Why would anyone join the LIberal Democrats!

Excellent film

Behind the scenes at the Today programme....

For Comic Relief I presume, thanks to Tom Harris MP, for the prompt....not that he needs traffic from my blog.

Public Space, Pornography and what I did on my holidays

Friday afternoon at the Lib Dem’s Spring Conference and it's the Women's Policy Consultation session.

We went through a whole pile of topics, neatly titled in the consultation paper under such terms as 'Can we have it all?, Money, Sex, Love & Relationships and MEN!

One thing we got on to talking about in our group, towards the end of the session is the increasing sexualisation and objectification of young women, particularly in our public spaces.

It seems to me that the norms of pornography are seeping into our public spaces, and I don't just mean billboards in the centre of town, but the media and mainstream internet and the products we buy.

The liberal in me, reckons that pornography does not have to be degrading to women; I am largely a sex positive feminist. The liberal me, that lives in the real world, has to admit however that most of it is degrading to women

The pornographic norm is that women are ready to have sex at all times, they are happy to share their men with other women, that even when the pornography involves gang rape, the women in these scenes, though they may be unwilling to start with soon discover they really, really wanted it after all.

Above all, they must always make an effort to look attractive to men.

A 2005 review found that half of all children have logged on to a pornography website, whilst over 57% of children aged 9-19 had seen pornography online.

But they don’t have to go online; everywhere I look there are pictures and adverts involving women in sexual poses, scantily clad and often inferring some sort of lesbian relationship - but not the type that doesn't involve men, of course.

Even the Daily Mail is running articles looking at gratuitous use of sex to promote products!!

The defects that all of us have, including the models used, are airbrushed out creating a standard of perfection for young women to aspire to that actually does not exist.

Lap dancing clubs, able to operate on the same footing as cafes, have doubled across the UK in recent years. This involves naked and topless women dancing at close 'proximity' to men (often there after work or at lunch time). There is ostensibly a three feet rule but in practice this rule is not enforced.

Honest to god, I'm not a prude - I really, really don't mind what it is that people to get up to, as long as they're both consenting - but I do think that public space should not be given over to the lowest common denominator.

They even advertise lap dancing classes for women and my health club - just along from the crèche – when did the work of a sex worker become so aspirational?

I think public spaces should be available and safe places for children and young people; it's bad enough being a 37 year old woman in these times and being made to feel no good unless you're a size 10 (with at least D cup breast, of course) - who would be a 14 or 15 year old girl, trying to work out a sense of self?

Liberalism isn't just about freedom for people to be and do what they want - that's libertarianism - but is also about freedom from harm and I want to be and I want children and young people to be free from the pornographic norm that suggests that in order to be normal you have to be gagging for sex at all times (whether male or female) and that if you’re female or even just a little girl you primary aim is to look sexy and attractive to men!

As a friend of mine, over in Sydney, said recently when this subject came up at dinner - why should we let corporations and businesses (for it is they that run the lap dancing clubs, the porn sites and push the products with the highly sexual adverts) dictate to us what are public spaces feel like? Why should it always be the freedom of companies to make money through sex that wins out?

I am glad to see that today Jacqui Smith has ordered a fact-finding review into the increasing sexualisation of young women.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be like this.

I’m not long back from New Zealand plus a long weekend in Sydney. Lucky me!

But lucky New Zealanders as well. Because one of the most striking differences I noticed between the UK and NZ was that there seemed no pressure on women to be sexual objects at all times – although there did seem to be a lot of excessive baking going on.

Perhaps, they’ve yet to catch up with us, but I don’t think that’s it. New Zealand is way ahead of us in many things and especially in terms of diversity, particularly in its parliament. It’s already had two female Prime Ministers and 33.6% of it’s current MPs are female.

In fact when I spoke about how worried I was about the sexualisation of young women in the UK, they were kind of mystified - it was clearly not as much a problem there.

It is hard to say which came first.

Does New Zealand have more female MPs and therefore any over sexualisation of women and girls in public spaces has been nipped in the bud; or do more women feel able to go forward into parliament and are taken more seriously when they get there because they don’t feel any pressure to come over like a sex object?

One New Zealander that I know well, is not sure how New Zealand women became free from the need to be a sex object at all times, but thinks that it may be because women get organised in NZ. Perhaps female MPs and groups would lobby companies that wanted to produce overtly sexist and sexualised adverts and products and therefore preserve their public space for everybody, not just those who want to use sex to make money from it.

In any case, the sexualisation of young women and the pornographication of our public spaces is not inevitable; we can stop it and we can say no to handing over our public spaces to those who would be happy with the lowest common denominator.

If you would like to contribute to the Liberal Democrat's Women's Policy Consultation, you can do so here.

By an accident of birth...

I was finally dragged from sleep, in disgust this morning, by a report from Refuge and Migrant Justice charity highlighting how UK Border staff had not been following guidelines when dealing with children and that they were often locking them up and not providing them with legal advice.

In fact, when I looked this up on the BBC I saw that:

"an eight-year-boy who had fled his country after his home had been destroyed in fighting was given no legal help with his asylum interview and application.

His claim was refused because of his lack of "credibility", the report says.

He's a child, without legal representation up against adults who are playing at God!

Of course, if this is true, then UK Borders need to sort it out and much is in the training, as always.

But I have to wonder what is wrong with these people, that they treat children, who are only in the position they are in by an accident of birth, so appallingly!

Would they want someone to treat their own children like that?

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people think that somehow that they somehow deserve the relative riches that we live in more than others; that somehow it was all their own hard work and not an accident of birth!

People!

Just a quickie....

I have (finally) got a blog cooking on Cambridge University , because I have (finally) got Who's Who off to the printers, but in the mean time here's my slot last week on skynews.com where I talked to Martin Stanford on some of the up and coming sites on the web!

Amazed I got there actually, as traffic was uber bad on the M4 & A4 and I had to run from car, through reception (much to the angst of the security guard), to make up (thank God, imagine going on TV without it) and then straight on to TV - much exciting and certainly the best way to do it!

Except for the traffic of course.

Diversity 101

"...many organisational cultures are outdated, having been designed for just one type of worker. The days of trying to shoe-horn people into institutions that were never designed by them or for them are over. They need to reform".

Many thanks to Zohra Moosa, in the CiF piece on Friday. She's talking about business and the world of work but she could just as equally be talking about political parties, and particularly, in my experience of the Liberal Democrats.

Jonathan Hunt of the wrote a letter in Lib Dem News, a few weeks ago, pointing out the parties dismal record of recruiting, selecting and getting elected ethnic minority candidates. We are vaguely better at getting women in to place but we are far from utilising the potential of the 40% of Liberal Democrats that are women to their full force.

And gosh, the letters that have come in since decrying Jonathan's letter! And none of them actually suggesting what we do about apart from inferring it's not really a problem!

Indeed, in the latest Lib Dem News (9th Jan), Ian Hale suggests, by some weird logic, that in Labour dominated areas, where he suggests that most BME people live:

'A capable person who wanted to be actively involved in politics might well take the pragmatic decision to join Labour'.

What he does not then go on to explain in his letter is why ethnic minority candidates should be more prone to this behaviour than white people.

Really!! The letters page of Lib Dem News can be as bad as listening to Any Answers on a Saturday afternoon at times!

It is true we do not have the luxury of safe seats that perhaps the other two parties have, which means that our techniques for getting people elected require that person to sacrifice all including career, income and family in the hope of getting elected. For a lucky (and sure, hardworking) 63 it has paid off but for many more the bet rarely has any chance of success.

I have long been of the view that we expect too much of all our candidates, whether male, female, black or white. We make the prospect and process of being a PPC such a hair shirt that those people who are in demand in their own communities, whether that's an interest community or a geographical one decide they can probably achieve their aims in another less sacrificial manner.

And so off they go, just like Chamali Fernando, and go and find something more constructive to do. Her actions were a little impatient I thought, but she's a loss to us and a gain for some other cause. We can shrug our shoulders as much as we like but, her leaving is still a net loss to us as a party.

Those of us who by virtue of our race or gender find ourselves on the wrong end of power are expected to rise above the fact that we have to work far harder than our white male peers to get nowhere near as far.

What is clear is that all these letter writers are against positive discrimination. Fair enough. But what is also clear to me is that many of these letter writers do not understand why we need to be diverse as a party. In fact, it seems to me that they see diversity as an irrelevance and are far more interest in just spewing out once more the mantra that we need the best person for the job.

But why then, is that person so often white and male? Equality does not just happen; surely millennia of human civilisation has taught us that? And, in any case, who gets to decide what is best?

But why in a party, that often defines itself by it's commitment to the individual do we need diversity? Surely it's the policies that matter not the colour of their skin or their sex?

Well, there's two reasons.

Firstly diverse groups make better decisions for the whole of society because even the voices of the minority or less powerful groups can be heard. We all like to think that we are compassionate enough and objective enough to take every one's situation into account but experience shows that groups of white men, largely tend to create organisations that fit the modus operandi of groups of white men. Take the way parliament works, for example.

And as Lynne Featherstone says in her article here of her time as a London Assembly Member and the difficulties ensuing were there was a homogeneity of life experiences:

"Nowhere is this clearer than in the allocation of resources, where the macho boys culture so often summons up the massive project and neglects the important details. When I was chair of transport at London Assembly it was starkly clear. Why is it that an obsession with boys-toys – the macho game of who’s got the biggest airport or the longest train – delivers multi-billion pound budgets for massive transport infrastructure projects yet not even a fraction of those budgets were spent on so called ‘soft measures’, such as making sure you can fit a double buggy through the door of a bus and making sure that local shopping centres and services are easily accessible – really easily accessible - through using public transport?"

The benefit of diversity is not because someone has different coloured skin or a differently shaped body but the different life experiences that they gain because society treats us differently depending on what colour skin we have or what sex we are. As long as women undertake the majority of childcare and the men making the decisions do not, women will be more likely to understand the need for these 'so called soft measures' that Lynne refers to.

Secondly, there is the issue of identity. Identity politics may be an anathema to a bunch of liberals but I can promise you that if I look at a group of people that I might aspire to be part of and I see they are all white, middle aged men then I will assume that's because the people putting them there only wanted white, middle class men. I am highly suspicious of homogeneous groups in positions of power and I don't buy that it's because they are all the best people for the job.

It is as Zohra Moosa said a culture designed for one type of person that still insists that the rest of us have to be shoe horned into working the same way.

To be honest, I cannot believe that anyone ever wants or desires positive discrimination as a first point of call. There are many other things, that we have yet to do, but that we can do before we have to resort to that. But, we have to go forward with the assumption that it will be us and the way that we do things that will have to change not BME or women as a group who have to change to fit in.

I'm hoping that the Diversity Engagement Group chaired by Vince Cable and of which I am a member will explore many of these opportunities. We are currently catching up, very slowly it seems to me, on the very basics of being able monitor and target diversity but I think once that's done we need to get much more radical and look at how the Liberal Democrats are going to change the way we do things to make being involved as easy for a woman in her thirties with 2 children to look after as it is for a similar man.

A Liberal Democrat Women's Policy? What do we need one of those for?

The Liberal Democrats Women's Policy Consultation Paper is up here.

From a quick first glance it looks pretty good and is seeking to address some of the issues that I've been writing about on this blog over the last 2 years; but I shall report back later when I've had a chance to read it properly.

Please go and have a look at it; and that includes men as well as women - any policy on women is going to affect men as well, so better you get your say now and ensure that the policy (whatever that's going to be) has a better chance of getting passed at Conference.

Oh, and if you're wondering why we, as Liberals, need a Women's Policy then click on the link above and have a read - they've anticipated the question!

In 2008 I read...

...all these books!

Survivors by Terry Nation
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
Asquith by Roy Jenkins
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
The Night of the Mi'raj by Zoe Ferraris
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
The Rough Guide to Devon and Cornwall 3
The Civil War (American Heritage Books) by Bruce Catton
The Allotment Book: Seasonal Planner & Cookbook by Andi Clevely
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce
Black Dogs: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Women in England 1760-1914 by Susie Steinbach
Age of Iron by J. M. Coetzee
Why women should rule the world : a memoir by Dee Dee Myers
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes by Linda Smith
Waiting For The Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
Kingdom come by J. G. Ballard

I have to admit to not having read the Rough Guide to Devon & Cornwall from cover to cover, just the relevant bits for our holiday!

Members of the Speaker’s Conference

The membership of the Speakers conference that been set up to sort out the inequalities of representation in the House of Commons of anybody who isn't a white, able bodied man is out:

Name, Constituency, Party

Miss Anne Begg (Vice-Chairman), Aberdeen South, Labour
Ms Diane Abbott, Hackney North & Stoke Newington, Labour
John Bercow, Buckingham, Conservative
Mr David Blunkett, Sheffield, Brightside, Labour
Angela Browning, Tiverton & Honiton, Conservative
Mr Ronnie Campbell, Blyth Valley, Labour
Mrs Ann Cryer, Keighley, Labour
Mr Parmjit Dhanda, Gloucester, Labour
Andrew George, St Ives, Liberal Democrat
Miss Julie Kirkbride, Bromsgrove, Conservative
Dr William McCrea, South Antrim, Democratic Unionist
David Maclean, Penrith & The Border, Conservative
Fiona Mactaggart, Slough, Labour
Anne Main, St Albans, Conservative
Jo Swinson, East Dunbartonshire, Liberal Democrat
Mrs Betty Williams, Conwy, Labour

I shall do some digging next week, to see what sort of Speaker's Conference it is (are the people on it conservative with a small 'c' or will be have AWL before the year is out!) and whether we should expect any change.

On SkyNew.Com in a couple of hours

Yes, I nearly forgot to mention. I am doing my more or less monthly slot on SkyNews.Com this evening looking at the 'hot' stories from the web today.

In fact, I'd better go as the car will be waiting for me and I don't want to be late!! I'm in enough trouble as it is, as I double booked it with a School Governors meeting...