What is the Great Privilege of our Times?

It is at times like this (a devastating world-wide pandemic) that an extraordinary privilege becomes apparent. This is the ability to live in two different countries (excepting the UK's 4 countries & the EU). People in transnational marriages have this privilege. Women always; men sometimes. This makes miscegenation very attractive. The UK is obsessed about equality but foreign men can live here through marriage. This rank privilege is (partly) because the Equal Opportunities Commission campaigned vigorously to defeat Mrs Thatcher's 1979 election promise to end it. Immigration was later determined by the House of Lords on 7 July 1983 to be outside the ambit of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. The EOC was legally required to support complaints by men as well as women, but its response to my complaint about this in 1977 was that it was outside its ambit. Nevertheless, the EOC - as stated above - spent public money campaigning hard and successfully to defeat Government policy. Public money spent to enable foreigners live in the UK....

Mrs Humphry Ward (1852-1920), "the greatest woman of her time"

When the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward died 100 years ago on 24 March 1920 she was called "the greatest woman of her time". In 1908 she founded the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League. Also in 1908 she founded the Passmore Edwards Settlement for orphans in London's Tavistock Square. It is now called the Mary Ward Centre. In 1916 she went closer to the British front line than any other woman gathering material for a book that was intended to encourage the Americans to join in the War. The horrors she described probably had the opposite effect. In the 1970s I requested the Greater London Council to put up a plaque to Mrs Ward on the Mary Ward Centre. This was refused on the grounds she hadn't lived there.