Notices by HebrideanHecate (hebrideanhecate@spinster.xyz)

Oooooh, I really don't think it was human error.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/human-error-led-to-grooming-gang-cases-being-abandoned-9005xpz9t

Investigations into alleged grooming gangs were closed because of potential “human error” and police officers’ failure to pursue lines of inquiry, a senior law enforcement officer said. Thousands of closed cases in England and Wales are being examined as part of the national Operation Beaconport to uncover failures to tackle group-based child sexual exploitation. Some may be subject to reinvestigation by detectives. Nigel Leary, deputy director at the NCA, said: “Our initial reviews have identified that in some cases where there has been a decision to take no further action [NFA] there were available lines of inquiry that could have been pursued. “We’ve seen in those cases what appears to be potentially human error and … in some cases that those investigations haven’t followed what we would characterise as proper investigative practice, and that will have contributed to the NFA decision.”

https://archive.ph/pQv4h

@carolen That's it in a nutshell, these bloody people disgust me.

@KeepTakingTheSoma @sappholives83 We are already seeing that, and the bent judges and lawyers etc too.

@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain So sick of it, and the fact that they stand by and watch violent men on a takeover mission flood in. Where are all the women with children, why are the oh so concerned marching wazzocks not shouting about what is happening in Sudan and Nigeria, among others, but not a peep out of them, these tosspots though, oh they just love their dangerous men, full of support for them.

@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain I am incandescent with rage, these sodding politicians need strung up at traitor's gate, starting with Blair.

@KeepTakingTheSoma @Lady_Penelope Damn right they shouldn't, not anywhere, ever. This takeover of everything enrages me, and worst of all is medical setting, like that maggot of a junior Dr and her anti Jewish ranting, imagine having someone like that treating you, how unsafe.

@KeepTakingTheSoma @Lady_Penelope I hope they kick their arses seven ways from Sunday.

https://thecritic.co.uk/no-one-needs-privilege-to-enjoy-the-theatre/

Some of his complaints are fair enough. West End ticket prices have risen exponentially. Carl Woodward has highlighted how audiences are being priced out. Yet what truly struck me were Day-Lewis’s comments about theatre and elitism. He rails against the assumption that the stage is superior to the screen. He recalls that during his training (1975–78), the emphasis was almost entirely on live performance. He then makes an irritating claim. Theatre, he states, is an exclusive cultural institution which “essentially relies on people having had the privilege of an education that allows them to believe that they’re entitled to go to the theatre … It’s a relatively small group of people that is available to, and that is just quite wrong.” Full disclosure: I have considerable skin in this game. I hail from a working-class family in Romford, growing up there in the 1970s on a council estate. At no point can I ever recall thinking that I was not “entitled” to go to the theatre. Probably because, from a very early age, my parents — both of whom worked on the production line in Ford car factories — took me to theatres. At five, I was treated to pantomime at the London Palladium. A couple of years later, I saw Carry On London (I still can’t quite believe I saw Sid James live). By the mid-70s, I was being taken to our local, the Queen’s in Hornchurch, to see the likes of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (back in the day it bore a now-unpublishable title). Theatre-going was as natural to us as cinema-going, albeit a little less often as it was further away than the local Odeon and somewhat more expensive.

The culture of low expectations for “underprivileged” kids runs riot through the public-school custodians of our arts and media. Soon after my play Fat Souls won a competition at the lamentably lost Warehouse Theatre in Croydon, I attended a panel discussion there on new writing. The representative from the BBC told of his fight to produce “quality drama” and announced, “of course, we have to produce EastEnders for the tower blocks.” Ladies and gentlemen, I longed for quality drama, loathed EastEnders, and was living in a council tower block at the time. I will leave the reader to imagine what went through my mind on hearing that gross generalisation — similarly unprintable thoughts strike me on reading Day-Lewis’s cant.

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/under-pressure-nhs-fife-bosses-36132200

NHS Fife is monitoring the "unprecedented" impact of the Sandie Peggie tribunal on social media, with millions of people around the world talking about the health board.

The A&E nurse is suing her employer and transgender medic Dr Beth Upton after she was suspended and subjected to a misconduct investigation for objecting to the presence of a biological male in the female changing rooms.

A landmark employment tribunal brought by Ms Peggie has been playing out this year, with two sessions of hearings putting both NHS Fife and the Scottish Government's policy of gender self-ID under the spotlight.

Members of the health board's staff governance committee recently considered a report including a section called 'Social media focus: Employment tribunal coverage – unprecedented interaction and its wider impact'. Humiliatingly for NHS Fife and the SNP administration in Edinburgh, the most popular hashtags were #istandwithsandiepeggie and #sandiepeggie followed by #resigncarolinelamb (the chief executive of NHS Scotland) and #resigncarolpotter (the chief executive of NHS Fife).

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/sandie-peggies-personal-data-included-36131221

Personal details about NHS Fife nurse Sandie Peggie were included in secret briefings for SNP ministers prepared by her bosses at the health board. Ms Peggie's legal team say she is concerned about the content of the emails, which include references to her occupational health appointments and other internal employment matters.

Remarkably, the health board told the Scottish Government the married mum's "personal circumstances" may have "contributed to the incident" where she confronted transgender medic Dr Beth Upton in the female changing rooms at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy. They suggest the veteran A&E nurse should have had the "skills and knowledge to de-escalate or remove herself from this situation" on Christmas Eve in 2023 and claim the space was a "locker room and not a designated changing room".

The secret briefings were uncovered by The Herald under freedom of information legislation. Ms Peggie is suing her employer and Dr Upton after she was suspended and placed under investigation, leading to a landmark employment tribunal that has gripped the nation this year. Ms Peggie's solicitor Margaret Gribbon said: "Our client was concerned to learn about these disclosures and has asked me to write to Fife Health Board asking them to explain why they have divulged her personal data to third parties without her consent and with no redactions. She will consider next steps with her legal team once that explanation has been provided."

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5430685-is-intersectional-feminism-the-problem-filia-sbs-statement

As a brown woman who used to admire SBS greatly I just want to say my feminism includes all women, I don’t care if they are Israeli or Palestinian, rape and violence against women is disgusting whatever the ethnicity or religion of the man that does it and the ethnicity and religion of the woman on the receiving end. I’ve seen the rape denial and it’s abhorrent. No girl or woman should expect less sympathy or anger on her behalf because of her religion or ethnicity. This is where intersectionality has got us, hierarchies of rape. I remember arguing about this with someone on here YEARS ago. I was trying to point out that whilst I completely got where it came from as a brown woman and I’ve experienced some of it I thought it was a blunt tool to understand disadvantage. It felt like there was so much missing from that analysis, it was really useful in terms of understanding prejudice in the workplace and Crenshaw really did useful work, but it expanded to a degree thats made it meaningless as a useful tool for feminists outside of very narrow analysis. I’m even more convinced of that now.

How hard is it to just say rape is wrong and there is never any good reason to rape, ever. They also turn a blind eye to Palestinian women talking about coerced sex to secure aid from Palestinian men. Something that again we know happens in war, but it will be ignored because they don’t want to confront the fact that some men on their “side” are just rapey fuckers and will rape any woman they can. Personally I find it much easier to sleep at night knowing I won’t let any rapist hide behind my skirts. I don’t get this, SBS are fully aware of what kind of man will rape a woman, and they are fully aware of the devastation that rape causes, they are fully aware of the fact that women from conservative communities are less likely to report rape so will be fully fucking aware that a man who raped an Israeli woman is just as likely to be raping a Palestinian woman. It’s complete and utter brain rot. They used to be amazing, helping women who were some of the most vulnerable in society and least likely to go to the police and now they are basically rape apologists.

@Flick and here we thought he was just a Welsh choirboy!

https://thecritic.co.uk/no-longer-a-nation-of-shopkeepers/

Working for Neal’s Yard in the 1990s, she became interested in how to help small, more specialist local suppliers whose products were not being stocked, regarded as too expensive by the supermarkets. She has focused on supplying the best quality of food which she sources direct from the farmers themselves or from specialist suppliers, such as the bakery E5, whose founder, Ben Mackinnon, she helped with advice when it was first established, and Charlie Macintosh who runs a small brewery in Hammersmith.

Now Tower Hamlets is destroying the business and all the other traders in the street by employing a third party, Exigen, to raise the rent to what it regards as the market level.

This is a morality tale as to how Britain, once a nation of shopkeepers, allows local authorities to support rack-renting landlords and drive specialist shops and small traders out of business.

https://unherd.com/2025/10/why-is-london-ignoring-its-grooming-gangs/

Stratford’s shopping centre has been a notorious grooming hotspot for years. It’s easy to be anonymous in the cavernous mall, and security guards have spoken about how hard it is to keep an eye on suspicious individuals as they disappear into the front and out of the back of many of the large department stores. “It’s not illegal for teenagers to have coffee together, or to flirt, go into the cinema, or try on trainers,” one police officer told me. “What are we supposed to do?” By now, everyone is familiar with the grooming gang scandal. But few people realise how serious the problem is in London — and those who do are very reluctant to call it out. As we are only now discovering, the capital’s politicians, police and social workers are just as guilty as those pilloried Up North for conspiring to keep this growing threat out of the public eye. Rather than exposing and stopping the trafficking of girls, they have dodged the issue by saying this isn’t sexual exploitation: instead they say the girls are criminals too. They’re being recruited for “county lines”, to move and supply drugs.

Khan’s response is scarcely credible on many levels, especially since the grooming of girls in London has been going on for decades and if one whistle-blower is to be believed, it is at “catastrophic” levels. Jon Wedger is a former Metropolitan Police officer with more than 25 years experience investigating child sexual exploitation. Back in 2006, Wedger submitted a list of 50 youngsters who had been groomed and sexually abused in the capital, providing details such as the car-registration numbers of the perpetrators. But he was told to back off by social services, and even a large children’s charity, because he was generating “extra work”.

As the scandal in London grows, the process for bringing institutions to account is in complete disarray. And last night, a fourth member of the Starmer inquiry resigned: all four women are victims; all four are sick of the continued cover-up. The question for the rest of us is: how can there ever be justice for the abused girls, and retribution for the perpetrators, if public servants such as Khan remain in denial?

https://archive.ph/SKuwW

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp1gk0n23o

The Metropolitan Police says it will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents to allow officers to "focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations".

The announcement came as the Met confirmed it was dropping a probe into Father Ted creator Graham Linehan after he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence in posts on X.

Mr Linehan was arrested by five officers on 1 September after arriving on a flight from the US, sparking a backlash from some public figures and politicians.

The Crown Prosecution Service said it had decided no further action should be taken in the writer's case following a "careful review" of the evidence supplied by police.

@KeepTakingTheSoma @RadicalCartoons @TriptychTwinsRidesAgain I see Stella's point absolutely, and also these people were probably the kind who would have cheered when it happened in Canada, but I agree with Soma, because it is thin end of the wedge too. This whole digital ID thing to me stinks of this shit. Govts have always been iffy, but things are bad in a way here now that is different, far more dodgy, actually, in my opinion, they are outright traitors, and I would not trust them an inch not to do this to any of us.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/celebrities-making-autism-seem-desirable-and-that-s-misleading/ar-AA1OGgwv?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=68f2c9597d5f4fab85d6a96e6a3ecc34&ei=7

In recent years, a number of celebrities have spoken of being diagnosed with ADHD and autism as adults, some in middle age. “We’re misleading people as a society,” Dr O’Sullivan said during a talk at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. “We’ve got an awful lot of celebrities saying, ‘Well, I got my diagnosis and the world opened up to me.’ And they get book deals and stand-up comedy tours. “The average person who gets diagnosed will not get those things, but we have a culture of leading people to believe that a diagnosis will lead somewhere wonderful. “It’s now being incorporated into people’s personalities as an identity. I work with people with epilepsy. We’ve never called them ‘epileptics’ – we call them ‘people with epilepsy’ because they are people who happen to have that disease. “Whereas now the trend is to say ‘I am autistic’, rather than ‘I’m a person with autism’. And that is a real problem because, once you incorporate your illness into your identity, how do you get better?”

@KeepTakingTheSoma @AnungIkwe Yeah, and I am sick of so called feminists like that.

@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain @virvallis Of course he has, this is nothing short of treachery by UK Govts.

@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain @virvallis https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce86y13m4gno

Three men have been charged with raping a woman on Brighton beach, Sussex Police has said.

Police were called to the Lower Esplanade at about 05:00 BST on 4 October after reports that a woman in her 30s had been attacked.

Sussex Police said Abdulla Ahmadi, 25, an Iranian from Crewe, Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, both Egyptians from Horsham, have been arrested and each charged with two counts of rape.

The force added the three men had been remanded in custody and were due to appear at Brighton Magistrates' Court on Thursday.