Publicity: it's a funny old game.
The Daily Mail, the Sun, the Mirror, the London Paper and Channel Four News all failed to credit Personnel Today with a story we wrote this week - while Equalities and Human Rights Commission chairman Trevor Phillips credited us with one we never did.
It was great to see the exclusive we ran on lie detectors being picked up across the national media. Just a shame they claimed it as their own when replicating quotes given to me.
Mr Phillips, on the other hand, had no problem mentioning Personnel Today, using the hallowed words on three separate occassions during a short speech to HR professionals at a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development diversity conference.
"I was nervous about being here after being labelled in Personnel Today as the man trying to kill HR," he said. This was the beginning of what was supposed to be a valuable insight into what the Equality Bill holds in store for employers, but turned out to be more of a disturbing insight into Phillips' paranoid mind.
We did once report on his comments that diversity was too big to be looked after solely by HR. He reiterated these comments at the CIPD conference, and then rubbed salt into the wound by saying diveristy needed "a board-level equality champion". Perhaps he was unaware that many of the people in his audience managed to combine being in HR with being - gasp - on the board.
Still, he eventually moved on from that bugbear to another favourite topic of his - positive, er, anything other than discrimination. Positive action, positive steps, affirmative action, all these are great. Positive discriminaiton is not. What's the difference? Well, he tried to explain that to me, but I got lost somewhere in the middle of his bizarre example about a world made up of men and boys.
Anyway, he made one thing clear. In a specifically targetted but gramatically suspect sentence, he told the audience: "For whoever is here reporting for Personnel Today, let me say this in words of one syllable: I do not support positive discrimination."
Five syllables at the end there, Trevor, but we get the message.
Comments (1)
Reflecting on Lord Justice Ward’s article in the Times 1st May 2008 on “Vengeful Mothers” I wonder how this may be rectified.
I have a perfectly good contact order, which has been in place since 2004 yet the mother has withheld my children for the past 9 months, there seems no way this can be resolved through any prescribed means with in the current family law protocols.
How am I supposed to honour my role as Father to two young sons, in their best interests and as prescribed by the Children’s Acts when there is no means of dealing with this blatant breach of sound court orders which is supported by a Cafcass report? Yet if I were to approach my own children, even on prescribed contact times, she can cry harassment, and try to have me arrested! Is there a human rights issue here?
I have reached the conclusion that the laws in this country regard the mothers as civil and the fathers as criminal and feel this is what underlines many of society’s ills with regard to children and teenagers that seem to have no respect of authority in school or indeed the law. All I wish to do is support my children through those tricky years
Posted by Dave Farmer | June 9, 2008 12:17 PM
Posted on June 9, 2008 12:17