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Quite possibly so, yes

The report concludes: “The GMB is institutionally sexist. The general secretaries and all regional secretaries are, and always have been, men. The culture in the GMB is one of heavy drinking and late-night socialising, salacious gossip and a lack of professionalism.”

The complaint, for some decades now, has been that the British working class is sexist, hasn’t it?

24 thoughts on “Quite possibly so, yes”

  1. So Much For Subtlety

    the culture in the GMB is one of heavy drinking and late-night socialising, salacious gossip and a lack of professionalism.

    That is interesting. I would have thought that professionalism tends to go with the other things. Let’s see, who thinks the Royal Marines are a little fond of of heavy drinking and late-night socialising, and even salacious gossip? Although they probably wouldn’t call it that.

    Who thinks that the SAS drinks milk and only reads the Guardian?

    Compare your average Oxford college with, say, Birmingham University of. Which do you think has more heavy drinking, late-night socialising, and salacious gossip? And that’s just Blackfriars. The others are worse.

  2. So Much For Subtlety

    Off Topic: The Germans have just said that Novalny has been poisoned with Novachok. I was interested to see some people here blame the British for the Salisbury thing. No doubt the SAS *could* have made it to Siberia.

    I am listening to Merkel. It sounds familiar. I think the best advice I could give is that if she tells Putin she is going to write him an angry letter, she should not move a little to the left.

    The Europeans have swallowed the annexation of Donbas, they are fine with whatever the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs, and no doubt they will excuse this too.

  3. ‘… heavy drinking and late-night socialising, salacious gossip and a lack of professionalism.”…’

    Sounds like a hen party.

  4. “Off Topic: The Germans have just said that Novalny has been poisoned with Novachok. I was interested to see some people here blame the British for the Salisbury thing. No doubt the SAS *could* have made it to Siberia.”

    Its remarkably benign this ‘deadliest nerve agent known to man’. So far the Russians have managed to kill one person out of 6 people who they’ve contaminated with it. If only we’d known during the Cold War, we could have saved a fortune on making all our tanks chemical weapons proof……..

  5. “The general secretaries and all regional secretaries are, and always have been, men”

    Before I retired, my secretaries were always women, and some of them were damn fine looking gels.

  6. SFMS: I don’t think the Europeans can do much about the Donbas or the Uighurs beyond shouting “You Naughty People!”. We have pretty much the same problem about Hong Kong, though arguably we have more reason to have a go at the CCP. Putin’s adventures with Polonium and Novichok shows he couldn’t care less what we think.

    As for Novichok, the experience in Salisbury suggests it’s relatively slow-acting, so Navalny could have encountered it hours before he got on the plane and there would be no trace to affect the other passengers.

  7. @Sam Vera

    I trust that if any of those damn fine looking gels complained about sexual harassment at work that you asked them to sit on your lap and tell you all about it.

  8. Blojerk already twitted on the aniv of the deadly doorknob poisoning –this new caper will just revive the old crap.

  9. Jim,

    Nerve agents are lethal if (a) you get a high enough dose, (b) you don’t get treatment and support. Inhalation was the quickest, most lethal route: absorption through mucous membranes (eyes, mouth…) next: absorption through skin slowest and most likely to leave you alive. If he’s testing positive for nerve agent, then the backtrack of where and how he made contact with it will be lively.

    Kim Jong-Nam had a “massive dose” of VX sprayed/rubbed in his face at Kuala Lumpur airport and was able to go get help and be stretchered to an ambulance, before dying (~20 minutes from massive contamination to death) – onset from skin contact is significantly slower, so I’d be looking at events in the departures area rather than on the plane.

    Navalny’s apparently in a “medically induced coma” which may mean he’s got a chance of recovery, or that he’s actually in a persistently vegetative state (getting him out of the coma is the hard part…) – doesn’t sound that benign to me.

    And chemical agents aren’t necessarily designed to kill everyone – back in the First World War, 97% of mustard gas victims survived, and two-thirds even returned to duty. Didn’t mean you shouldn’t be very careful about your respirator and gas cape, though – mustard gas was really vicious stuff even if it didn’t kill that many people, you’d really, really regret coming into contact with it.

  10. I have come to the conclusion that ‘institutionally,’ and her sister ‘systemic,’ are adjectives meaning, “Not really. We are just saying this shit because idiots will believe it.”

    E.g.:

    ‘The GMB is institutionally sexist.’

    Means “we are going to stir up some shit as if GMB were sexist.” It’s nebulous enough that it can neither be proven nor disproven.

  11. Surely there are easier ways to assassinate, better methods, something more discreet? Poison seems so cissy-like. What’s wrong with an old-fashioned bomb or a garrotte?

  12. BlokeInTejasInNormandy

    So sexist means : there’s not the distribution of employees that I think tehre should be, and they do things I disapprove of?

    If they were truly **sexist** there’d be evidence that they had rejected female applicants who were better qualified for jobs, systematically, and for a long time.

    But apparently that’s not available evidence, so it’s just another twat opining.

    Quelle surprise.

  13. @Jussi
    A bullet in the head could be attributed to almost anybody. Polonium or a nerve agent sends a message that it’s government operatives carrying out the killing.

  14. “Why are those vices considered male”

    For the same reason men sweat and women perspire. What the other n “genders” do I really have no idea.

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