Expat.

I can't answer the question Gladys unless it's to do with Tynwald needing to approve the cost implications. I was praising my government for removing VAT on period products but the rest of their approach is typically mealy mouthed. Girls in schools and colleges can ask for sanitary wear and be given enough for the school/college day for free. Given the typical cost is around £150 a year I can see why these products should be available free of charge, no questions asked, at homeless shelters, women's refuges, foodbanks, NHS GP surgeries, and universities across the country, to name but a few. Well done the Isle of Man if this goes through.

Not in the UK. The EU required a 5% VAT levy on sanitary products and pre Brexit the UK charged it .Post Brexit the UK decided to make these products VAT free and did so from January 2021. This, rightly, brings these products into line with food and regards them as necessities and not luxuries. I think your MHK is trying to get the IoM to adopt best practise around the world for dealing with period poverty. 64% of UK women report having difficulty affording period products at some point and 21% report being unable to afford any for at least one menstrual cycle a year and having to improvise. The best practise model suggests that period products should be available free of charge and no questions asked in all Government facilities. Seems fair enough to me.

As ever, you haven't quite thought this through. Sickness absence rates are about 50% higher in the public sector than the private sector, not double. Sickness absence rates have always been higher in the public sector than the private sector. Sickness absence rates are falling in both sectors. But it's not as simple as implying that public sector employees are a bunch of feckless skivers. Firstly women have higher absence rates than men and women form a higher proportion of the public sector workforce. Secondly what's being measured is contracted time lost due to sickness and in the private sector you can make up some of that lost time by putting in a few extra hours. Absence rates are higher in large workforces in both sectors but the private sector has a lot more small workforces. A substantial proportion of the private sector is self employed and they are the least likely of any group of employees to take time off. Private sector workers are more likely to have agreed employment procedures to control absence due to sickness because they're more likely to be unionised. You're a bit behind the times when it comes to in work sick pay. Public servants are monitored through an absence of more than a few days and are every bit as likely as private sector workers to be put through a capability procedure leading to dismissal.

Do you have to be a teacher to give this a go? Asking for a friend.

We both know what it says. It's etymology is mongol as in the offensive term for people with Down's syndrome. It's a corruption first noted in the 1980's. One of it's uses is as he says but it remains a nasty little term.

Not sure where you're going with this but it won't be good for poor people. Doctors aren't the only health professionals who can issue fit notes. They can't issue a fit note over the counter, there has to be a medical assessment of the person. The fit note cannot be job specific it is concerned with the persons ability to do any work at all. The fit note has to acknowledge if the person could do any work at all with sufficient support, and that potential support has to be clearly set out. Of course Sunak is after sick people, it's a well worked political trope helped by a persistent public perception that there is much more benefit fraud than there really is. About £4billion a year is wrongly claimed as benefits, of which £1.6billion is over paid in error and reclaimed by the Government. Its about 2% of the total benefits bill. Every penny of that is wrong, especially given that a lot of that is the work of organised crime gangs. The UK Treasury itself estimates that it loses seventeen times as much in tax fraud. Not tax evasion, but tax fraud. Mind you tax fraudsters are often well turned out and talk properly.

What evidence? Without immigration there wouldn't be anyone there. 8000 years ago the Isle of Man wasn't even an island there was a land bridge to Cumbria who were probably the first people to wander over there. Then the ice age creates the Irish Sea and the next lot to arrive are the Irish. Then the Celts. Then the Danes. Then the Scots, who buy it from the Norwegians. Then the English who seize it by force. Then the Stanley family move over because they own the whole place after they're given it by the English king. Then the thieving locals can't stop smuggling to the point that they destabilise the English economy so the English buy it back and give it to the Monarch. Where it's been ever since. About the only ones who cast an eye over the place and couldn't be bothered to take it over were the Romans. Other than that the Manx are genetically pure as the driven snow.

I've no idea. I guess it does. I wasn't saying it's a bad thing that you invest more heavily in your road network, it isn't. I was pointing out that you do. I don't know why Derek thinks the roads on the Flyde are shite either but, if they are, one reason seems to be that Lancashire County Council have proportionately fewer resources than the Isle of Man government to maintain them.

The A588 a cart track? It's rural, and certainly an accident blackspot, but it seemed fine to me yesterday when I drove the grandson back from his rugby match. Not a cart to be seen. Are you sure you weren't just depressed because you were in the hated UK? A588 - Roader's Digest: The SABRE Wiki (sabre-roads.org.uk)

So they should be. According to the pink book they're spending £7.28million on 688 miles of a road network. Lancashire County Council have a £35million budget for over 7000 miles of roadways. It doesn't all go on pot holes or whatever has gotten your goat but you're not comparing like with like.

Nobody was keen on war in 1946. There weren't that many who were keen on it in 1939 given what had happened only twenty odd years before. However there was an existential threat from the Nazis and it couldn't be dodged or appeased or reasoned with.

Well, defended in terms of sending an army there to be bombed to pieces together with the civilian population and infrastructure to try a defend islands of no strategic value given their proximity to France which had already fallen, then yeah they weren't defended. In fact Churchill was having none of it. He wrote a memo that included the now infamous line, “Let 'em starve. No fighting. They can rot at their leisure”. (although he may have been referring to the invading German forces). Nonetheless, it was the best and most pragmatic decision to have made for the Channel Islands. What the UK did do was send ships to evacuate and look after every Channel Islander who wanted to go removing 21000 people to relative safety for the duration, but that's a whole other story.

The Channel islands were indefensible given the access the Luftwaffe had from France. To have attempted to do so would have led to mass destruction and civilian deaths in a British territory. It was a realistic decision and in the best interests of the territories. The Nazis made a huge error invading them. They had no strategic value and sucked resources out of the Nazi war machine for the rest of the war just so that Hitler could boast that he had invaded a part of the UK.

you'd better hope it holds up, given the number of referrals you make to the NHS in a year.

Christ on a bike Derek you can't be serious. Farage pretends to be a man of the people, whereas he is a privately educated son of a millionaire stock broker. He has stirred up hatred towards foreigners, Muslims, refugees. He is leader of a party that has many prominent members who are racist, sexist and homophobic. He lives in Germany, where his children have German passports. He has caused more turmoil and division in British society in living memory. He has sunk the £ and conned half the population into giving up a whole raft of their rights and liberties so he and his cronies could make a fast buck on the markets out of the economy crashing into recession. He has failed to be elected as a UK MP on SEVEN occasions. I could go on. Politics for Nigel Farage is primarily an ego trip, and these people are the most dangerous and unpleasant. The Isle of Man doesn't need Farage. No one does.