Vehicles Not Allowed on Driving Test

Someone found the blog on the search term “cars not suitable for dvsa driving test”. The rules for this are actually quite simple and are given on the GOV.UK website.Fiesta Van

You definitely can’t use a BMW Mini convertible, a Ford KA convertible, a Toyota iQ, or a VW Beetle convertible. You are advised to contact DVSA if you plan to use ANY convertible or ANY panel van (and I would assume that includes those semi-estate cars without side windows you often see BT engineers or technical reps driving).

There’s no point turning up in a car DVSA won’t accept, and arguing with them if you do is likely to get you arrested – plus you’ll lose your money.

One Lane Roundabouts

Please note that this is an old post, and the layout of the Racecourse Roundabout is not longer as described here.

The article How to do Roundabouts is one of the most popular on the blog, and I often get questions from people regarding roundabouts in their areas. Some of these I add to that main article, some I write additional articles about, and most I just give a private opinion via email.

Racecourse Roundabout, Nottingham (old layout)

I noticed someone ask on a forum about roundabouts which only have a single lane. Apparently, the ADI in question had been spoken to by an examiner about their pupil not driving all around the edge of a roundabout. The examiner apparently said that even if a roundabout only has one lane on approach then candidates should keep to the left. More on this later.

First of all, there is no one answer or solution which fits every roundabout. Secondly – and the ADI mentioned above did not provide the actual location – you need to understand the roundabout in question.

The photo above is the Racecourse Roundabout in Nottingham. Candidates taking their tests at Colwick often have to negotiate it twice (and three times wouldn’t be out of the question). Look at the darkened tyre marks travelling from left to right – everyone and his dog takes that “straight” route through the roundabout.

When I was still a wet-behind-the-ears ADI, I naively taught my pupils to go all around the outside edge – just like you’d do if you were engaging 100% of your Colourfile Presenter and 0% of your brain. It was only after I discovered that, especially during rush hour, going round the edge is a sure fire way of having every prat travelling towards Doncaster use the opportunity to overtake and sound their horn, I got wise and quickly started teaching my pupils to take the same line as everyone else.  THERE ARE NOT TWO LANES ON THIS ROUNDABOUT. It may well be wide enough for two or even three cars, but at no point are cars following correct lane discipline travelling legitimately side by side around it.

Another problem with driving à la Colourfile is that the outer edge of a roundabout is where all the glass and nails collect – usually embedded in inch-thick piles of other crap, all nicely poised to poke right into your tyre if you drive through it – and in the case of the Racecourse Roundabout, since very few other drivers except a few learners go out there, there’s loads of the stuff. There’s no way I want my pupils driving in that – they have enough ways of trying to @%£$ up my car as it is, without me showing them another.

Another local roundabout, this one over on the Beeston side, is also definitely only one lane wide. Yes, you could sit two cars side by side, but every feed road is only one car wide at the entry point. IT IS ABSOLUTELY ONLY ONE LANE WIDE.

Roundabout in Wollaton, Nottingham

It would be nice if all roundabout neatly met these same criteria, but they don’t. This next one is near the location of the old Chalfont Drive test centre (now demolished), and it used to feature on every test conducted there.

Roundabout in Beechdale, Nottingham

Although it isn’t marked with lanes, it IS possible for two cars to legitimately be side by side as they negotiate this one. They probably shouldn’t, but there is no reason why they can’t (and it’s in Beechdale, so they often do). Three of the feed roads are marked as being two lanes wide, and unlike the Racecourse example these lanes feed past other exits, which further suggests two implied lanes on the roundabout (i.e. both lanes can emerge on to it simultaneously). All this means that adopting a left or right  hand lane position becomes more worthy of consideration.

Going back to the original idea that an examiner had suggested candidates should be hugging the left lane when going straight ahead on such roundabouts, if he said that concerning the first two examples here he would be wholly wrong. It is downright dangerous on the Racecourse roundabout, and totally pointless on the one in Bramcote.

In the case of the Robin’s Wood Road example, though, the examiner would perhaps have a point, since not treating it as two lanes wide would mean encroaching on other traffic. And this is why roundabouts can be annoyingly hard to place into any single pigeon-hole as far as procedure is concerned. There is no single rule that works on all of them, but that doesn’t stop some instructors trying to make one up (the totally fallacious “12 o’clock rule”, for example) or sticking doggedly with their Colourfile approach (I see plenty of them driving wide on the Racecourse example when I’m following them, and it does cause confusion – particularly if they’re driving slowly).

The ADI mentioned at the start of this article didn’t provide a map reference for the roundabout which had triggered the comment, and it would be both useful and interesting to see the layout and to know how locals deal with it. Although it is possible that the examiner was wrong (the primary assumption on most forums), it is also possible that the ADI has missed something. However, if the roundabout was similar to either of the first two, a polite word with the examiner’s manager might be worthwhile.


Apparently, this is the roundabout the examiner was referring to. Having now seen this, I would say that the examiner certainly had a point, though without being from around there I couldn’t give a definite answer.

Roundaqbout in Cambridge

The reason is that at least one feed road is wide enough to allow two cars to get on to the roundabout at the same time, and at least one is wide enough to allow two to exit. The roundabout is easily wide enough to accommodate two vehicles and it is also of a fairly substantial size (in all my own local examples, above, the roundabouts are small).

Indeed, the photo shows a van and a car traversing the roundabout side by side and although the van appears to only be turning left, it would be extremely easy for him to continue to his 2nd exit if he changed his mind without having broken any rule of the road about lane markings on the feed (there aren’t any). Having said that, the tyre markings do suggest that the locals treat it as a single lane most of the time.

This definitely needs an official answer from the local test centre – no one else could give a definitive one.


A further point to consider is that some examiners WILL allow straight-lining – not hugging the left lane where there are two or more – when going ahead on unmarked roundabouts IF the appropriate checks are made to make sure no other vehicles are present.

I have covered it in more detail in the How to do Roundabouts article, but a few hundred metres before the Racecourse roundabout in Nottingham is the Virgin roundabout. It has two lanes in and two lanes out, but isn’t delineated on the roundabout itself. I always teach pupils to stay in their lane when they negotiate it – so to approach in the left, stay left, and hug the left when going straight ahead. If they don’t do this, it is invariably because they forgot or just weren’t aware of where the car was. I have heard several examiners say something like this in the debrief:

When we came to the roundabout you were in the left hand lane. As you crossed the roundabout to go ahead you [straight-lined] it – which is perfectly OK – but you didn’t check your right mirror to make sure it was clear.

Seriously, I have heard this a couple of times from different examiners and the fail goes down under “mirrors”. To be honest, I wish they wouldn’t explain it like this, because I know full well that the reason my pupil did it was because they were effectively wearing a blindfold at that moment in time and possibly weren’t even aware of any lanes, let alone who might be in any neighbouring ones. At the very least, their spatial awareness at that point was lacking, and it had nothing to do with not checking mirrors. The roundabout is very narrow and even slight encroachment can draw hoots of irritation from other drivers who are trying to overtake where they shouldn’t. It is why this particular one is what I call a “test killer”.

I can only speak for one or two examiners in Nottingham from whom I have heard this explanation, and it might not apply to other examiners or in other towns and cities.

Flock of Sheep

A bad accident happened in Penge, London, a few days ago when a car being chased by police crashed into pedestrians and killed two people. It’s always a little bit surreal when you see lives end like this – and that includes that of Joshua Dobby, the 23-year old driver who is “accused” of the crime. Still, better that he’s kept off the streets than put back on them.Pronouncing Penge

What bugged me, though, was how when the story was reported on the radio and media. They had some stupid (“shocked and appalled”) woman being interviewed pronouncing “Penge” like it rhymed with “Benjy”. Then, the newsreader started doing it as well.

Thankfully, the media realised that even if a handful of dickwads do pronounce it that way, it’s best to do it properly, and they’re now reporting it so it rhymes with “henge” – the way it should do.

Filthy Parasites

Over the last month or so, whenever I was picking a pupil up from Top Valley, it had been noticeable that a bunch of travellers (aka in colloquial terms, “gypsies”) had infested a playing field up that way.Sliding tile puzzle game

Now, I know there will be do-gooders out there who resent the use of the term “gypsy”, citing that it is the correct name for the Romani people emanating from Central and Eastern Europe. Actually, its legal meaning includes New Age Travellers, Irish Travellers, and “persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin, but does not include members of an organised group of travelling showmen, or persons engaged in travelling circuses, travelling together as such.” So there.

The kind I’m talking about, though, are filthy vermin who require a major clean-up operation after they’ve been kicked off land they have often broken into, quite probably by cutting down hedges, or breaking fences or locks (unless the Council had been stupid enough not to erect a strong barrier to prevent their purulent ingress in the first place). I’m citing real examples from around here, by the way, in case those do-gooders I mentioned are still on the case.

The mob who have just been kicked off the playing fields in Top Valley simply moved a few hundred yards to a field off Beckhampton Road, and now the idiot Council has got to go through the whole two-plus week saga of having them evicted again. Earlier this year they fouled up a field in West Bridgford. In the past they have infested fields close to my home. Wherever they go, reports of crime increase. All they do is scuttle from place to place like the vermin they are. It is obvious that they had already cased the new joint and organised a new hole to retreat to the second they left the previous location. They all own flat bed trucks of the kind used to effect minor road repairs and driveway upgrades.

As usual. they are “demanding” a permanent site. I would suggest this location: 48.535250, -14.550861 (paste it into Google Maps). No sensible or respectable member of society is going to be happy having these living anywhere near them. And nor should any council expect them to be.

What prompted me to write this was a couple of quotes from/about these people.

One of the travellers, Patrick Ward, told BBC Radio Nottingham’s Pip Watts they were using the Southglade Leisure Centre for showers and toilets.

Yeah, and I’ll bet Southglade stays open all night and on weekends, and that these “respectable” travellers just hold it in otherwise. And their kids – they always have loads of kids – won’t soil a nappy when the place is shut. For every traveller who has a chemical toilet, and who pays to have it emptied professionally, there are hundreds who don’t. And none of them carry bin bags away with them – they just leave their mess wherever it falls.

He said he had tried to live in a house in Bulwell with his family for a year but he “felt too enclosed” and moved back outside.

Sorry, Pat, but that’s no reason for people who don’t have your obvious emotional problems to have to put up with your odious presence. Particularly when you are not the only one in your pack, and no matter how good you are (or profess to be), you’re only as good as the worst of your number.

The simple fact is that these people shit in every corner of any field they occupy. You can see them going into the bushes to do it (when we had them, all the footpaths were fouled with it). They leave bin bags full of nappies and other filth when they go not to mention old baths, bikes, car parts/tyres, and other ridiculous items of junk. And they don’t pay to have it removed – we do. So they’re hardly the hard-done-by angels our friend Pat implies.


I noticed recently that a few caravans have set up on the green near Clifton Village. So far, there’s only about three – but just watch them multiply like fungus. They did last time they camped there.

How Do They Sleep At Night?

I’m referring to drug companies, after reading this “extraordinary commercial response” from Mylan (that’s their own self-glorious rhetoric, by the way) in dealing with a series of obscene price rises for a live-saving product they acquired.EpiPen

For anyone who doesn’t know, an EpiPen is a device used by people with severe allergies to give themselves a shot of epinephrine/adrenaline if they ever have an anaphylactic attack. It is a sterile ampoule of the drug with a spring loaded needle, and is based on devices developed by the American army to treat nerve gas attacks quickly. In short, it saves lives.

The EpiPen was first marketed in the mid-70s. It has been successively owned/part-owned/marketed and generally thrown around by various large pharma companies. Mylan got their hooks into it in 2007. Every time anyone else develops something even remotely similar, it seems that they’re sued to hell and back, and it’s so bad that any attempt to save someone having an anaphylactic attack without using an EpiPen is virtually an infringement of patent. You can read the extremely dark and disturbing history on Wikipedia.

But here’s the worst part. Up until 2007 in the USA, a pack of two EpiPens cost around $100 (note that they have a 12-month shelf life, so a user would be looking at spending the same amount each year just so they always had a back up). Even that price was bad enough, since only about $1 of drug is contained in each EpiPen. However, largely following a push by Mylan the market share of the EpiPen rose higher and higher. In spite of selling more and more units, Mylan increased the price successively, passing $265 in 2013, $461 in 2015, and more recently to and absolutely obscene $609 (it has gone up by 500% since Mylan acquired it in 2007).

Laughably, Mylan’s cheaper generic version which they are touting costs a “mere” $300. Just a reminder that it delivers $1-worth of drug. Indeed, you can purchase a 1ml ampoule of epinephrine for about $5 retail.

If you take a look on Amazon, auto-injector pens for Insulin cost around £40 (just over $50) for all-singing-and-dancing models with electronic memories. The EpiPen is a cheap plastic throwaway device. Mylan has no excuse whatsoever for the price it is asking Americans to pay.

It’s understandable that pharma companies charge high prices for brand new medicines because it costs many millions of pounds/dollars to develop them. It is also understandable that medicines which have a fairly low user base are also more expensive. But sometimes, the price asked is just too much – especially when it is hiked from an established low price to a much higher one, usually following the purchase of the marketing rights by a no-name company. Many years ago my mother asked me to buy her a tube of special ointment which she had previously been prescribed. It was available through the pharmacy and didn’t actually need a prescription – except that a small 5ml tube retailed at £45. She went to the doctor to get it instead. But this was chickenfeed compared to some of the borderline criminal pricing that goes on.

A few years ago there was an outcry when Martin Shkreli, CE of Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Daraprim from an established price of under $14 per tablet to $750. Daraprim was suitably “hot” in that is was used to treat certain conditions associate with HIV/AIDS, and before Shkreli could be lynched outright for this particular situation, he was indicted for fraud on unrelated issues (note: only “unrelated” in the legal sense, since there was clearly a link in terms of Shkreli’s morals).

Rodelis Therapeutics acquired Cycloserine, used to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis. They immediately raised the price from $500 for 30 tablets to $10,800.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals acquired heart drugs Isuprel and Nitropress and promptly increased the price of Isuprel by 525% and Nitropress by 212%.

Marathon has raised the prices of various drugs it acquired from others by a factor of four.

Doxycycline is a tetracycline antibiotic. It cost as little as $4.30 for 30 tablets in 2012. By early 2013 it was sitting at $165 for the same amount. A bottle of doxycycline was around $20 in  late 2013 and yet it was $1,849 by April 2014. Mylan appears to be involved in this one again.

In the UK it can be just as stupid. Paracetamol tablets cost as little as 14p for 16 tablets (0.88p per tablet) retail. Certain companies who manufacture them, and who sell them as branded items, have asked up to 75p for 16 tablets (4.69p per tablet) and even now ask 50p. The NHS is paying between two and twenty times the lowest retail price, depending on which news source you believe. And yet all paracetamol tablets labelled as “Paracetamol BP 500mg” are identical (even if they’re labelled “caplets” they’re still essentially the same and very cheap to make). Although it has been a long time since I was involved, you can believe me when I say that the cost price of each tablet/caplet is tiny. Even 14p for a tub of 16 is profitable except to dinosaur companies with ridiculous overheads.

Make Your Bloody Minds Up

Instructors’ favourite whinge at the moment is test waiting times. In Nottingham, a test booked anytime now (August) would be in mid-December, and the same story repeats across the country.Nelson area

In Nelson, near Burnley, they still have one of those silly little test centres. It has three parking bays and DVSA has recently upped the number of examiners there to six to try and improve waiting time. They’re apparently not too smart in Nelson, and so it is important to point out that six is a bigger number than three. Furthermore, the office there is crumbling, and the ladies’ toilets are often out of order. As everyone is no doubt aware, having the gents lavatory out of order is one thing, but the ladies’… that’s almost punishable by death. Therefore, DVSA is looking at closing down the current Nelson test centre and relocating to a better place.

Heaven forbid that the new test centre location should be 6km (4 miles) away in Burnley – somewhere big enough to have been heard of. Or which includes driving on big roads or the bay park exercise.

DVSA hasn’t said anything about a new location yet, but if this story is anything to go by, the local ADIs and Andrew Stephenson, MP for Pendle are already kicking up a fuss over it. Stephenson fears it will be “moved out of Pendle” – which obviously means “to Burnley”. If you look it up, Pendle is a district just north of Burnley, the northern reaches of which are three times more distant from Nelson than Burnley is! In fact, many Pendle learners most probably go to Skipton for their tests, because it’s nearer.

DVSA has no logical reason to specifically maintain a centre in Nelson with Burnley being so close. It has every reason to want a bigger location which can conduct more tests and all the manoeuvres, and which may or may not be in Nelson.

It’s just strikes me as funny that ADIs want shorter waiting times, but oppose anything which might achieve that depending on which head they’ve got on.

Another Statement of the Blindingly Obvious

It’s been in the news over the last year or so, but “the world’s longest aircraft” has been having test flights in the UK. It’s basically a big balloon with propellers – not entirely unlike a Zeppelin.World's longest airship

Well, on it’s second test flight it crash-landed. I love the euphemistic language they have used for that:

The flight went really well and the only issue was when it landed.

So that’s all right, then.

No one was hurt, which is why I’m making a joke out of it.

How to Destroy Your Life in a Single Step

Imagine this. You’re competing at the Olympics. You’ve won a few gold medals and you’ve left the Olympic Village to have a few drinks with your team mates one night. You end up pissed out of your skull – or at least pissed out of it enough to allegedly do a bit of vandalism and pee up the wall behind the petrol station you ended up in. You forgot you were in a country where security guards carry guns, even though you come from one where anyone above the age of five is allowed to, and when stopped at gunpoint and told to pay for the damage you opted for an alternative solution.Olympic pool

The alternative you chose was to claim you were robbed at gunpoint and add some stuff that made you out to be Rambo. However, you were too dumb to consider the possibility that CCTV might be operating in the store where it allegedly happened. After changing your story several times, the CCTV was seen and you were identified as the cowardly liar you really are.

Something not dissimilar to this happened when USA swimmers Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, and Jack Conger went out last week in Rio de Janeiro.

Lochte managed to escape back to the States after his false claim. Bentz and Conger had almost made it when they were removed from their flight by police. Feigen has ended up agreeing to pay around $11,000 to a Brazilian charity so that all charges can be dropped. The full story is somewhat confused and Feigen, at least, appears totally innocent. Lochte would appear to be the least innocent.

True American Heroes they ain’t. And at least one of them should be stripped of any medals he won. He’s already lost a lot of his sponsorship.


If Lochte and his gang of masterminds represent one stagnant pool of humanity, their actions certainly have highlighted another.

Most of America is appalled by what they did. Unfortunately, some of these “appalled” Americans don’t have a limiter on the pendulum which determines how they feel about something, and they allow it to swing freely from one absolute extreme to the other.

The simple truth is that Lochte and co. are merely a bunch of over-privileged assholes. That’s all there is to it. But this is the internet age, and things are never that simple when there is a whole heap of conspiracy theories to run with. Therefore, the events in Rio have stirred up the usual crowd of web loonies.

Loony #1 – Tariq Nasheed tweets:

If Black athletes pulled that… stunt, the headlines would read “Black Lives Matter Thugs Caused Terror At The Olympics”

Loony #2 – WendyBrandes tweets:

If Ryan Lochte lied about that robbery, how can we ever believe any man’s allegations of robbery?

I reckon that second one is a certifiably insane man-hater (I admit I’m reading into it with “man-hater”).

On a related note involving a different story, Ellen DeGeneres posted a tweet a few days ago showing herself piggybacking with Usain Bolt, with the comment:

This is how I’m running errands from now on.

Ms DeGeneres, who I have always liked and still admire, is married to another woman, and is probably all too aware of the problems that come with prejudice. I don’t think for a second that she was referring to anything other than Bolt’s speed but I seem to be in a minority on that. You see, American historical media libraries contain numerous images from the 19th and early 20th centuries of white people sitting on the backs of black servants and slaves. Many images simply show white children sitting on the backs of black servants playing “horsey”, though there are some unsettling ones of adults treating black people as furniture. The net loonies have drawn an immediate parallel and pilloried Ms DeGeneres.

But Ellen DeGeneres couldn’t win on this. If she’d have posted a picture of Usain Bolt riding on her back, these lunatics would accuse her of parodying those archive images.

A few months ago, Ms DeGeneres got caught up in a similar fiasco when she collaborated with clothing firm Gap. The advertisement had a simple and innocent photograph of four children, and yet the net loonies managed to read into it and declare it “racist”. Why? Simply because a taller white girl was apparently resting her arm on the head of a smaller (and younger) black child. The loonies had a field day over that – even the fact that the black child was shorter than the white one was somehow “racist”. No one mentioned that by the same token it was also sexist, since it showed four white girls (or possibly three and one boy). The loonies reckoned it was “passive racism” (their new Big Phrase). I charge – with my tongue in my cheek – that is was “active sexism”.

Although it is ugly and wrong, racism is something which on the whole just happens – it isn’t calculated and constructed like a complex machine, and to suggest that a company like Gap (or Ellen DeGeneres, who has had to endure prejudice herself). Most racists couldn’t explain the mechanisms involved in their prejudice if they tried (which is probably why “passive” is used to describe it). Most would have trouble writing their name, though they could probably just about manage to put an “X” in the “Leave” box on a voting form.

But that’s a different subject.

How to End a Career Before it’s Started

I saw this in the newsfeeds today. It’s in The Sun, which loves this kind of “shocking” story, but it raises a few questions.

Emily Higgins was out at a nightclub in the West Midlands and had apparently done what many young people do when they’re out in nightclubs in the West Midlands. She got pissed, then started a slanging match with bouncers. But this is the Facebook age, remember, and someone with time on their hands (and 16,000 followers) videoed the altercation and published it on social media. Quite why he chose to do this is a bit of a mystery if you don’t automatically think “tosser”.

Ms Higgins is due to start teaching year two at St Gregory’s Catholic Primary School in Bearwood in a few weeks, and inevitably in such a small area one of the followers of the film taker was a parent of one of the kids at the school, and recognised Ms Higgins. Word spread – or rather, shit was thrown – and as far as Ms Higgins is concerned it has now hit the fan.

One of the funniest bits is from a parent who “wished to remain anonymous”. Yeah, I’ll bet she does.

I was completely shocked when I saw the video and recognised her immediately.

I know that parents in our community have been shocked and disgusted by her behaviour.

Bearwood is part of Smethwick, and is just a few km from Birmingham city centre. The streets around the school are primarily small terraced houses. In spite of that, the above quote suggests that the occupants are angels straight out of Heaven who simply use Bearwood as a summer address. In reality, I would suggest that what Ms Higgins has done in her own time – and which didn’t involve the police, from the reports – is no worse than what many of these “shocked” parents get up to (either now, or in the past).

And how many teachers out there have gotten themselves drunk and done something stupid and/or embarrassing? As long as they don’t do it in front of the kids, or have it affect their work, it doesn’t matter.

The only reason THIS has been put in front of the kids is because of the berk with the camera and his Facebook fetish. He could have written about it, but what he has done is bordering on an invasion of privacy since it doesn’t place things in context but it does identify people in such a way that their entire career could be destroyed.

Emily Higgins is likely to lose her job over this, and being a teacher it would also be the end of her career. Is a drunken argument with bouncers – something which happens a hundred times every weekend – really bad enough to warrant that?


Someone accessed this story recently (February 2017). I’d forgotten about it, but a quick check of the staff list on the St Gregory’s website doesn’t show Emily Higgins as one of them.

Poor girl. The screeching harridans of the terraces nearby got their pounds of flesh.

Shock, Horror: If You Put Water on it, it Gets Wet!

I saw this in the news yesterday, and naturally the BBC is on it like a starving Chihuahua on a pork chop. Apparently, women who return to work part-time after having children earn less than men who don’t. Also, the women miss out on promotions and gain less experience. according to shock “studies”.A 60s advert by Alcoa Aluminum with spoofed tagline

Obviously, this statement of the blindingly obvious is wrong, because the law says that women must be promoted ahead of men wherever possible, and companies who choose the most able candidate instead of a female – where the two options deviate – are committing a heinous criminal offence. Likewise, companies who insist of acting logically based on the current space-time continuum and who choose to employ people based on the experience they actually have rather than the experience they might have gained if they hadn’t gone AWOL for a year (and intermittently when they return if the child-minder phones up and says that junior is crying). And absolutely no concern should be raised over the likelihood of them doing the whole thing at least twice more over the next 3-4 years, no matter how important the company’s expansion from simple start up into the international market is.

It’s funny, but I have male pupils who have trouble getting time off for driving lessons and tests even if they’re dead. The females seem to have very little trouble.

I wonder if anyone is ever going to realise that unless you officially declare men to be inferior members of society, women – who, by dint of nature, have to do/experience things which are absolutely counter to what is required in a successful business – are going to be scored accordingly. Of course, when I use the terms “men” and “women” I am referring to the groups generally – there are some women who can do some things men normally excel at much better, just as there are men who can do things that women normally excel at much better. However, if nothing else, the “just being available for work” skill is pretty much lacking when childbirth comes into it. The “not having the experience” and “missing promotions” cards fall naturally out of that, and the only way many women get promoted is simply by being women. Because the Law is on their side on that.

Equal rights is one thing. Forced balance (i.e. positive discrimination) is another matter entirely.

In the workplace, people who do the same job, for the same number of actual hours, and with the same commitment should be paid the same. Someone who does the job part time in order to bring up a family can only expect pro rata at absolute best. And by pro rata, I mean when all the fringe benefits not given to anyone else are taken into account. When you add all that up, there can never be a line right down the middle where all men and all women are earning the same and getting the same opportunities without artificial adjustment.

(Note: the image I’ve used in this article came from a real 60s advert in America. The company was Alcoa Aluminum, to which someone has added that last line in brackets. The funny thing is – and everyone forgets this – before technology advanced, most woman (and a lot of men) would have had trouble getting a ketchup lid off, so the advert wasn’t quite as overtly sexist as it appears today.)