Keir Today, Gone Tomorrow

 If there was a General Election tomorrow, how would it turn out?

Well, as Starmer tries to out- Tory the Tories on spending cuts and out-xenophobe Reform on migration, the bad news for Keith is, he's toast and so is the entire "New" Nu-Labour project.

Three national polls in a row put the far right, Trumpite party of chancers and self-enrichers of Reform in the lead, the latest a full 6% ahead of the government.

With the SNP resurgent in Scotland, the result via Electoral Calculus would produce a parliament of:

REFORM - 305 seats

LABOUR - 142

TORIES - 93

LIB DEMS - 59

SNP - 23

GREENS - 4

IND SOC - 4

PLAID CYMRU- 2

OTHERS - 18

(figures use the latest polls for UK from "Find Out Now" and for Scotland from "Survation".

So not quite an outright majority, but with some rebel Tories and ULSTER!!!men (and they are ULSTERMEN!!!!) there'd be little doubt we would be staring a Farage Premiership in the face...

So let's take a minute to grasp what that would mean:

- no more free NHS treatment, you'll need to pay insurance instead;

- huge cuts in taxes for big business and the wealthiest, cuts in services and benefits for everyone else;

- racism run amok in our schools, communities, public services, and immigration service

- men convicted of assaulting their female partners accepted to be MPs

- an end to most types of employment protection, so it would be much, much easier for your employer to fire you at will;

- tax cuts for private schools, spending cuts for state schools;

- scraping of investment in green technology and energy and spending more on subsidising private nuclear energy companies;

- scrap the BBC(yes, you'll miss it when it is gone) for more TV like GB News ;

- cuddling up to Trump, and Putin

- government by the rich for the rich...

Starmer and co, of course, cling to the analysis of 30 years ago, when Bliar won a landslide victory on a minority vote and then watched it wither away over 3 subsequent elections. With even fewer voters supporting him last year than poor old Jeremy Corbyn got in his much-excoriated and widely misrepresented 2019 result, Starmer is facing oblivion... even although Reform has even less support than he got!

Believe it or not, there is every prospect, thanks to our ludicrous first-past-the-post voting system, that Nigel Farage can become PM with just 29% of the vote: a calumny, an utterly bizarre situation that can and must be remedied via electoral reform and proportional representation (PR) so that broadly speaking, parties' shares of the vote should equal their seats in parliament.

I've only ever heard three arguments against PR:

1. Our current system produces "STRONG GOVERNMENTS".

Erm... ???WTF?? WTF ACTUAL F???!!!

2. Our current system means people know who their MP is.

Well, actually, the vast majority haven't a clue who these increasingly faceless, marginal individuals are. I do follow politics and was previously very involved in political activity - I recall lots of MPs resigning their posts under Boris Johnson and realising I'd never heard of the vast majority of them; this has only increased since; who had ever heard of Andrew Gwynne before his career crashed to a close last weekend over his tasteless Whatsapp messages?

3. Our current system may not be that democratic, but it at least KEEPS OUT THE EXTREMISTS...

Well, we all have our views of what is extreme. The Con-Lib Dem coalition remains one of the most hard right governments we've ever had, but either way, with the polls suggesting Reform could just about win outright with barely a quarter of the vote, that little lie falls by the wayside.

At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Goring noted that Hitler had come to power legally after an election in which the Nazis polled 43% of the vote and got 43% of the seats. To become dictator, Adolf had to bully and bribe the German Nationalists, the liberal democrats and the Catholic Zentrum parties to vote for him, as well as arresting all the many Communist MPs so they couldn't vote against the Austrian Corporal.

Hermann however, pointed out that, had Germany at the time used the British first-past-the -post system, none of this unseemly cajoling and threatening would have been necessary; indeed, the Nazis would have come to power two years earlier than they did because

"Had the democratic election system of England or the United States of America existed in Germany, then the National Socialist German Workers Party would, at the end of 1931 already, have legally possessed all seats in the Reichstag, without exception.."

Starmer is finished before he has even begun. If he wants any sort of lasting legacy, anything worthwhile or even vaguely distinctive to be remembered for, the least he could do is save us from the fascists and give us PR NOW!

Don't Be Trumped: Stay Woke!

In spite of widespread condemnation from a fairly wide range of people over his appalling comments about disabled people after the Potomac aircrash, Trump and the Orcs he has assembled to do his bidding are unabashedly doubling down to suspend and cancel Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies across the American government. Many private companies are doing the same.

This is apparently in the name of meritocracy: no one but properly qualified people should get jobs, especially in roles such as air traffic controllers (this example in spite of there as yet being no evidence that the ATC was at fault). The Buffoon-in-Chief seemed concerned that no "dwarves" should be in a control tower while his MAGA followers in the USA and far beyond (including plenty on our shores) have performatively claimed to be concerned for disabled people having to hold down such stressful roles. Only the best, they proclaim, the irony given the very clearly unqualified man in the Oval Office completely lost on them.

So what is DEI (or often in the UK EDI)? Is it the case that "positive action" is putting unsuitable people into jobs that put others at risk? Or at the very least stop the best person for the job getting it?

The short answer is "No".

For a long time, many, many jobs - in the air industry, but in fact in pretty much all industries and especially in management and technical roles - often did (and not infrequently still do) go to certain not-best-candidates purely because of their race and gender.

These are white men. Often older white men. Including ones wearing insta-tan.

Diversity programmes, in the USA and UK and many other countries, are not at all about putting unqualified people into jobs - quite the opposite. They are about ensuring that people often marginalised and discounted for jobs even where they are the best candidate are encouraged to apply and considered equally to the stale, pale males who believe these are their birth right.

A few years ago, the BBC did an interesting experiment: they created identical fake applications for 100 jobs in London - one from someone with the white British-sounding name "Adam"; one from someone with the Muslim sounding name "Mohammed". And guess what?

Although the applications were identical, Adam got 12 interviews; Mohammed got 4. Such blatant disparities were also found in similar experiments by Nuffield University and by Canadian researchers.

Having worked for much of my career in human resources in the not-for-profit sector, I have been involved with many diversity programmes: in not a single one of these has anyone but the candidate identified as the best qualified/suited to the role been appointed. Under UK law, other than in a small number of exceptions such as provision of personal care, if you appoint someone because of their gender or race, you are breaking it and liable to be sued by any better qualified candidate. You can't reserve roles or have quotas. All of these are discriminatory and in breach of discrimination law.

What you can do is include welcome statements in job adverts to encourage people from marginalised backgrounds to apply by reassuring them that they will be treated fairly. You can (and should) provide training on avoiding bias to your recruiters and on inclusion to line managers and others so that everyone feels welcome and comfortable in their places of work.

You can also offer training to help people from such backgrounds to be able to compete equally: so for example a positive action training programme or an internship targeted at applicants from an ethnic background currently under-represented in your workforce. But you can't then move that person into a permanent job without running foul of the law. They have to compete and be the best appointee. (I write with an understanding of UK law; US law is very similar.)

Who benefits from this? Well, the people who would otherwise have been discounted obviously get a fair chance; their employers benefit by getting the best person for the job; and society benefits by being better run and simply feeling more equitable.

It is unsurprising, looking at Trump's henchmen (and they are nearly all men), that they don't like DEI/EDI programmes and denounce them as "woke". Because these generally talent-free guys are simply not interested in fairness or equity. Such concepts offend them not least because they threaten them and their grasping, greedy hold on patriarchal power.

What is surprising to many of his MAGA followers though is who is affected by the suspension of DEI programmes. For, contrary to the racist myths put about by Team Trump (and others of their ilk), the people who have benefited most of all from US DEI programmes are not black people or illegal immigrants; nor disabled or trans-people. It has actually been women from poorer white backgrounds: a substantial part of his voting base.

And now that he's elected, much to the upset of thousands of them as he purges government offices and programmes of the calumny of equity, he has, tragically, only three words for them:

"You are fired."

To be fair to the sociopath, back in September, he did warn them...