn’t have one obscenely wealthy shareholder, one who uses it to promulgate their own vested interests, instead they have thousands of smaller shareholders, or ‘supporters’ asks based  they’re euphemistically called. The ‘principled stance’ and ‘standards of modern journalism’ remain exactly the same, only mores, as the more it correctly anticipates its owners interests and validates them, so the cash keeps a’rolling and the virtue keeps a’signalling.

This in turn gives them pantomime politics with clearly defined villains and heroes.

I was wrong about being wrong. Seems that two wrongs do make a right after all. Phew!

While it is often said that life imitates art, I never really believed it to be true, not true in the sense of there being incontrovertible evidence that proved it to be so. All that changed a few moments ago though, when I saw this headline in “The Guardian’, ‘Susan Sarandon, Olivia Colman and Paul Mescal join star donors of Cinema for Gaza auction.’ 

 Joining the celebrities is the former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn – billed as the star of Sumotherhood, thanks to his cameo in last year’s Adam Deacon urban thriller – who is donating a Zoom poetry reading and a selection of homemade jam.’ 

Did anyone else think of Janet Breen and the Jam Festival, the sketch in ‘The Day Today’ which expertly lampooned the presumed moral superiority of people who are successful at one thing deluding themselves that their outrage at another more complicated thing has greater value than that of others.

All actors do is dress up and play make believe essentially, and you tend not to get plumbers, refuse collectors or nurses carrying on like this. 

Its all just virtue signalling, no its worse than that, its selective virtue signalling, the selection being based upon a self-serving desire to be well thought of. Or at least not be rounded upon, as happened to Olly Alexander a few weeks ago, when he refused to withdraw from Eurovision because people were upset about Israel’s participation in it. But that’s all forgotten now, because he’s ‘ offering ‘a Zoom serenade of the song of you choice’  and has redeemed himself, in the opinion those whose opinion he cares about at least.

That’s the main problem that I have with all of this very public display of virtue signalling, that it’s all done so very publicly. If they were doing it privately, possibly donating a days salary, then that’s one thing, but not rummaging around your attic for some old tat – Mike Leigh’s donating an ‘Abigails Party poster – or to read your children a bedtime story like Rebecca Hall. Oh, Tilda Swinton wants to do that as well, although not at the same time and not in person.

But the absolute pick of a very unworthy list of contenders is Josh O’ Connor – he played the young Prince Charles in ‘The Crown’ – who is offering a ‘perfect porridge masterclass via Zoom’ 

“Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman.” So sang Tammy Wynette in her 1968 hit ‘Stand by your man’, and if Tammy found it hard then, she’d find it incalculably harder in the Scotland of 2024. Even asserting that a woman is a biological female and not a man who likes fancy dress, can have you arrested and imprisoned, thanks to their new Hate Crime Bill (HCB). Welcome to the even more enlightened version of the Enlightenment, where some people are so enlightened that they believe that women can have penises.

Not since Westminster passed the Trade Union Act of 2016, has legislation been passed that expressly increases the rights of a very small minority at the cost of weakening them for the majority. That the HCB was introduced into law on April Fools Day is telling, not least it passed into law by the Scottish parliament in April 2021, and the delaying bringing it into force results from police concerns as to how exactly it is be implemented. 

So this post is concerned with why this confusion exists and to do this I’ll be quoting not just from the law itself, but from the Explanatory Notes (EN) that accompany it. Think of the attention grabbing headline in a news article and the boring details hidden in paragraph eight that hardly anyone ever reads and you’ll get the idea. 

My main problem with the HCB, aside from its curtailing of free expression and blatant authoritarianism, is its imprecise use of language. Now it may seem ironic for me to focus on this, given how often my posts will have words missing here and there, but I am brain damaged, whilst the civil servants responsible for its drafting and the politicians responsible for scrutinising it line by line at committee stage before finally voting it into law, are not. 

The HCB chooses when to be specific – as it does when defining who the law is designed to protect in Section 1 and throughout –  and when to believe that certain other words or phrases have a commonly agreed and understood meaning, giving the HCB an excuse not to provide one. ‘Malice and ill-will’ are two such examples of this kind of laxity and whilst these words may have a meaning in the publics mind, legally there isn’t an agreed one. Although these words crop up with alarming frequency in the early sections of the HCB as something the accused must be guilty of demonstrating toward the victim if an offence is deemed to have taken place, it is assumed everyone accepts the unspoken meaning.

Nowhere is this presumed osmosis more disingenuously used as when the HCB makes continual references to what a ‘reasonable person’ might consider this or that to be. The this and the that includes racial harassment, threatening behaviour and offensive material, to name but three. But the very notion that there even is such a thing as a ‘reasonable person’ is utter nonsense. Everyone imagines themselves to be reasonable and everyone else to be on the spectrum of unreasonableness. More importantly, this absurd fantasy imagining of what constitutes being a ‘reasonable person’ is dangerously naive, especially if it is left to the ‘victim’ to determine what ‘a reasonable person’ might think. 

One of the most chilling aspects of the HCB is not just the scope of what is communicated might be, but the detailed way in which it sets out in its EN how they might be communicated.

Behaviour or material which is threatening or abusive could arise in any setting, such as—

• on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook etc.,
• at the dinner table or elsewhere in the home,
• in an office or workplace,
• in a teaching environment, including religious education,
• during a religious sermon or as part of religious preaching or practice,
• in a public or private meeting,
• in a newspaper, blogpost or other media setting,
• when performing, including in a play or a show on stage or in a film.

Can anyone else hear the clocks strike 13?

One of the great fallacies of the HCB is that it is predicated upon a fundamental misconception of society, namely one that suggests that people only exist either as potential victim, or else as a potential offender.

If my reading of both recent Scottish political activism and the HCB are correct, the act will embolden those transgender activists who wish to use fit or vengeful and malicious reasons and to silence gender critical feminists. They will use it as a weapon in their ongoing struggle against the reality of biological sex and to not reaffirm their narrative of being part of an oppressed minority but then also to change that narrative so that they have now the power, they have agency. Which is great for them, all 24,000 fancy dress enthusiasts, or 0.5% of Scotlands population but not the 2.8 million Scottish women or 51% who make up the rest of it.

Which makes it all the more galling for those transgender activists anticipating a judicial gag on opinions that don’t match their delusion, the that HCB grudgingly concedes that the right to freedom of expression as contained in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, includes the general principle that the right applies to the expression of information or ideas that offend, shock or disturb. Basically, an acknowledgement of the fact that the HCB is liable to a successful challenge on that basis and that everything in the HCB can be contested. Meaning that the only winners in all of this will be the estate agents, luxury car dealers and stock brokers of the lawyers who’ll spend years sorting this out, before taking it to Europe.

It’s as if the Scottish parliament has effectively ceded responsibility for sorting out what the HCB means to lawyers. So it isn’t J.K Rowling who should be worried, she has enough fame and wealth to protect her for now, but rather those without her fame, wealth and time needed to mount a robust and costly legal defence. It is those women upon whom the law will be first tested, allowing legal precedents to be set, case law to be established and judgments to be be referenced that are the one’s who’ll suffer most. Why would anyone run a race without first having done the training needed to win?

And Tammy was wrong. It isn’t hard to be a woman, well certainly not for the vast majority of trans women who haven’t yet had genital reconstruction surgery.