Anyway, let's have a look at the days headlines.
The express (deliberately not capitalised - the paper doesn't merit it) tells us that Sunak's bonfire of EU laws will promote growth. How? In what way will divergence from our biggest and closest of trading partners help to boost growth? It's bullshit. Growth is already five percent lower as a result of Brexit, exports down eleven percent. How is further increasing the regulatory standards enshrined in EU laws (as transferred across to our statute books in the bulk transfer thereof) distance from our own going to help?
The Mail wants the pension stripped from this serial rapist policeman. Whatever. He'll have no need of it where he is going. His family (if he has one) might however, so this wants thinking about.
The Mirror points out the nonsensical nature of Number 10's willingness to pay agency nurses who cross the picket lines forty pounds an hour, but their refusal to pay the nurses who are striking, a decent wage in the first place.
The Sun runs with BBC millionaire football host Gary Lineker's commentary on the flagship sports programme Match of the Day being drowned out last night by the sound of a moaning woman in a porn film being heard in the background. It was apparently a prank which Lineker seemed to find funny, but I'm minded to ask what exactly these highly paid people are up to when they are supposed to be working (for the huge wages that we pay for).
At last however we come to the Times, where the top of the page story (above a picture of Greta Thunberg mugging up to the camera as she is carried away from some demonstration by German police) is that Number 10 has instructed that the phrase 'levelling up' is no longer to be used in referring to policies designed to increase equality across the regions. "No one knows what it means", they say. Well I know what it means and I also know why they want to drop it. They want it dropped because its use encourages people to look at whether they are actually achieving it. And it's absolutely cleat that they are not, so they should cut the bullshit and get on with the job they promised to do.
The paper also runs with a story that the first true anti aging drug for human use, a drug that increases the longevity of cells in the mice that it has been tested on, is moving "a step" closer" as trials progress to a point where they may soon begin on human subjects. This of course is the ultimate goal of medicine. Not the cure of disease in humankind generally, but the cure of disease in a small section of the population accompanied with an extension of longevity for the same group. Ultimately the defeat of death and movement into a permanent state of immortality (excepting death by accident or design) for that select few, would be the final goal, but we don't talk about that. As if these self indulgent creeps don't do enough damage in the three score and ten that they are already allotted without giving them free rein across aeons of time to work their destructive mischief.
And finally something in the Telegraph about a contentious area, but one that I for once, have sympathy with the government position on. That of the recent legislative change in Scotland to free up the law surrounding the changing of ones gender, in order to make it "simpler and less complicated" (and easier and faster to achieve thereby).
The government yesterday announced its intention to block the legislation using a hitherto unused piece of law that allows them to effect a veto of sorts under certain circumstances. This has caused uproar from the Scottish Nationalist MPs in both Westminster and Holyrood, with claims that the area is one that clearly falls under the remit of the Scottish Parliament under devolution, and that any attempt to interfere with the passage of this law by Westminster amounts to a gross overstepping of the boundaries set by said devolution legislation. They will, they say, challenge any such interference within the courts to the maximum extent of the law.
In my opinion however, this is politicising a very, very difficult issue just for the sake of it. It seems to me, that in an area where transference of gender from one to the other for mischievous purpose is a very real danger - very real - that it is absolutely right that the ability to do so should not be a simple and easy process. In respect to the sanctity of women's changing rooms, women's prisons, women only clubs etc, it seems absolutely correct (to me) that any man who would have his gender altered in a way that would give him access to such places as demanded by equality legislation, should have to prove the genuineness of his claim to the furthest possible degree. That, absolutely, he should have to provide the court with psychological profiling from expert witnesses that such a change of gender is necessary for the ongoing wellbeing of the pursuant, and is not made on a spurious or frivolous basis. The very last thing you want in such circumstances, I would think, is for the process to be "quick and easy". Surely the wellbeing of the entire group that would class itself as women (because let's not kid ourselves - the huge bulk of individuals looking to cross the gender barrier in this way will be in a male to female direction) should be given consideration, not just the wellbeing of the particular individuals who this might effect? No. This is one of the rare areas in life that complicated is good. Difficult is good. It beggars belief to me that the Scottish Parliament could ever have seen it differently.
