Read Melissa Benn’s latest pieces on the web. Further comment on ‘bigotgate’ in Public Finance, and a piece on one of Burma’s most celebrated activists, the poet and comedian Zarganar, recently sentenced to thirty five years for criticising the government’s handling of cyclone Nargis in 2008, on the Guardian’s Liberty Central section of Comment is Free.…
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Election matters, and why this election matters so much
Two excellent pieces today on separate aspects of the election campaign. Francis Gilbert has written a cogent piece on Comment is Free on why Tory policies for schools will spell disaster for our education system. In the main paper Natasha Walter analyses the deeper reasons for the absence of women from the front line of politics.
There are many reasons, of course, for the shift in modern politics, away from a collegiate/cabinet emphasis to a more Presidential style of party leadership but the set piece TV debates have only accelerated this trend. 2010’s election campaign has been structured entirely around the Thursday debates, and associated briefings and endless analysis. This means, as many have observed during this singularly depressing campaign, that the only women who seem to count are the glamorous loyal wives whom, it is hinted, will be able moderate their husband’s excesses and weaknesses in traditional medieval court style. The power beyond the throne: yes indeed; nothing to do with democracy. As for the elected women, they are nowhere to be seen. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, is occasionally glimpsed in her bright red coat ( much good it does her) standing at the edge of some media scrum or apparently pushed to the edge of a platform.I have glimpsed the top of her head at least three times on television in the last week; they don’t even bother to show her face. Of course, the main media players are only interested in the main political players. There’s a few women in there, but not many.
As for Tory policies on education, they will be an unmitigated disaster. If schools can select their own pupils, secure their own funding and float away from struggling schools in their neighbourhood – the independent school model, unwritten by the state this time – inequality will only intensify. The Tory claim to want to tackle poverty and inequality is disingenuous; if anything proves it, it is their education policy.…
Recommended
Very good piece by Seumas Milne in The Guardian today on what Tory plans, particularly on education, might really mean.…
The single mother’s manifesto by JK Rowling
‘David Cameron says the ‘nasty party’ that castigated people like me has changed. I’m not buying it’ says JK Rowling in The Times this week.…
Regressive, Stagnant and Contradictory: Fawcett’s damning verdict on parties’ Manifesto
For the duration of the election campaign I am posting items in the news I find of interest/relevance to our understanding of what this election really means. Below, a press release from the Fawcett Society on what the main party manifestos promise – or fail to promise – in relation to women.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 15TH APRIL 2010
FOR FURTHER INFO / INTERVIEWS: 0207 253 2598
Regressive, Stagnant and Contradictory: Fawcett’s damning verdict on parties’ Manifesto
After concerted efforts to woo women voters, the parties’ manifestos hardly mention those same women, and the policies they do propose range from disappointing to downright disturbing.
Women are dealt with in piecemeal fashion with no party providing coherent explanations of how their policies will impact on women lives or how they will address persistent gender inequality.
Ceri Goddard, Fawcett’s Chief Executive, said:
“After some progress in power Labour seems to have stagnated, some Conservatives policies could actually be a backward step for women’s equality, and the Liberal Democrats are contradictory. The manifestos are a depressing read for anyone concerned about women’s equality, particularly given the energy the Party campaigning machines have invested in targeting women voters on sofas, on the internet and from the pages of the glossies.”
“Perhaps the most backward of the Conservative policies is their proposal to recognise some marriages in the tax system. Their marriage tax allowance could well push lower paid women from low paid families back into the home – but are the Conservatives being honest about this? It’s well rehearsed that this policy discriminates against widows/widowers, single parents and people who leave abusive relationships. But this policy also discriminates against married couples where both partners choose to or need to work – the reality for most people. From the party that advocates the small state this is state-sponsored social engineering writ large.”
“This worrying theme is continued elsewhere. Despite the premise of the ‘Couple Penalty’ being debunked by our campaign partner Gingerbread , the Conservatives have said they will press ahead with benefit reform that will disproportionately reward couples. This will have the disastrous effect of leaving single parents, 90 per cent of whom are women, in far greater relative poverty.
Criticising Labour’s and the Liberal Democrats’ Manifestos Ceri Goddard continued:
“It’s a shame that Labour has failed to follow up on some of the progress of the last 13 years. There seems to be no vision to build on steps like the minimum wage, all women short-lists and flexible working to take the next step towards equality.…
Recommended
Good piece by Alice Thomson in The Times yesterday on how those who work in the NHS deserve gratitude as much as English lessons.…
Something to believe in…
….or is it? Am I being too optimistic in my latest post– more of a note – in Public Finance? You tell me. But the Labour manifesto, as drafted by Ed Miliband, and much discussed, even derided, in recent weeks, seems to contain some very good things.
Now if only there had been more about housing…not to mention a promise to abolish Trident… a pledge to break down the crippling divisions within our school system…..a pledge to withdraw from Afghanistan….…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
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