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Labour women: demonised and dismissed

by Rowenna Davis    
June 7, 2009 at 1:38 pm

Think what you will of Flint’s resignation – but don’t put your criticisms (or your photos) in gender-loaded terms. Personally I think Flint’s resignation was opportunistic, badly orchestrated and ultimately self-defeating; but I don’t think it was a “silly woman” losing her head because of oestrogen and an X chromosome.

Across the media, Flint was portrayed in starkly sexist terms. She’s “flounced out” of the cabinet in a “hissy fit”, throwing “a stiletto in the heart of government”.
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An attack on all of us

by Guest    
June 1, 2009 at 1:18 pm

post by ‘Don’t get mad‘.

How do you feel about gay and lesbian adoption? It’s probably OK, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all human, how much difference will gender make? But what if I told you that the research into the outcomes for children adopted by gay and lesbian couples showed that these adoptions were harmful – that there were ‘repeated studies’, an ‘increasing weight of academic research’ showing this harm and that studies showing positive outcomes for children were ‘thin on the ground’, ‘almost non-existent’ and ‘too methodically flawed to be valid’?

That changes things, doesn’t it? We don’t want to discriminate on the basis of sexuality, but when we’re talking about the lives of children in care, discrimination looks like the lesser of two evils. It’s not prejudice, it’s unfortunate common sense.

The Daily Mail tells this to its 1.6 million readers whenever it runs a story about adoption or homosexuality. But there’s a lot it doesn’t say.
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The other kind of Tory housing…

by Kate Belgrave    
May 31, 2009 at 7:17 pm

A bit more about the realities of evil Tories on the ground, as we prepare to be governed by them:

Parked high outside Hendon Town Hall is one of those wretchedly dated revolving billboards that councils use to spam the masses with unsubstantiated PR bilge: at various turns of the loop, this one proclaims that the Tory Barnet council is ‘working for a healthy community,’ and ’supporting the vulnerable to live independent and active lives,’ and screeds of other modernisation tripe.

All is not lost, though. There is this evening a nice, large protest group under the billboard – a protest group that is made up of exactly the vulnerable Barnet residents that the council purports to so fervidly support.

These protestors are very pissed off. They are Barnet sheltered housing residents, and they’re picketing this evening’s Barnet council annual meeting to protest at a council proposal to remove permanent on-site wardens (people who help in emergencies, organise GP visits and appointments, and check in with each resident at least once a day) from their sheltered housing blocks and replace the wardens with a ‘floating’ support service, whatever the hell that is. They’re mostly very elderly (in their 80s and even 90s) and at that unlovely point in life where people become too frail to stand. They’re huddled in wheelchairs, or clutching walking-frames, or leaning on carers and chairs.

They’re not too sure what a ‘floating’ support service is, either. The cynics among them have a few ideas – they imagine a system where residents telepathically trip some alarm when dropping dead from heart attack, thus alerting a random officer somewhere in the borough to stop by later on with a shovel.

I understand – kind of – the term ‘floating service’ to mean a support officer of some stripe will stop a various housing blocks across the borough, to meet briefly with anyone who needs – well, supporting.

Bill Campbell, Barnet council’s unnaturally oily senior press creature, refused point-blank to say what a floating service was when I told him that I didn’t quite grasp the idea – Campbell said he couldn’t say what a floating service was until the cabinet voted for or against the concept at its 8 June meeting. I said that someone must know what a floating service was, if only to be in a position to put the concept of it before the cabinet. Campbell said again that he couldn’t say what the concept would be. I thought probably somebody could. This went on for longer than was strictly fascinating. Suffice to say a floating service is not one the council wants to brag about. Let’s return on 8 June. continue reading… »

Where is Middle Britain?

by Guest    
May 28, 2009 at 12:40 pm

post by Nigel Stanley of the TUC

Newspapers and politicians are obsessed with something they call Middle Britain. But a new TUC Touchstone pamphlet published today finds that not only have few of them ever visited it, but most do not even know where it is.

The only definition of middle Britain that makes any sense is to look at people on the middle of the income scale. But how many know where this falls?
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Feminists and allies: vote out the stupid!

by Laurie Penny    
May 20, 2009 at 2:43 pm

There are going to be European elections soon, and the fascist British National Party are hoping to get an MEP elected. On top of the far-from-insignificantly fucking scary racism, xenophobia and homophobia that riddles their policy platform, the BNP are pushing a specifically and deliberately sexist agenda. Stopping these stupid bigots from gaining any more of a toehold in our nation is a feminist issue, too. Here’s why:

The BNP hate what they call, without a shred of irony, ‘feminazis’. By this they seem to mean not just self-identified feminists but any woman who, in the words of a recent BNP candidate, is ‘unnatural and vile… it is a strange kind of woman who would want to invest [her] energies into her job rather than into a man.’ The BNP are specifically and explicitly AGAINST equal rights between men and women. Party leader Nick Griffin has described the very idea of gender equality as ‘feminist poison’.
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Oh dear, Demos

by Jess McCabe    
May 11, 2009 at 8:04 pm

Think-tank Demos last week launched their vision for how power should be “radically” devolved.

But Jenni Russell at Comment is Free went to the launch, and “no one mentioned women’s existence once”:

As I stood listening, I began to feel a rising tide of outrage. There was just one problem with this message of transformation and innovation – which was that every single one of the five speakers arguing for change was a man (white, at that). That every name mentioned as a new Demos adviser was that of a man. That no one mentioned women’s ­existence once. And that when we were shown a brief video about how power must be shared with the people, every silhouette and every symbol on the screen was – quite unselfconsciously – that of a man.

Very… er… radical.

(Crossposted from The F-Word)

The hidden costs of Thatcherism

by Neil Robertson    
May 8, 2009 at 4:51 pm

In a piece arguing why Labour should hold firm to its criticisms of the Thatcher era, Anthony Painter makes an extremely important point:

The argument that Thatcherism was economically good but socially bad doesn’t really hold any more. A more accurate description would be that it was economically more likely to produce growth but contained hidden risks and had enormous social cost.

Exactly right, and those social costs created a financial burden on the state which the Conservatives were supposed to reduce.
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Open borders, not just amnesty, for migrants

by Alan Thomas    
May 5, 2009 at 2:42 pm

Yesterday there was a rally in central London called by the Strangers Into Citizens campaign, a coalition with an apparently bedazzling array of backers from the unions, parliament and from (largely religious) community groups.

Its aim was to call for a one-off “earned amnesty” for migrants who live and work in the UK without legal status, and who have been here for over 4 years. But there is a sting in its tail.

The campaign argues that there is a strong case for such a legal change.
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Jarvis Cocker and New Labour

by Neil Robertson    
May 2, 2009 at 2:56 pm

In the world of popular music, being called a Tory remains as hurtful as having your band compared to Ocean Colour Scene. Just leaving aside the number of songs strummed against Thatcher or pop’s role in movements against war and racism, the word ‘conservative’ isn’t just laden with assumptions about your politics, but about the music you make. For decades now, the word’s been used to infer that the art you produce is corporate, pro-establishment, staid, formulaic and conformist. In short, if you’re a Tory, you definitely don’t rock.

So when Jarvis Cocker gave an interview to GQ magazine where he seemed to say that a Conservative government wasn’t just inevitable but ‘necessary’, it wouldn’t be long before it was followed by a carefully-worded clarification. “In no way am I supporting or suggesting that a Conservative government is a good thing, far from it,” Cocker states. “Rather, what I intended to get across was that, in the absence of any real alternative, a Conservative government at this point unfortunately seems inevitable.” I think it’s safe to assume that he isn’t turning into Bryan Ferry.
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The ‘Evil Poor’

by Laurie Penny    
April 26, 2009 at 2:58 pm

Dave Osler has addressed the question of the class-war-that-isn’t; what we need to talk about urgently is when, precisely, it became good form to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person. When did it become alright to call the poor ‘evil’?

No, really. Let’s not forget that this week the Orwell prize for blogs was awarded to NightJack, a blogger who claims to be a white, middle-aged police officer posting about his experiences in the force, passing over, amongst others, the esteemed Alix Mortimer. One of his winning entries is entitled ‘The Evil Poor’. Initially I assumed that the title was ironic. It isn’t.
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Not good enough, Darling

by David Semple    
April 23, 2009 at 9:05 am

Credit where it’s due, Rahm Emmanuel masterfully pinched the jam-tomorrow glee of some nuttier revolutionaries when he said, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste, they are opportunities to do big things.” That is precisely what Alistair Darling has done with the new budget.

The crisis has gone to waste as the clock runs down on a Labour term of office. No mighty reforms to banking, more of the same tokenistic gestures (e.g. the £200 million to be raised by a 50% income tax band) and little else.

I’m probably being a bit too harsh, since there were some very helpful measures included – on pensioners, retraining for employment and on the carers of young people – but delivered with brevity and solemnity amid the jeers from the opposition benches, a 2009 “People’s Budget” it was not.
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Anti-semitism, the left and human rights

by Conor Foley    
April 21, 2009 at 9:47 pm

I have been meaning to respond to a couple of an article that David Toube wrote about the left and anti-Semitism in the Guardian for the last couple of months, but pressure of work prevented me. Since then he has written another piece on a similar theme at Harry’s Place and we have been treated to the bizarre spectacle of a holocaust-denier addressing a UN conference of racism – albeit with a lot of heckling and walkouts.

In his original article David made the point: ‘Although opposition to racism is now an article of faith for all mainstream political parties, the left has been the driving force in those organisations that set the antiracist agenda. There is a part of the left that is very comfortable condemning historical racism against Jews, at the hands of Nazis, back in the 1940s. It is, however, ambivalent when it comes to contemporary antisemitism: particularly when it can be “contextualised” within the Israel/Palestine conflict.’ I do not have much to say to that – other than that I agree with it and, while I would never associate with that ‘part of the left’, to which he is referring, I think that it does describe a worrying body of opinion.
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Why the left should argue for a small state

by Chris Dillow    
April 17, 2009 at 7:36 pm

David Semple thinks the left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons.
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Why isn’t the left working with rural campaigners?

by Rowenna Davis    
April 17, 2009 at 1:08 pm

This week I interviewed Georgina Downs, a campaigner from West Sussex who is almost single-handedly leading the campaign against pesticides in the UK. Suffering from ill health brought on by what she believes was inadvertent pesticide exposure from local farms as a child, she has been fighting to strengthen pesticide regulation through the courts for the last eight years.

Her story is a natural leftist battle. It’s about the exploitation of power – government officials and agro-chemical industries are blocking adequate regulatory methods despite robust research showing the damage that pesticides can do to human health.

And it’s about justice. Last November the High Court delivered a landmark victory on Georgina’s case, ruling that the government had failed to comply with a European directive designed to protect rural residents from exposure to toxins. The government has appealed that judgement, and Georgina is now fighting another round with support only from her Dad (who does the “postie runs”) and her Mum who does the photocopying. Her inbox is full of stories from other rural dwellers suffering health problems suspected to be brought on by pesticide exposure, but the court battle leaves precious little time for her to connect with them all.

Why does she not have more support from the left?

The left has always suffered from an urban bias. But we cannot let rural fights like these go unsupported. This point is about more than just anti-pesticide and environmental campaigns, important as they are – it’s about connecting with rural causes and communities more generally. Rural poverty and isolation for example, are huge issues in this country and should be natural territory for the left – but we hardly ever mention it. For their sake and ours, leftist organisations need to start connecting with communities in the countryside. It’s time to build a rural-urban alliance.

A chance to outlaw homophobic hatred

by Claude Carpentieri    
March 25, 2009 at 12:30 pm

Some may recall the homophobic campaigns run by the Sun in the not-so-distant past, including that of labelling HIV ‘the Gay Plague’ and the one about the ‘Gay Mafia running the country’ in 1998. You may also recall the Sun’s false allegations about Elton John. They only stopped when they were forced to pay £1m in damages. Overall, they did more to stigmatise gay people and those with HIV than any other publication in Britain.

It’s no surprise then that Fergus Shanahan, their most right wing columnist, is lashing out at the currently debated Coroners And Justice Bill. Some MPs are lobbying to include Clause 58 – which would extent the offence of incitement to hatred to the area of sexual orientation, placing homophobic hatred on a par with the areas of racism or religious hatred.
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Jack Straw unveils Bill of Rights

by Newswire    
March 24, 2009 at 3:46 am

A new British bill of rights and responsibilitilies outlined yesterday could enshrine entitlements to welfare, equal treatment, housing, children’s wellbeing and the NHS, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, said yesterday. He likened the bill’s potential impact to Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights.
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Birkbeck adopt Living Wage

by Newswire    
March 20, 2009 at 4:42 am

Birkbeck University has given into campaigners and adopted a London Living Wage for its cleaning and catering staff.
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About those scroungers

by Neil Robertson    
March 19, 2009 at 11:53 am

I’ll try to write more about this later in the week, but I would hope that Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant (and awfully depressing) report into Breadline Britain will add something to the debates on poverty & welfare dependency:

Shopping at Morrisons doesn’t take very long. Louise has a simple formula: don’t buy anything that costs more than £1. This week, the budget bananas are finished, and the regular packet costs £1.29, so she doesn’t buy bananas. The cheap potatoes are also sold out, so she doesn’t buy potatoes. She fills a basket with Morrisons own-brand orange juice, 56p; reduced-sugar jam, 95p; peanut butter, 78p; yoghurt, £1.00; bread, 99p, granulated sugar, 93p; oven chips, 79p; two tins of eight hot dogs at 49p each; one bag of value apples, £1.00. Only the milk, biscuits and the cheese cost more. She ignores the faltering monologue from her son, who has been diagnosed with learning difficulties, just audible from beneath the pram’s hood. “Mum, I want flowers. Please buy flowers. I want the Bob the Builder egg. I want High School Musical chocolates.“
. . .
“It would be nice, on occasion, to buy them something on a whim – treats, cakes and biscuits. But if you do, you know you’re going to have to turn the heating off,” she says. Her face is pallid, and she has grey patches of exhaustion beneath her eyes.

She crosses the car park to Iceland to find cheaper bananas (brown and verging on rotten), pizza, cheese spread and chicken pies for £1 each.

“This will easily last me until next week, and there’ll be stuff left over,” she says confidently, although she concedes that things would be better still if she could spare £4 to make a bus trip into the city centre for the weekly Wednesday food handouts by nuns, who usually give her a couple of plastic bags of tins and pasta. Last harvest festival her daughter’s school was collecting for the nuns, so she sent in a few tins she had been given by them, and is half-expecting to see them come back full circle and return to her cupboard.

Do read the rest.

Shocking attitudes towards rape & Million Women Rise march

by Sunny Hundal    
March 10, 2009 at 1:51 am

The Home Office yesterday published results of a poll on violence against women.
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Against ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on teenage pregnancy

by Neil Robertson    
March 6, 2009 at 4:49 pm

We’ll begin, as is the vogue when writing about this topic, with some of those tiresome anedotes which somehow prove the observations which follow.

Back when I was still lugging crates of cheap pop around a newsagents in Meadowhall, I worked with a girl named Claire*. Claire was sexually active well before the age of consent, was pregnant by the age of sixteen and had only a handful of GCSEs to her name. So far, so ‘Shameless ‘. Except, as soon as her maternity leave was up, Claire returned to work whatever hours she could manage whilst still looking after her newborn. Some two years after giving birth, she enrolled on a part-time hairdressing course, which she squeezed-in between her paid work and all the hours where she simply had to be a mum. She finally qualified last year and, last I heard, was working in a hair salon with dreams of one day opening her own.

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