Re-fund the police
Shoutout to the Police and Crime Commissioner of West Midlands Police, David Jamieson who, after complaining about how small his budget is, has managed to save enough to fund an “Assistant Director of Fairness and Belonging”. The starting salary is £75,000 and in the job ad the force ambitiously tell us they’re looking for a “forward thinking, creative individual” who will be “comfortable challenging senior leaders”. One bigoted officer complained to the Telegraph that it was an “insult” to those on the frontline who are on “half this salary” despite “putting their lives in danger”. Oh, so suddenly we should give up on challenging the white privilege and unconscious bias of senior officers just because money is tight? The hierarchy of priorities should obviously be:

1. Facilitating BLM protests/stopping lockdown protests
2. Decorating police cars in rainbow flags
3. Responding to violent crime

Is that so hard to grasp?

Set in stone
Thankfully removing problematic statues and monuments around Britain has become institutionalised, and many local councils are busy dispatching them without all the toxic masculinity needed by protesters to haul them into the sea themselves. Exeter City Council are energetically trying to “relocate” the city’s statue of General Buller – whose crimes are so infamous I need hardly relate them to you, or indeed say he who he was, but rest assured, Exeter City Council knows – and his horse Biffen. They say the relocation will occur “against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement”. I don’t know what crimes Biffen committed, but I note that he’ll doubtless have been an invasive, non-indigenuous species in many colonial contexts. One can’t help but admire the Council’s choice of language and think of the ingenious ways forward thinking European leaders in the last century “relocated” some of their troublesome colleagues, against the backdrop of dissent, treachery and dodgy horse association. Exeter say it’s not just about Buller, but “the role public statues have in reflecting present-day values in the city”. Sadly they haven’t listed any of Buller’s sins but the fact he was alive before 1997 is surely a good place to start, and the fact that he got the Victoria Cross while his racist horse Biffen (who is still a victim here) got nothing. Fighting for the empire and gross speciesism to boot. In a truly just world the statue would be toppled onto a Lockdown sceptic.

Stand up to hate
Men standing to pee is triggering to trans men, according to this excellent meme which is sadly being mocked on social media by alt-right activists and TERFs. A definitely real person writes: “As I was transitioning, I found it triggering to constantly have to use the stall when going to the bathroom with my cisgender male friends”. How could the male friends be so transphobic? Mind you, this could worryingly risk turning into being het-cis appropriation of she-micturation. Oh dear, I may need to report myself to HR’s intersectionality zoom chat.

Making the Weather
Before 1998 in Germany cloudy low pressure weather systems used to have female names and sunny highs were male, demonstrating beyond doubt the patriarchal nature of the planet. But now fearless activists journalists have uncovered another profound injustice in our atmosphere – the fact that German storms are given German names. The group have just started something called #WeatherCorrection, and no, it’s nothing as sinister as the cloud-seeding that tyrants reportedly do to make sure their birthday is sunny, it’s just a harmless plot by the New German Media Makers to re-make the weather in their image. The group have started naming weather fronts foreign-names instead of German ones as an awareness campaign in which they also want the media to impose race quotas when hiring. In Germany anyone can name a weather system; it’s  €360 for a sunny high but €240 for a rainy low. Of course, placing a lower value on so-called “worse” weather is problematic, as is the discriminatory practice of only accepting euro payments when placing your political ad in the sky, but it’s progress. The next task will be combatting the white fragility of snowflakes and re-naming the earth’s light-source something a bit less male.