Yet they still route through areas we use intensively and blame us for near-misses
Yet you keep on gliding in military training areas... Bottom line is that we need to be talking to each other, and everybody needs to understanding each others requirements. Civil + military + gliders = about 20,000 flying machines in the UK, that's actually quite a lot of airspace each, and we don't really need to clash - but there are ways and means.
Nobody's blameless here, I've frequently seen gliders join at several GA airfields I know, make no calls, completely ignore published circuit procedure, and in several cases stop on the runway as well. This is not big, clever, or safe.
On the other hand there are plenty of published cases of fast jets routing low over published gliding or hang-gliding sites, resulting in genuine risk to life - that's just plain unprofessional.
Permission to start up/taxi/take off? Not in a glider
True, but not relevant to most powered airfields either.
Route deviations/diversions? - happens every 30 seconds in a glider.
And in most light aircraft - but if diverting to an unplanned airfield we jolly well talk to them.
PAN/Maday calls - not a huge relevance
At various times I've seen (and reported on RT) road accidents and another (non-radio) aircraft make an emergency landing underneath me - that's just as likely to happen to a glider as something powered. It's also nearly as likely that your pax might suffer some medical problem in a glider as a Cessna, requiring a Mayday - similarly for a structural failure - a glider is hardly less complex than a light aircraft and maintained to lower standards.
Class D airspace ? Don't want to fly in it anyway.
Let's see, you've run out of lift and your choices are to ask for permission to fly into class D to divert to a sensible airfield, or to try and land on the side of a mountain? Do you..
(a) Talk to somebody, and divert to a friendly airfield in perfect safety.
(b) Land on the side of a mountain, hope to survive, then expect somebody to retrieve the bits of your glider from there. (Or even if it's intact, you'll probably have landed a mile from a road).
(c) Fly into controlled airspace without permission or nobody knowing you're there, possibly causing safety problems to other aircraft and in all likelihood attracting a CAA prosecution.
Plus, if you may divert to another airfield, don't you want to understand what the powered traffic is doing from their RT transmissions, for your own safety?
G