Read Melissa Benn’s latest article, and readers’ comments, in today’s Guardian Comment is Free

Early Saturday afternoon in bracing February sunshine and a crowd is gathering outside Bow station in London’s East End. We are about to embark on a walk round the landmarks in the East End life of George Lansbury (1859-1940), part of a week of celebrations of this extraordinary man: socialist, Christian, militant pacifist and suffragist, and leader of the Labour party from 1932 to 1935……. ( Read on here)…

Read my latest Public Finance opinion piece

The tone was positively Churchillian: ‘Britain can beat this… just like we’ve beaten everything else this world has thrown at us. We’ll win by pulling together, not by facing the storm alone.’

But such stirring language came not from beleaguered national leaders at a world summit but from a bog-standard government press release issued earlier this week. It quoted the rather colourful Liam Byrne, Cabinet Office minister, on the pledge to give £42.5m to help charities weather the effects of the recession….. ( Read the rest of the article here……………http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion_details.cfm?News_id=59751…

Since I started occasionally posting pieces on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, I’ve had my first taste of real net malice. My current favourite remains ‘Melissa Benn. Pig Ignorant and Stupid With It.’ the headline of quite the most extraordinarily insulting blog,  posted by The Devil’s Kitchen, in response to an article I wrote a couple of months ago about Tory education policy.

I know experienced writers who will not enter into the world of net comment for fear of attack. I completely understand their distate and worry; it can be unsettling and even frightening to face such verbal violence.

On the other hand, why let the bullies win? Here, I think my political upbringing may have proved useful. As a child and teenager, I became used to reading nasty diatribes, either in the press, or in the steady flow of abusive and threatening letters sent directly to my father or our family as a whole. So I learned that long term, it is the abusers who reveal themselves to be weak and spineless and the person who can put their point of view calmly, firmly, with wit and thoughtfulness etc, will usually emerge the winner.

Needless to say, that Devil’s Kitchen headline has stayed with me in recent weeks; its comedy has swelled in my imagination: so much so, I’ve actually been considering getting a fridge magnate or a kid’s party style badge made up with those very words on it. It’s the ‘ ……and Stupid With It’ that really cracks me up. As if ‘Pig Ignorant’ alone is …well………just not ……quite………rude enough.…

 There was something important missing from Sabine Durrant’s The Chore Wars, an otherwise interesting double page feature in yesterday’s Guardian about the degree to which mothers are still left to carry the domestic can. And that was any reference to any sort of feminist analysis.

After all, there is a long, troubled, truculent, fascinating backstory to this issue of the domestic division of labour, and the apparently personal complaint of women and mothers. Modern feminism – second wave feminism – whatever you want to call it – began, in part, with womens’ collective anger/depression at the way domestic life was left to them. The first wave of women to get a decent further education post 1944 suddenly found themselves in the mid to late sixties beached up at home with the dishes and the babies while their male peers discovered sixties radicalism. Whoosh; the flame of fury and, subsequently, modern feminism was lit.

And yet here we are, four decades later, and a major liberal/left newspaper publishes a feature forensically dissecting womens’ continuing domestic burdens, that so clearly have knock on effects on everything from pay differentials to the the lack of women in senior positions, without any suggestion that this IS a stark illustration of continuing structural inequality?

For me the most telling quote of the piece came from a woman who gave up her job as a lawyer to care for her children, “My fury stems from seeing somebody ( her husband)  living in a world that’s not my own, a career world that feels denied [to me].”

Durrant  also quotes a recent survey in which ‘60% of respondents said that they either didn’t share these experiences with their friends or, if they did, they made light of them.’ No wonder when everything is reduced to personal complaint.

The piece also quotes Denise Knowles of Relate, who says “you need to work out, am I angry with my husband or am I angry because I don’t understand what is happening?” To which I would add a third option, ‘ Or am I angry because I DO understand what’s happening?’

I know the F word has been out of fashion for decades and that ‘structural inequality’ might not be quite the way to put it in a daily newspaper but surely there was some way to say at some point: hey, you know what, the personal is still political?…

‘One of Us’ has been selected by Richard and Judy as their book choice for February. Their reviews plus those of Amanda Ross, Joanne Frogatt and Sam West can be read in the Online Edition of the Daily Mail.…