Sixty female civil servants have accused the Ministry of Defence of having a “toxic” sexist culture in a letter written to the department last month. Accusations include groping, harassment and verbal abuse, with one woman claiming a senior official told her “there were only two kinds of women in defence, the bitches, who were effective, and the mumsy ones, who were completely useless”. Harsh…
Another accusation includes senior male officials making excel spreadsheets that rated women based on their looks and what they’d be like in bed. So that’s what our pen pushers are doing, no wonder productivity is so low…
In the letter seen by the Guardian, the MoD is blasted for it’s toxic culture:
“Women’s day-to-day professional lives are made difficult thanks to behaviours that would be considered toxic and inappropriate in public life, but that are tolerated at the MoD. We are spoken over during meetings, we are subject to pejorative language, we receive unwanted attention and face sexual harassment, including intrusive staring, sexualised comments, running commentary about what we wear, how we look, and how we smell.”
The letter slammed the “male-dominated” department which apparently sees women “overlooked” for promotions. The department has the most male staff (59.49%) in the civil service. Female public servant might have a better time at Health and Social Care, where the majority are women. Maybe Glen won’t want them to return to the office 3 days-a-week anymore…
The Met has managed to draw enough of its firearms officers back into the fold after the 300-strong Kaba walkout over the weekend. The Home Office had asked the army to step in as a contingency…
The Met is now saying that “discussions have been taking place with those officers” over the weekend and London couterterrorism duties can be fulfilled by the Met’s own firearms officers. At ease…
Read the Met’s full statement below:
Scrolling through the government’s civil service job listings this afternoon, Guido was less-than-reassured to see a new job advert put up for a “DNO Warhead Nuclear Threat Reduction Programme Manager” over at the MoD. In light of the heated tensions on European soil, defence chiefs are looking for someone to step up to the plate and help “mitigate threats across the nuclear spectrum”:
“Lead on the programme management of the Nuclear Threat Reduction programme delivered through [Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE)], to a variety of customers across Government. Establish and maintain requirements for the Nuclear Threat Reduction programme to deliver to Dep Hd NTR, tracking and managing AWE’s programme performance to time, cost, and quality, escalating issues as appropriate. Interface closely with DNO enabling functions for financial, commercial, and PMO support.”
Perhaps more shocking than the advertising of the role itself, however, is the comparatively meagre salary offered for such a stressful and essential public sector job: just £40,000. The double blow being that you may also have to work in Reading…
In December Guido revealed the NHS had moved on to hiring diversity managers with salaries now up to £108,000 – 2.7x that being offered to the people now being asked to avert nuclear armageddon. If we’re all soon to be vaporised underneath a mushroom cloud, hopefully it’ll be an equitable extermination…
The Centre for Army Leadership has announced they’re to host Extinction Rebellion’s Chris Taylor at their Culture and Leadership Conference on 1st December. According to the announcement Taylor will talk on “Leadership in a time of social collapse”. Guido imagines Her Majesty’s forces will be only too happy to be lectured by a spokesman for a group that last year hijacked Remembrance Day to daub the Cenotaph in extremist protest garb reading “Climate change means war”.
Surely the army should be busy dealing with loons like Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain – not taking lectures from them…
UPDATE: In just under two hours his invite has been rescinded
While the CAL encourages diverse thinking and alternative views, we recognise the challenge of inviting a member of XR to speak at our conference. At the direction of the Army’s Director Leadership, Chris Taylor will no longer attend.
— Centre for Army Leadership (@Army_Leadership) November 9, 2021
It was just yesterday when Boris warned that the UK was “at risk of a kind of know-nothing, cancel culture iconoclasm”, and if this new 30-page ‘inclusive language guide’ from the Ministry of Defence is anything to go by, it looks like he might be right. You might think that an organisation with a mission that often involves waging war and killing people would be resistant to the march of wokeness…
It’s a gripping read. Describing itself as “a practical toolkit [for] creating a structure and a standard for inclusive language in Defence”, the manual encourages Defence employees (including those on the front line) to “keep referring back to the guidance” to foster an inclusive and professional environment. While it insists it’s “not an attempt to police language”, the guide nonetheless offers some helpful pointers over which phrases might upset fellow soldiers, and some alternatives:
- ❌ “Girls, boys and youngsters” “Colleagues, personnel, young people” ✅
- ❌ “Young and vibrant team” “Effective and vibrant team” ✅
- ❌ “Mature workforce” “Experienced workforce” ✅
- ❌ “The disabled, handicapped” “Person with a disability” ✅
- ❌ “The females in the platoon” “The women in the platoon” ✅
Despite weighing in at a hefty 30 pages, the guide also warns that “language is constantly evolving, so this guide is not definitive and will be subject to review and updates annually.” Time to get learning… if the MoD is going to bring death and destruction to our enemies, at the very least they should get their pronouns right…
The Ministry of Defence has denied claims that Russia fired at a British ship this morning, claiming that the “Russians were undertaking a gunnery exercise in the Black Sea and provided the maritime community with prior-warning of their activity”.
No warning shots have been fired at HMS Defender.
— Ministry of Defence Press Office (@DefenceHQPress) June 23, 2021
The Royal Navy ship is conducting innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law.
Contradictory reports, however, suggest the Russian Navy’s Su-24 attack aircraft dropped four bombs along the path of the British Royal Navy’s HMS Defender destroyer to “stop” it from further manoeuvres. That would make it the first time since the Cold War that Russia has used live ammunition to deter a Nato vessel…
The Russian military claims that at 11.52 am a British destroyer crossed the Russian sea border, and Russia responded with warning shots after the British ship ignored verbal warnings. The confrontation comes as the UK today announced it would support Ukranian naval capabilities around Crimea…
