England is a country in which a great deal is happening at the moment in respect of male advocacy. We already have had occasion to mention the Mankind Initiative which has carried out some great work in recent times; in particular it coordinated a campaign to mark Nov. 2 as “Male Victims of Domestic Abuse Day.” Indeed on that day 42 groups in the United Kingdom came together; the event was designed to highlight the fact that male victims make up only one in 25 victims accessing support from their local commissioned domestic service even though domestic abuse against men is widespread in the UK.
The Mankind Initiative has also produced a number of excellent videos. One of these, a video titled, “Men, You Are Not Alone,” has just been nominated for a CFA Charity Film Award in the UK.
We also noted the arrival on the scene of the All Party Parliamentary Group, APPG for Men and Boys, which has already produced three reports in its short existence. The first was titled “What it is like to grow up as a boy in Britain today”.
We have just heard of a new group there called MWWT, Men and Women Working Together; it looks like this title is designed to counter the kind of divisiveness between men and women which is fostered by current policies. It describes this sowing of division as Gender Apartheid.
Objective – campaign for a Minister for Men
One of its aims is to have a Minister for Men, on the face of it an idea which would be considered daft by many including of course the media and the rest of the Establishment. But as if to underline the seriousness of the proposal it was discussed at a Fringe meeting of the Conservative Party Conference in Oct 2022 where the APPG presented The Case for a Minister for Men with Mark Brooks of the Mankind Initiative doing the introduction. MPs Ben Bradley, Nick Fletcher, Caroline Ansell took part.
Calling for change, the website says: It will only be achieved by men and women working together to both turn back the tide and stop the rot.
It lists nine issues: Family Law reform, Domestic Abuse, Court anonymity and false allegations, Homelessness, Male Suicide, Health Issues, Boy’s education and Cultural Marxism.
Most of these are well known to Men’s Voices, forming our key issues. An interesting one is the last, Cultural Marxism. This is seen as the guiding ideology, the fundamental principles underlying the whole enterprise which is to destroy Western civilisation. Once again, many others have come to the same conclusion and we have written about it on several occasions.
Incidentally, lest anyone accuse them of being ultra conservative, MWWT and many other advocates quickly learned that they would get no support from Labour or indeed the Lib Dems whom they also approached for support; that the only possibility of political support came from Conservative ranks.
The EU and the Istanbul Convention
Of the current 27 member states of the EU, six have not ratified the Istanbul Convention:
Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. The EU is accustomed to issuing orders to member states and having them obeyed. It is becoming increasingly centralised, authoritarian and intolerant of member states exercising sovereignty over what they consider their own internal affairs. Accordingly the Commission has now determined to force the matter by issuing a Directive which would be binding on member states. It has further determined that the EU should accede to the Convention itself, a move which has been questioned in law, to increase pressure on recalcitrant states. This process has been going through the EU Parliament for some months.
DAVIA wrote to four committees of the EU Parliament and the seven main groupings therein. This was done rather late in the day. The EP is expected to vote on the matter shortly, perhaps next month.
We heard of the pressure brought to bear on the Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP, by the Party of European Socialists, to revoke its opposition to the IC; how four leading figures in the Commission travelled to Sofia to increase that pressure; but the BSP did not change its mind. The Constitutional Court decided that the IC was contrary to the Constitution, in large measure because of the insertion of the phrase “gender identity” in Art 4.3 of the Convention among those characteristics which are protected against discrimination.
The Court determined that this infringed upon the basic categories of “man” and “woman” which is contrary to the constitution.