Latest news with #GabyHinsliff
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Devastating repercussions of calling out misbehaviour at work
I'm writing in response to Gaby Hinsliff's column (White men are apparently terrified of doing the wrong thing at work. I have some advice, 26 May). I was sexually assaulted at work by a man twice my age – my boss. I reported it to my company and to the police. I pursued legal justice. I spoke openly about what had happened. And I lost my job and haven't worked since. This isn't from a lack of trying. I would love to be working again. I'm a well-educated woman in my 30s – I have a postgraduate degree, I've worked for the Foreign Office and the BBC, I speak Arabic and French. I've been working since I was 13. Even as I changed countries and careers in my 20s, I was never unemployed – until now. I've applied for hundreds of roles. I've networked. Nothing sticks. My hunch is that when prospective employers Google me and find my name linked to a story of sexual violence at work, the conclusion is swift: she's trouble, or she's troubled. The great irony is that I believe I'm far less trouble or troubled than I would be had I stayed silent – this stuff festers if you swallow it. Speaking up wasn't about getting my own back and it wasn't about wallowing. I made an impossibly hard choice to protect my dignity. Women should be allowed to work without betraying themselves to get it. I agree with Gaby that some of the anxiety that Tim Samuels identifies is real, but it should be some relief to those behind the YouTube show that he presents, White Men Can't Work!, that, time and time again, men who are called out for bad behaviour in the workplace bounce back. It's the women who had the courage to call them out who suffer the devastating professional fallout. If you publish this, please keep me anonymous, as my days of believing it's empowering to speak up are long gone. Name and address supplied It's easy to sneer about white men being discriminated against at work. But I've been in precisely that situation myself on two occasions – once in a civil service department and once at a charity. On both occasions, the discrimination, which was humiliating and hurtful, was perpetrated by white women in positions of power. I suppose I could have just accepted it, as Gaby Hinsliff suggests, by acknowledging that others suffered much more (which was undoubtedly true), but I felt forced to leave the job instead. The experience has had a profound and lasting effect on my and address supplied What I find objectionable in Gaby Hinsliff's piece is the treatment of white men as some kind of homogeneous group. As if the combination of whiteness and maleness alone confer privilege. Some white men are indeed very privileged and have a sense of that privilege being diminished, as Ms Hinsliff suggests. Other white men are very far from privileged. White males are greatly overrepresented among those failing at school, among the homeless living on the streets, among those injured and killed in industrial accidents or through self-destructive reckless behaviour, among the isolated and lonely, and among those who take their own lives. Hinsliff writes: 'So if white men genuinely don't think work is working for them, welcome to the club, boys. Just don't forget that some of us have been here rather longer than you.' For many white working-class men (and black men too), it's not just work – the education system, the criminal justice system and social structures have never worked for them. They don't need to be told to check their BoothCanterbury
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Texas model cuts costs and prison numbers
We welcome Gaby Hinsliff's call for 'a more enlightened approach to cutting crime' (Republican Texas is a surprising model for solving the UK's prison crisis – but it just might work, 16 May). To achieve this and deal with the problem of prison overcrowding, we do not need to build more prisons. Community sentences require more resources so they can constructively challenge offending behaviour while keeping convicted individuals in touch with their responsibilities to families and communities. For those in prison, this would also allow for the application of the Texas model – a promising form of prison reform that is not only cost-saving but has also reduced crime and recidivism rates in that state. Its success lies significantly in prioritising incarceration for violent offences. It also emphasises in-prison and community-based treatment programmes for non-violent offenders, many of whose crimes intersect with substance abuse and/or mental health problems. Several other US states have found the Texas model fits with their wish to curtail prison numbers without jeopardising public VanstoneEmeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice, Swansea UniversityAnita Kalunta-CrumptonProfessor of administration of justice, Texas Southern UniversityPhilip Priestley Independent scholar As welcome as it is that the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has acknowledged the prison crisis, her solutions treat symptoms, not causes (Jail time for recalled offenders to be limited to free up prison places, 14 May). Limiting recall periods to 28 days may provide temporary relief, but the admission that prisons in England and Wales will still be 9,000 places short by 2028 exposes the futility of building our way out of this crisis. We cannot continue this cycle of emergency releases and quick fixes. The government must prioritise evidence-based alternatives: community sentences, electronic monitoring and intensive supervision programmes that cost less and reduce reoffending more effectively than prison. Most importantly, we need investment in prevention – addressing the social determinants of crime through education, mental health services and employment support. The current approach is both financially unsustainable and morally StoddartProject coordinator, the Oswin Project Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
When a university degree won't get you a decent job or home
The university degree was never a guaranteed ticket to a good career. I graduated from Cambridge about the same time as Gaby Hinsliff (We told young people that degrees were their ticket to a better life. It's become a great betrayal, 13 May). Without middle-class connections, or 'professional' work experience, I returned home after graduation to a neighbourhood counted among the 1% most deprived in England, in a post-industrial northern city with a crumbling social infrastructure. I had £30 to my name and took a job worse than the one I'd had while at school in order to live. To get to London, where there was a greater range of jobs, I did non-graduate work for a few years, sofa-surfing to begin with. Like today's graduates, I had to do further study to get a decent job, and I was just shy of 40 when I managed to get a career job. I guess it is a better life in the end, as the alternative may well have been a cycle of bad jobs and unemployment. Of course, this circuitous route to decent work and conditions means that I couldn't afford to live in London (I left), and won't ever earn enough for a middle-class home and a good pension. As always, jobs, housing, pensions and other social issues become a political problem when it is deep enough to affect privileged white middle-class people in addition to those at the bottom of the pecking order who were already and address supplied Gaby Hinsliff writes of the increasingly disappointing prospects for new graduates. Thanks to the Blair-era policy of 'everyone must go to university', we have a massive oversupply of young graduates in the UK. We also have a massive shortage of more practical skills – Angela Rayner's ambitious housebuilding programme was scuppered before it even got off the ground because we do not have nearly enough tradespeople to build 1.5m homes. Yet the government has just announced its intention to allow only those with a degree to immigrate to Britain as skilled workers. Astoundingly, they are going to import more graduates to compete with young British graduates for jobs, while banning the people we need most – those who do the jobs that young British people can't or won't do. I'm trying to think of a way this policy could be more stupid, but I'm not CrockerShoreham, Kent Gaby Hinsliff notes that many graduates of the class of 2024-25 may struggle to find appropriate employment. That is true, although those who do get jobs will get better salaries over time, albeit with student loans to pay off. Hinsliff also raises the issue of whether studying for a degree is worthwhile. It is an argument put forward by the culture-war right – namely, that graduates who can't get jobs become highly educated troublemakers. Indeed, while my first degree, nearly 50 years ago, did lead me into a professional job, it also taught me how to write a leaflet, organise a protest and speak at mass meetings. None of this was of course on the official curriculum. A reminder, and something Hinsliff misses, that there is such a thing as a liberal education, something beyond monetary FlettTottenham, London Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Rage against the mainstream: did UK politics just change for good?
As Reform UK reaches new highs in the polls, it feels more and more likely that Nigel Farage's triumph at local elections will be remembered as a huge turning point in UK politics. With support for the Tories at historic lows, and Keir Starmer's government in deep trouble, is there a way back for the mainstream parties? John Harris is joined by the Guardian columnists Gaby Hinsliff and Polly Toynbee to make sense of what could be the biggest political change to hit the UK in living memory
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Labour and Conservatives face a challenging electoral test
Talk of electoral pacts between the Conservatives and Reform UK for the right-of-centre vote has been widely reported. Your editorial (24 April) notes that as the policies of these parties move further right, some traditional Conservative voters will shift their allegiance away. Yet these voters are not going to the Labour party, as its leadership follows rightwards. A litany of government policies must seem as abhorrent to 'old school' Conservatives as they do to traditional Labour values. Instead, there is steady growth in support for parties that are broadly in the soft left, socially and environmentally aware space: Liberal Democrats, Greens, the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru. These four parties, albeit each with their own distinctive policy stance or geographic focus, now have a combined voting-preference share larger than that of Labour, the Conservatives or Reform. This can be seen in the three most recent nationwide opinion polls – More in Common: 26%; YouGov: 30%; Find Out Now: 30%. This trend, little reported on – an exception being Gaby Hinsliff (We obsess over the angry young men going Reform. But what of the anxious young women going Green?, 25 April) – of younger, more educated women's despairing shift to the Green party can surely only broaden and deepen. For society is fragmenting as living standards fall, not least in response to climate breakdown, even while governments worldwide ignore this along with their electorates' own views on global heating. It should not only be the right-of-centre parties talking of electoral pacts to gain power and make a difference to our lives, but also parties to the left of this government. Otherwise, a future Nigel Farage-led government, incorporating the remains of the Conservative party, seems only too likely. Neil BrownOban, Argyll and Bute Your editorial assesses the threat posed by Reform to the Conservatives in the local elections. Equally concerning is the threat Reform also poses to Labour in the forthcoming Runcorn byelection. Labour's first few months in government have done little to stem the flow of disillusioned voters turning to Reform, with its seductive and simplistic solutions to complex problems. Keir Starmer knows that the self-imposed fiscal constraints belong to another economic era that has been swept away by Donald Trump's unravelling of global market orthodoxies. If people are to see real change in public services and their economic wellbeing, the fiscal shackles must come off. With the Tory party failing to offer an effective alternative, creating real change in voters' lives is the only solution to stop Nigel Farage emerging as the victor in future RiddleWirksworth, Derbyshire I am 67 and after a lifetime of voting Labour, I voted Green in the last election. I don't know who to vote for now that Labour has ceased to be a party of the left. I believe in social justice and I get the impression that many in this country would like the same. I don't agree with the current appetite for pitching groups of people against each other to stoke culture wars. If young men feel angry with their situation, perhaps we should be seeing what injustices they face before insulting them. And if young women are turning to the Green party, maybe Labour needs to remind itself of the principles on which it was founded. Janice HillTaverham, Norfolk Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
