Another reason why encouraging Boris Johnson is a really, really bad idea...

Sorry to keep on about this but I’m hoping this little comment from Iain Dale’s blog (not him but one of his commenters, Danvers Baillieu)shines some light on why giving any vote for Boris is still a really, really bad idea; even if the fact that he’s incompetent, pointed out yesterday, doesn’t persuade you:

"I have just spent an hour or so handing out "Back Boris" oyster card holders outside Bank tube station. In all my years of campaigning, I have never seen such a positive response for a candidate. The card holders flew out of my (and the other volunteers') hands so fast we had to call to HQ for additional supplies. I realise that the centre of the City is not exactly enemy territory for Boris, but I still got the strong feeling that he is a popular front runner. After 11 years in the political wilderness, on 1 May Boris will show that the Conservatives are back."

Do you see that bit at the end there? The bit about the Conservatives being back? So, that’s the other really, really horrific thing about giving your second preference vote (or God forbid, your first; not that I’m religious, but you might be) to Boris Johnson.

Do we really want to give the Tories this momentum?

I’m pretty sure that the Tories know he’s an incompetent too. They’re just happy to let his media persona do some work for them for once and sacrifice London so that they can build up momentum for the General Election. After all, there’ll be plenty of them ready to pull his puppet strings. And to those (thankfully now receding proportionately in the Lib Dem Voice poll) who think it might be a jolly wheeze to place your second vote for Boris, and then just think about what a boost this would give the Tories.

If the Tories get a comfortable majority in a General Election off the back of a win in London, not only could some of that majority be at the expense of Lib Dem MPs, but we can say bye-bye to electoral reform any time in the near future.

No votes are wasted, even second ones. I know that the best vote is a vote for Brian Paddick but it seems we still have a FPTP mentality; the second vote is still there to be used and not ignored or frittered away in a fit of hubris.

My only hope is that, given that Mr Baillieu was giving out the oyster card holders at Bank, many of the workers were commuters living outside of London or that they didn’t know who was on the oyster card holder and were just happy to get a new one. Personally, I think the oyster card holder from Mulberry is far more chic!

Why Boris Johnson is a really, really bad idea.

Boris Johnson terrifies me. Boris Johnson terrifies me because if he gets into power he will ruin our fantastic City.

So, it is with horror and disbelief that I see the polls that put Boris ahead and even on Lib Dem Voice so many people are putting Boris as their second preference; although perhaps they’re the ones that don’t actually live in London and so won’t have to live with so many of the consequences!

For sure, there is much to be done; our roads are still too congested, our public transport too expensive and inefficiently run, people are afraid of crime and we have teenagers killing each other with knives and guns; but it is still one of the best cities in the world to live in. I am so, so proud of being a Londoner and I reckon we knock the socks off all our great city rivals such as Paris, Berlin and New York.

We need a Mayor who is capable, who has a passion not just for power but running things and changing them where they have to be changed.

Nothing, nothing I have so far seen, in this man Boris Johnson, gives me any indication that he could do anything more than make a joke out of the job. No, really; because unless presenting ‘Have I got news for you?’ is the qualification required to run the best capital city in the world, as I’ve not seen him do anything else!

And he proved this on Newsnight, last night, as Lynne Featherstone so adroitly points out. Boris once more showed us that this is just an exercise in vanity for him; that he is so much more interested in just being someone than doing anything. Lynne points out:

“Boris was appalling - and Paxman nailed him on his waffle approach by asking him for a figure for something he was proposing re-replacing bendy buses. Boris was baffled. Boris was bamboozled. But Boris didn't answer the question. Boris was exposed as not knowing a thing really about bus costs.”

And this is the thing: if you are capable, if you are experienced at actually running things and you are really interested in something then understanding the costs of what you wanted to do is easy. It trips off your tongue; you have rehearsed all the arguments in favour of something because you have rehearsed them with yourself. You have thought it through.

I am, in my professional life a Projects & Programme Manager. I am responsible for spending millions pounds of my clients’ money and (obviously) ensuring that they either save as much or are able to bring in much, much more extra revenue as a result of the changes that I and my teams will make in their business and organisations. I can tell you right now, how much money I have spent, how much money I am going to spend, how much I should have spent and how much the extra thing that the MD asked us to do actually cost. I know how much money we’re going to save or earn, what that relies on, why it might not happen. I know all that stuff. Off by heart, without looking. If you woke me up at three in the morning and I was still half asleep I’d probably be able to give you that information before I could tell you my name. Or your name*.

I know, with passion, what the most important issues are, what the risks are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. Of course I do; for somebody charging what I do, you would expect no less. Indeed, if you wanted to employ someone for the job of spending millions of pounds on behalf of your organisation you’d probably look for a CV that proved they had done that sort of thing before, with some evidence of successful outcome.

Well, step forward Brian Paddick (tick), who has managed millions of pounds worth of policing and been so successful in Lambeth that when he left there was a grass roots campaign to bring him back – he made a difference, a positive difference. When asked about dealing with gun crime last night he was passionate and fluent in his response.

And even, though I have to hold my nose as I say this, step forward Ken Livingstone (tick). I don’t like Ken, I don’t like the company he keeps, the way he wastes money, the permanent self promotion that he undertakes and the dodgy deals and cronies that he keeps in work. But I have to concede that, although he has usually nicked the ideas of the Lib Dem Group at GLA, he can at least implement change and run a city. Not as well as I would like, but he has not been the disaster I thought he would be eight years ago (there, I can stop holding my breath now).

But Boris Johnson? Nothing, nada…no experience and, it looks pretty clear to me, no interest in and passion for running or doing anything. Is the mayoralty a Tory compensation prize for a man with the delusion that he could’ve have been something? You see, I don’t think Boris is stupid; I’m sure the man is very clever, writes a good column and even I concede that he can be amusing on telly; but he does not have the competence to be the Mayor of London. Frankly I wouldn’t employ Boris to answer the bleeding phone in my company, let alone run the bloody thing.

And so, I just do not understand why so many people would have Boris as their first or second choice on May 1^st.

If you care anything about London and the people who live and work in it, you will not put a cross anywhere near the name of Boris Johnson. Put your first choice for Brian Paddick, he is undoubtedly the best candidate; but whatever else you do, don’t let Boris Johnson ruin our beautiful, wonderful, vibrant city!

*Although, to be fair, if you woke me up to ask me that sort of stuff at three in the morning, you may no longer need a name as I may be tempted to commit some sort of ‘cide’ on you.

Obama and the women's vote

Early on in these primaries it seemed quite clear cut, Hillary had the women’s vote and because there were enough women, she was winning the race to the Democratic nomination.

All the US commentators are now saying that one reason that Barack Obama is pulling ahead from Hillary is that the women’s vote is abandoning her and has gone to vote for Obama. Now, I know women don’t vote as a block etc, etc but there are significant amounts of movement in voter’s demographics to see a trend that aligns women and voting intentions.

This new development does seem to be flying in the face of my pretty strong defence, yesterday, of identity politics as a rational way forward. Having slightly sophist tendencies I have been for some days now putting this move towards Obama as a result of his wooing of female voters and the attention his campaign has paid in the last few weeks to them and matters of interest to women voters. I mean you would, wouldn’t you if you were looking at your campaign strategy? I still think this is the case.

However, here on the CBS News website Elizabeth Cline does an interesting analysis of the young female voter and the fact that it is them, as far as anybody can tell, that are voting in increasing numbers for Obama. So what makes a young female voter make different decisions from an older female voter?

“College has become one corner of American life where hardworking females are consistently and fairly rewarded, and they are succeeding there, to a much greater degree than their male counterparts. It's possible, maybe even likely, to graduate college with little sense and zero experience of institutionalized gender discrimination -- with almost complete freedom from the type of covert, daily setbacks that drive blacks to the polls for Obama and older women to vote for Clinton.”

This resonates with me. I can’t say that I left University with no feminist consciousness. I identified myself as a feminist before I went to University the roots of my feminism going deep, deep into my upbringing and experiences growing up (or at least, watching the experiences of the women around me). Whilst at Aberystwyth, studying International Relations, I took courses on feminist theories of international relations and indeed that was where I got a grounding in the various feminist political theories which allow me as great an understanding of them as I have of say liberalism or fascism. I arrived at University a feminist and left a slightly better educated one!

But I will say that at University I had never felt or had any personal experience of discrimination myself – although I had seen it, especially, weirdly, in the Drama Department; despite there being many times more women in the department than men, the plays used for people’s practical examinations tended to have very strong male roles and hardly any substantial female parts at all; rather concerning if you are trying to achieve a 1st or even a 2:1 by playing the third washer woman from the right! But, I am digressing…..

No, it’s only as I have got older that I have become more and more aware of the under the radar, structuralised, many faceted, drip, drip, drip of barriers to women’s progress and equality and, indeed, have experienced them myself. And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, one of the least oppressed women on the planet!

It makes me sad that it’s the case, but I think as you get older and come across these barriers, you do get to understand that no matter how you think the world should be theoretically, in fact, it isn’t like that! As Cline says:

“…the advantage women have in college quickly slips away in the working world. Women get paid a lot less than the men they graduate with, no matter how much extra work or hours they put in. One year out of school, women working full-time are earning 80 percent of what their former male classmates are making, according to a 2007 study by American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. And this fact hasn't budged over the past ten years -- despite the advances women have made on campus”.

The positive thing is that when you do have a meritocracy, which people believe in, then they do start to drift away from identity politics, as can be seen in, what Cline terms, the ‘girl-positive’ environment of college and/or University. But out in the real world where there’s power and money at stake, not just good grades, it’s not so ‘girl-positive’ and the identity politics and an understanding of how the world really does work drifts back in. Cline summarises:

“Young people are going to continue to impact this election in unprecedented ways -- a force of history that leaves me simultaneously in love with young people's fervor and optimism and unnerved by their lack of interest in Hillary. For the candidate, the parallels between college and the real world are striking. She has worked hard and done what's expected of her, but may very well get passed over by a less qualified guy when payday comes”.

Is it really only 80 years?

As Ros and Jennie have already noted, it is 90 years ago today that women got the vote. 80 years since they got the vote on the same terms as men and 50 years since they were allowed to enter the House of Lords.

And, although all is technically equal on the legal front, we are still having to loosen, finger by finger, the grip that men have on power and money. We have just 19% of our MPs female, even less running our top companies and the pay gap, well, it's still the pay gap and interestingly (or if you're me, bloody annoyingly) gets wider the higher up the career ladder women go! I reckon, that we're about 20% down the road to equality; you know, real equality, in how we live our lives, as opposed to equality in the eyes of the law.

Women's unpaid labour is still not included in national accounts, with all the implications for public policy that that entails, rape conviction as a proportion of reported rapes is frightenly low and I don't seem to be able to walk down the road or get on a bus without having a highly sexualised image of a women presented to me at every opportunity. My favourite one to hate at the moment is one advertising a programme called 'Skins'; I really enjoy having to look at that at the bustop surrounded by primary school kids.

There's an excellent article in the Guardian about it where Katherine Rake, the Director of The Fawcett Society.

It's a wide ranging interview looking back, as well as forward, but for me she really hits the nail on the head for me when she says:

"We are only half way through the revolution: there has been a huge change in women's lives but very little in men's. We have got to look at what happens in men's lives in future, in terms of a fairer division of labour and getting the benefits and costs of that."

Such completion of the revolution means wading into the private sphere to challenge the very way most of us live our lives, but Rake remains unapologetic. "There has to be a day that happens. This is very much a part of [Fawcett's] heritage. Unless you talk about changing the rules, about social transformation, the fundamental rules don't change and you are not going to be offering equality for women.

"We have done as much as we can levering women into a system designed by men for men. Now we have to work for a society where the rules are fitted for everybody."

Don't worry! I too, the good liberal that I am, get nervous when people talk about wading into the private sphere, but she has got a point.

To be honest, I think this is what we've been trying to do in the Lib Dems for too long; we have been focussing on getting women to change and to go on all sorts of training so we can play the selection game the same way the guys do.

When we get our heads around the fact that diversity is not about looking different on the outside but, in fact, about doing things differently and that it's possible to believe in liberalism but approach the practice of politics differently, we will start to make some progress on diversity.

And changing the way we do things (the rules) means everyone, including men and I think that will make politics and liberal democrat politics, in particular, better for all of us, not just women! Hooray!

Women come out for Hillary!

So, it would seem, from a quick review of what's being said, that Hillary's win in the New Hampshire primaries is as a result of women coming out for her in the last few days. This is confirmation that in politics gender certainly matters.

And once again, I ask myself in a country where women make up 52% of the population why we don't take more electoral advantage of those women who do put themselves up for a selection; particularly in target, by election and vacated held seats. As Lib Dems we may not think the gender of the candidate relevant but it looks like voters do. Even in the UK there is a 2% increase in female turnout if there is a female candidate (and a neutral impact on male voters); 2%, well, that can make quite a difference at times, can't it?

You see, although I do think that diversity is 'a good thing' in it's own right, I do find the fact that diversity helps win votes an even more compelling argument for having more of it!

Lynne in her blog post this morning can almost be heard sighing over how far equality has to go if male BME MPs are having to defend their choice of Hillary vs. Barack lest they should be seen as disloyal. Lynne looks forward to a time when colour or gender doesn't matter when choosing a candidate, when all that matters is whether they are the best.

Well, I think that's wishful thinking. Firstly, because I believe that for the vast majority of voters the decision of who to vote for is intuitive and a response to an engaging political narrative or (and this may be the same thing) an identification with the candidate. It is rarely a rational assessment of the pros and cons of the candidates skills set and policies, so hankered after by us political activists.

Secondly, even if voting wasn't such an intuitive matter that still leaves us with the problem in defining best; this is entirely subjective. It may be, if I had a vote in the US elections, best for me that I vote for a woman who has experienced all sorts of below the radar prejudice herself and is conscience of all the invisible, non legal hurdles that women have to climb even to compete in the workplace, for example. That would be quite logical for me, I guess.

And to prove my point, If I did have a vote in these elections I would be voting for Obama...for the intuitive reasons outlined above; I have completely fallen for his political narrative. That doesn’t mean though, I would be outraged if Hillary got the nomination.

However, what is most exciting is how riveting the democratic nomination process is this year!

As someone who is much more interested in the issues that politics has sway over rather than the game itself, this is the first time that US politics has captured my imagination. And it would seem from the increased turnout that it has captured the imagination of many voters in the US who previously couldn't give a fig for primaries!

It surely can't be that the idea that, if the Democrats win, they will either be putting a women or a black man into The White House for the first time, has nothing to do with it? Imagine if we had such diversity at the top of politics in the UK, might not that lead to a resurgence of interest in politics that we Lib Dems could capitalise on?