Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Councils told to drop personal questionnaires
FOR YEARS councils throughout Britain have been burning real money (taxpayers cash) in an extraordinarily useless way. The collection of responses – whether truthful or not – to diversity surveys is surely one of the largest piles of utterly useless information in council possession.
In recent times, there's been a survey (self-selecting, of course) by Haringey, on governance. But more than 90% of the questions had nothing to do with municipal governance – actually a serious issue – but were about the respondent's personal attributes, including asking if the respondent was transexual.
All balance, priority, proportion and common sense seemed to have departed.
It is worrying that money was wasted in this way and that otherwise sane people could justify such waste with a straight face. Waste in this way prevents money being spent on genuine services that are of real use to the community, such as services for youth and the elderly. How much real benefit could have made with that money I wonder?
Finally, the government appears to be tackling this nonsense:
Councils told to drop personal questionnaires (BBC story)
Tags for Forum Posts: diversity, survey, transgender, waste
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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YOU HAVE to wonder at the brains behind the nonsense. The powers that be, claim that the responses help them plan public services better.
I few moments thought reveal this line of logic to be flawed. (let us suspend disbelief for a moment and make the heroic assumption that all responses are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth).
Even if you take the authorities' perverted reasoning at face value, it still makes no sense. For example, let us assume for the sake of argument, that an unusually high proportion of new library users were trans gender or were another minority interest:
In what way would library services be rearranged in response ?!
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Clive and Osbawn,
Not for the first time I detect an unwarranted and pennypinching attack on our Council's essentially caring services. As bibliophiles you should know better. Library services have always tried to be sensitive intermediaries between authors and readers. How would I ever have encountered Enid Blyton's Georgina (a WWII creation from the year before I was born) who always insisted she was a tomboy George, dressed as a boy with close cropped hair, were it not for our local County Council's transgender item in their enlightened 1942-'43 data collection? And how would our librarians ever know how many copies of Black Beauty to order or how to shelve them appropriately were it not for their council's sensitive questioning on Pulchritude, Negritude, Equinitude etc.? Osbawn, your two-year old is a tabula rasa on which you must allow your Council's stylus to inscribe freely. Do not frustrate it.
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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I wouldn't have put you down as a Kirrin Island fan OAE..
I wonder if the UK will ever get over this attack of Besserwisser-ism ... commonly know as Klugscheißer-ei .....so many seem to be affected..
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OAE:
You've set out the case for libraries.
But its not just the library service for which this kind of make-work is collected. Some months ago, I was thinking of going for a swim at the council's pool in Crouch End. Apart from the Direct Debit forms I collected from the office, there were pages of equailty/diversity utter-nonense to complete.
It seems that even going for a swim is subject to a municipal personal information gathering exercise – but to what end?
Now, I'd much like to hear what you have to say about
(a) Diversity/Equal Opportunity Survey Information
and
(b) the provision of Swimming Pools!
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Surely, Clive, you do not question the Council's need to plan its services according to the predilections of its Park Road end-users for breast stroking, back stroking, butterflying behaviours, all broken down by ethnicity, age and sex (aren't we all?)?
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OAE: I thought you might have said that, if the recorded response rate for trans-genders was higher than average (where are those stats, I wonder?) then the London Borough might build separate changing rooms at pools for those whose current gender differs from their birth gender.
On the other hand, the council could consider stop wasting money and instead, spend it on real services for the public.
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