This is so compelling and clever, vintage Stuart Hall. He has the great gift of ravishing clarity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals

 

 

 

So Theresa May on Woman’s Hour 14 September 2011 is promising to address women and women’s issues. She who abolished the one body that made sure the government engages with the voices of women, The Women’s National Commission; she who refuses to enforce mandatory pay audits so that companies disclose patterns of pay – without which equal pay become inconceivable; she who refuses to modernise the equal pay legislation and proposes instead voluntary action -  without the Equal Pay Act introduced by Barbara Castle in 1969 there would have been no significant action on the gender pay gap; equal pay has stalled, the gender pay gap is growing.

She who  disabled the equality duties introduced in the dog days of the last Labour government. There will be no significant progress to budge the gender pay gap.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/17/theresa-may-scraps-legal-requirement-inequality

There is no doubt that May’s commitment to improving outcomes for women suffering secxual violence has been a lifeline to rape crisis centres.

Where the oppression of women converges with law and order Tories tend to be braver than when women’s oppression impinges on political economy.

And we know that Theresa May knows the implications of  legal equality duties, the possibility that they may actually make a difference: she  warned government departments in 2010 that they had not implemented their legal duties. Clearly she understood that had  the coalition deficit reduction strategy been disciplined by the equality duties then the cuts could not have scythed through women’s socio-economic wellbeing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/aug/03/theresa-may-letter-chancellor-cuts

Yvette Cooper’s brilliant arithmetic revealed that around three quarters of the deficit reduction costs would fall to women, and only around a quarter would fall on men. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/04/women-budget-cuts-yvette-cooper

It made no difference. They ignored their statutory duties.

Fawcett Society undertook a judicial review. It failed. It made no difference.

So, when we listen to Theresa May’s claims that women are in the coalition’s mind we know that they intend to make no difference.

September 2011

Here we are, returning from summer breaks, and what the media describes as the silly season, back into real life.

Real life is ‘the usual rubbish’ about equal opportunities.

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University advertised for a trainee anaesthetist and allowed an inadvertent clause to slip through its recruitment ad: after describing the job spec, it added ‘the usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc.’

The Freudian slip provoked great amusement among the usual suspects, Tories and the Daily Mail.

It released another bout of ‘Positive discrimination has gone too far…!”

But how many people involved in recruitment didn’t bother to read that ad?

Who was taking seriously equal opportunities in this profession still dominated by  white, male, middle class men? Who was expecting this ad to do its bit?

And how come some people who should at least know how to read an Act of Parliament –that is, MPs – don’t know there isn’t and never has been  ‘positive discrimination’ in Britain’s equality legislation.

In a debate between me and the Tory MP Dominic Raab on the Jeremy Vine Show on 6 September, Raab insisted that positive discrimination was the problem.  But positive discrimination is not and never has been allowed by British equalities legislation.

What  is permitted is positive action: where candidates have equivalent experience            expertise, employers may select candidates whose presence will make the  workforce more representative. Who would not want to do that? Raab MP, for one.

Buried by the muddle over the law, and the scornful hilarity there is a bad joke: among UK medics there is ‘widespread discrimination’ against women, there isn’t positive discrimination in their favour.  Men earn around £15,000 more than women.  Women’s opportunities are constrained by a ‘hostile culture’. That’s the verdict of the British Medical Association’s first investigation into inequality among medics in the senior echelons of the NHS, published in 2009 and on its of its esteemed authors, Prof. Anita  Holdcroft, herself an anaesthetist.

There are twice as many male anaesthetists as female – 4382 men, 1774 women.  What’s positive about that?

Kira Cochrane’s latest book is a collection of “Forty years of the feminist movement as reported in the Guardian“.

It includes:

“Lively, provocative, thoughtful and funny, this is the essential guide to the feminist thinking and writing of the past 40 years – the ultimate portrait of an ongoing revolution.”

The book is available on Amazon, or at the Guardian’s bookshop.

I was pleased to see someone had put my 1990 Arena documentary on the history of “Morning Star” onto Youtube. Here it is split into parts 1-6.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

See my piece on Rosa Luxemburg in left foot forward, follow the link:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/03/womens-history-month-profiles-rosa-luxemburg/

ARMS AND THAT MAN

….BLAIR

…and CAMERON

….

24 February 2011

It is to be hoped that the ghost of Robin Cook is haunting the Prime Minister: his proclamation that Britain has been wrong to back authoritarian regimes, while defending Britain’s arms exports industry deserves a savage quip from the former, late Foreign Secretary.

Cook’s fate confounds the idea that foreign policy is somehow made up as it goes along, framed by personal affinities and pragmatism, enunciated this week by the amiable and clever Conservative columnist Daniel Finklestein on the Today programme.

It was only in the field of foreign policy and international relations that Labour appeared, albeit briefly, radical, democratic and progressive after the May 1997 election victory.

With Cook in the Foreign Office and Clare Short in international development (not to mention Mo Mowlam handling Northern Ireland), the possibility of an approach to international diplomacy grounded in human rights seemed uniquely possible.

That  prospectus was swiftly quashed by Tony Blair. When Cook launched his maxim: an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy – quckly spun into ‘an ethical foreign policy’ – it was unceremoniously binned by Blair.

Read John Kampfner’s shocking account in Blair’s Wars of how Tony Blair and his aide de camp – and mentor – Jonathan Powell humiliated Cook and adopted instead the ‘new imperialism.’

Kampfner explains that Blair went to war five times in six years, and it was that statistic that impelled him to write the book.

Although Cook’s approach – to base foreign policy on human rights – had been cleared with Downing Street, it was not to Blair’s taste.

The tactical difficulties of re-orientating Britain away from arms exports to repressive regimes -  and rupturing the historic intimacies between Downing Street and the arms manufacturers -  gave Blair a weapon against Cook. The Foreign Secretary’s detailed plans for releasing Britain from contractual obligations to dictatorships buying arms from Britain  were scrutinised by Blair’s men.  The scowlers vetted line by line his criteria for arms sales – Cook’s template for a new ethic in one of Britain’s foremost export industries.   Before the year was out the ‘ethical dimension’ faded  and Blair himself promoted the  ‘hug ‘em close’ mantra that sealed a UK-US united, imperial front.

The arms exporters were safe, and supported by the Prime Minister. Wars would be waged. Indecent tyrannies would be re-armed and reassured.

All until 2011 when New Labour’s New Imperialism and the special relationship between the UK and the US, and the West and Israel, began to shudder in the astounding aftermath of the largely secular people’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Downing Street and the White House were scandalously slow to welcome the revolutionary uprisings. The new imperialist rhetoric of humanitarian warfare was suddenly exposed: the West appeared befuddled.

Secular or sectarian, it didn’t matter – Downing Street has sponsored muslimists and their enemies – the specialist relationship has nurtured, funded, armed them all in the name of stability, the cold war, Israel and above all ‘our interests’.

Cameron has been scorned for the arms traders who have been his cohorts during his Middle East tour. ‘Shameful,’ protests War on Want. It is.  ‘Stop it,’ insists the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. Yes!

David Cameron lanced embarrassment by insisting on 21 February that the arms trade ‘is very much in Britain’s interests.’

No doubt he feels comforted by his new friend, the Observer’s   Nick Cohen, who’s commentary on the Middle East uprisings has been, yet again, to rant about muslim clerics – surely the least influential or interesting presence on the streets of Tunisia or Egypt so far. Cohen couldn’t see the heroic and secular wood for his islamist trees.

Cohen wrote in the Observer on 6 February that ‘David Cameron seems to be prepared to stand up for elementary principles. He was almost pitch-perfect in his speech in Germany as he rejected with the required scorn the right’s argument that a clash of civilisations made Muslims and democracy incompatible and the double-standard of the multi-culturalists, who hold that one can oppose fascistic doctrines when they are held by white-skinned demagogues but not when they are propagated by brown-skinned reactionaries.’

How does any of this blether clarify the Western powers’ complicity in hollowing out civil society and radical, democratic political movement is the Middle East, and how they should make amends.

Blair should be ashamed. David Cameron should be ashamed.

Robin Cook is dead. Long live Robin Cook.

February 18 2011

KICK IT OUT

Kick OUT Sexism in football – its been a long time coming, but its moment has finally arrived – marked beautifully by Philosophy Football’s nice new T-Shirt (got one on order!) and a mug.

This is great for those people, like me, who feel oppressed by the way that football takes up all the space, with its rude intrusion into our sitting rooms, the news, kids bedrooms, TV schedules and even the sounds of the cities.

Despite ourselves we know about football because there is no escape from it. So Kick it Out enables us to contribute to the reform of football’s ugly culture.

The Sky row provoked by Andy Gray and Richard Keys giving out yards against women exposed a fascinating cleavage in football culture between the men who love its macho scaffolding and men who don’t.

And it offered men the opportunity to take the side of women and repudiate the grand masters of the ancien regime.

That, of course, was an effect of the curious contradictions in football culture that have been created by women’s presence in a man’s game.

Football was formerly a pleasure put beyond the reach of women in a segregated social space in which men could relish the sound of their own voices singing, soaring over the fence, invading the soundscape of the cities.

For women that exclusivity presented a crisis – be beaten (because we could not beat it) or join it. So, in their thousands, nay millions, women began to play it, watch it, know it, heaven forfend ‘commentate’ on it, manage it and referee it.

That somehow confirmed its warrant in popular culture. But that in turn created a crisis for as football as uniquely a man thing,  as a ‘pageant of masculinity’, as uniquely a man thing, in which men kiss, cry, sing, scream, and in which they harbour hatred and violence, all as a way of being men, and all by themselves.

Women’s presence (plus a few catastrophes caused by total disrespect for fans) encouraged a cultural revolution in the conditions of the sport,  that – no doubt – many men endorsed..

But it had not been echoed by the proprietors of the public game. Lord Triesman complans that it is the country’s worst managed sport.

We could add that even the best of their managers  rely on hapless masculine intuition to sort out the lads. This tradition is exemplified by Sir Alex Ferguson and his treatment of Wayne Rooney.  He assumed that marriage would sort out the lads’ morals, that ‘settling down’  and domestication would somehow keep them off the streets and sort out their sexism.  Ferguson was wrong and he was irresponsible. He gave to the WAGs the problem  he would not, could not address professionally or politically.

The outcome of his strategy has been a tragedy for Rooney and his family, and a ruinous contribution to sexism in the city: everyone knows that girls sell themselves in faux knocking shops.  Football offers its players as commodities in a celebrity market in which both men and women are objectified.

The Sky row takes the crisis to a deeper place: here were men watching from the sidelines, spilling out pious, sexist and above all WRONG homilies about the expertise of a woman actually on the field.

That took the ignobility of their sexism to another level.

It was the moment when women became more than merely an audience, and took themselves into the field, so to say, that the old football fogeys were confronted by a great challenge to the security of their chauvinism.

There have been great wranglings over whether these men were sexist or stupid. They were both. The social media and mass media commentaries and the larger conversations they have joined, have disclosed  a sophistication in popular culture that was traduced by Gray and Keys..

Their behaviour relied on a sense that they had critical mass, an omnipotent fantasy that they were the voice of the people. They were clearly mystified and tongue tied by the discovery that they weren’t.

What would be wonderful would be if the fans – and their alienated friends – kept on creatively crying foul against sexism in sport.

www.philosophyfootball.com

5 October 2010 Prison isn’t working

Two cheers for Ken Clarke. He’s the best available minister for justice. He thinks – before he’s read the Mail, rather than after.
He is interested evidence and what works. So, two cheers for his interest in making prisons places of work, rather than institutionalised indolence.
But will his proposals to get prisoners involved in doing useful work, for the minimum wage, enabling them to save, and to pay recompense to their families and victims address the scale of the problem?
The Howard League for Penal Reform is enthusiastic. ‘This could be the biggest change to the prison system in 200 years,’ says the Howard League.
‘Bringing real work into prisons is the most important reform to the prison system in two centuries,’ comments Frances Crook, its splendid director. The Howard League says paid work, and paying tax is ‘the best way to support victims, families and for the first time, be asked to contribute to the common good. We must get prisoners to take responsibility for their actions and work is the best way to achieve this.’
And she believes, ‘everyone will gain from this new policy. It will enable prisoners (overwhelmingly men) to contribute to families so that we could reduce the benefits bill and this will help to keep families together. It could reduce prison costs as prisoners can pay for the luxuries just like the rest of us have to. ‘
The Prison Reform Trust agrees, ‘Real work for real wages makes sense. This would be a sea change for prisons where currently few work opportunities exist and those in work earn an average ‘wage’ of 8 pounds a week.’

This is a coherent case. But we should also be wary; the PRT is concerned that this will be ‘exploitative menial work.’
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies director Richard Garside also cautions, ‘My suspicion is that this is more about turning prisoners into an exploitable resource and balancing the Ministry of Justice books than it is about introducing greater purpose and justice.’

Waged work won’t apply to the majority of people introduced to the prison system. Around 110,000 people are received into prison every year, two thirds of them are sentenced to 12 months, and, in effect, serve 2 months, then they won’t be available for work or anything else.
Prisons are becalmed by idleness and in-cell televisions, which induce a soporific effect, if they’re switched on half the night. Tired prisoners are malleable, dulled.
Nor does paid labour address the catastrophic under-education of the prison population – the average reading age is estimated to be between nine and eleven.
Access to education among all but ‘juveniles’ is haphazard and increasingly work-oriented. Education must be the best route to employability, but prisons seeking to make cuts are likely to shred their education service and focus on security.
Waged work won’t, however, address the massive problem of mental ill health in prisons.
It won’t deal with the crisis of women in prison. Most shouldn’t be there. The Prison Reform Trust has championed a new network of women’s centres where women live in the community, take responsibility for themselves and their families, gain skills, get out of debt, break addictions and get the support they need.

The women’s centres are instructive: they focus on how women get tangled in the prison system as women.
No justice minister has yet grasped that the criminal justice system is fundamentally about men, as men.
We are to go on locking up thousands of young men at vast expense. A year spend in prison is equivalent to a year at Eton. So lets treat prison as a resource – where young men could go to get real rehab.

HIS WAY

Tony Blair A Journey
Hutchinson
London
September 2010
£25

There is little to be learned from Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey…and yet, and yet…. It is important. Not because it ranks as one of the great political memoirs. It is lite, as you’d expect, a smooth edit, with some of the quality of easy listening. Its allure is its difference from a political memoir written for the politically engaged. Its title is misleading, a journey implies contemplation, development, change. Blair didn’t mature, he degenerated.
It should have been entitled ‘My Way’.
He’s written it for a Des O’ Connor audience as much as for addicts of political diaries. And that’s fine.
If it was an economic decision to by-pass serialisation and go for direct sales, it was also surely a political decision – there is no kiss and tell worth spending money on, not even his portrait of his passionate bonding with Gordon Brown, his partner in the creation of New Labour.
His narrative differs from most political chronicles is in its emotionalism, his candour about the excitement he felt in this platonic amour, the alchemy of men making history.
But his is apparently unaware of how the apparent emotional intelligence is utterly macho – it isn’t unusual for men talk about each other like this; emotional literacy isn’t about being thrilled by the company of other men and showing it.
What he reveals is his admiration for cojones, ‘clanking big ones’. His public persona – charming, easy – and attachment to his wife was misinterpreted as being interested in women and therefore alluring to women. The book marginalises women, however, just as they were sidelined in the birth of the project. He shows how he needs women, likes them and relies on them, but you don’t sense that admires them. The frisson is reserved for men.
Discussing with Alistair Campbell his assault on party rule Clause IV in 1994 – the marque of his leadership – he says Campbell loved the ‘brassiness’ of it. And he discovers ‘something I hadn’t been 100 per cent sure of – he had clanking great balls.’
It is men who excite Blair, dangerous men: Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. He likens one to an oak battering ram and the other to a stealthy rapier.
Clearly, he thinks this is cool. But it is coarse. The celebrated ‘ballsiness’ of Blair’s boys had dire consequences for the New Labour project. As Prof. Joni Lovenduski, the political scientist, argued: if Parliament was masculinist New Labour’s culture was overly so.
Blair’s blindness extends to the text as history and as polemic: it is bereft of context and a sense of the necessary otherness of others. He offers vignettes of his comrades that are sometimes acute, sometimes quite sweet, but everyone is only a supporting actor, he scarcely acknowledges anyone else’s priorities or ideas. It is as if they only bulwarked a mission designed by him.
The project
On page 90 he spins his political creed, I use the word advisedly, because it is more faith and ‘common sense’ than analysis.
The essential problem of labour in the post war period, he says, was that it had lost touch with its basic purpose – ‘at heart, the individual’.
A powerful state, trade unions, what he calls ‘social action’ – presumably in contrast to political action – collective bargaining, all were ‘a means to an end: to help the individual gain opportunity’, to overcome limitations, imposed by poverty and circumstance.
The purpose was ‘all about opportunity not in general but in particular’.
Blair traduces the post-war Labour project: Labourism was always interested in opportunity in general – hence its great reforms, the welfare state, public housing, comprehensive education.
Blair refracts all of this as merely ‘individual opportunity’. For him that is ultimately realised through discourses of choice and consumption, not through the good society, an egalitarian, democratic, just and sustainable society.
‘The problem for progressive parties was that by the 1960s the first generation of those helped in such a way had been liberated.’ Thus on the ladder of opportunity they didn’t want more state help, ‘They wanted more choice, freedom to earn more money and spend it…’ and they started to resent the freeloaders…’
So that’s the ‘60s is it?
Above all, he says, they wanted a relationship to the state as partners or citizens, not clients. Yes, and those aspirations during the ‘60s animated new social movements, NGOs, radical professionals’ alliances with clients, movements that he precisely ignores, and indeed for which New Labour felt fear and loathing.
He is left inevitably with the private sector as the model of modernity and dynamism and – through consumerism – of democracy.
New Labour was also authoritarian and abject: its lack of rapport with the troubles of the poorest and least protected was expressed in a shift from social justice to criminal justice. (He acknowledges Brown’s gift of the mantra ‘tough on crime tough on the causes of crime’); its relationship to the City was fearful, supplicant, it gave capital the freedom of manoeuvre that it wanted and staunched the opportunities for dissent and resistance and thus for progressive politics.
Blair’s prospectus echoes – more perhaps than he intended – Thatcher’s hapless notion that there is ‘no such thing as society, only individuals and families.’
Which helps to explain why, despite New Labour’s creditable focus on investment in health and education, and most creative of all Sure Start, it never had a strategic and radical approach to planning, the cities, equality, energy, environment, and to children. It had no excuse – these great themes had hosts of champions knocking on the closed doors of Parliament before 1997.
Prosperity by the 1960s was not the end of history; it exposed new and old crises and contradictions – sexism, racism, colonialism, and environmental wreckage. The great liberation movements introduced a new vocabulary of emancipation and ecology – indispensable for renewal of the social democratic project: how to achieve an egalitarian society that is dynamic, democratic, modern, flexible, welcoming, sustainable.
They’re just not on his agenda. And a kind of babble fills his ideological vacuum. There is no theory of exploitation, of power, of democracy.

Life and Death
Princess Diana infatuated him, he even ventures that Diana was somehow the zeitgeist – rather forgetting that she actually was a neglected aristocratic girl who, in the context of her global betrayal by a future king, improvised her way into a modern-ish persona. ‘Whatever New Labour had in part Diana had in whole,’ says Blair. Eh?
His one insight into the Royal Family is offered about the Queen’s disposition towards William and Harry after their mother’s death. She did her duty; she sought to protect them, but ‘first and foremost as princes.’
Reading this book as a republican I have to confess that, though, that although I’m up for any amount of scandal, intrigue and critique, there is something tasteless about Blair’s royal vignettes. He is a royalist, but can’t resist smug chatter that shows he was there, that he knows better.

Northern Ireland
The Agreement that was signed in Belfast 1998 should stand and one of the great achievements of the Labour government. The prize might have been John Major’s. But his government was enfeebled not only by Major’s dependence on the Unionists for his parliamentary survival, but also by the Tories’ historic compromise with loyalism. Had Peter Brooke endured as secretary of state – in my opinion the most creative Tory during the armed conflict – and had Major been secure, the Conservatives might have redeemed their treasonable history in Northern Ireland.
New Labour was well-prepared: Blair’s Secretary of State Mo Mowlam knew the territory well and whether or not its parochial Established like her – and enough of it did – she electrified the people. She was unlike any other British politician before or after. She treated Northern Ireland’s citizens as normal people entitled to her curiosity and respect. And she was on talking terms with the politicians closest to the armed militias. Unsurprisingly, Blair doesn’t have the grace to acknowledge this. It takes 20 pages on the peace talks before he accords his Secretary of State a place.
Then he makes an important concession.
During the final days of talks, when Blair felt stumped by a long document of Sinn Fein amendments and challenges, Mo Mowlam made a proposal. She’d been consigned to the tea trolley while and he and Ahern shouldered the hands of history. But she took the document, swiftly digested it, worked out what was important to Sinn Fein and the IRA, said, Neogiate! They negotiated. ‘It seemed very odd to me but it worked.’ This is an astounding comment from a man whose reputation as a peace dealer was made in Northern Ireland.
He admits that she took ‘an extraordinarily forward position on the prisoners’ – clearly in any armed conflict the prisoners are decisive and symbolic. Mowlam offered a release date. Talks resumed.
The deal caused ructions among his comrades. Alistair Campbell thought it was ‘barking’ mad. But without the prisoners there would be no deal; without the armed adversaries, there would be no deal. This was a great lessons on treaty-making: all the players were present, including representatives of the demonised armed combatants. Deals won’t work without them.
Still, in a drama with some many actors, Blair can’t control his vanity. He wonders, ‘Why on earth did I think it could be settled?’ Perhaps, he might have answered, because so many had already done so much. No. The answer comes: it was his own mission. His aide Jonathon Powell dubbed it, ‘my messiah complex’.

Iraq
Inevitably, we learn nothing new about the war. Blair’s text has been combed by editors and lawyers. So, he’s saying nothing. And yet we can discern and admission that confirms what everyone already knows: by Camp David 2002 he had made up his mind.
As for the war itself and the awful aftermath, he blames International Development Secretary Clare Short, his only surviving critic in his disempowered Cabinet, for the post-invasion mess. And he blames the mass march against the war for just making him feel more isolated. That’s all he’s got to say.
It didn’t make him think.
This tells us so much about Blair’s élan and his decline. Blair is candid about his extraordinary prescience, the sense that he can achieve something beyond the ordinary. He says witnessed his own metamorphosis, ‘I felt on fire, with a passion and a sense of mission’.
These words call to mind an eloquent moment in the diary of Barbara Castle, the Red Queen of old Labour – and an early moderniser. Observing Margaret Thatcher after her election as leader of the Conservatives, she notes that metamorphosis: Margaret was radiant, potent, Margaret was falling in love ‘falling in love with herself.’
Blair’s love affair led him not to triumph but hubris and shame.