Just had a head-to-head with the Tory commentator Dominic Lawson on the Jeremy Vine show: discussing the public sector pensions strike. He proposes that the problem is not the government’s attack on the public sector and its pensions it is the relationship between the ‘haves’   and the ‘have-nots’. No, this is not a Tory lamenting the cruel gap between rich and poor, it is a Tory deflecting attention away from the cruel inequalities in the private sector:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-it-is-the-haves-going-on-strike-not-the-havenots-6269308.html

Lawson’s argument was reiterated by Tory minister David Willetts on Radio 4’s The World at One. It shows a remarkable sway of denial. It is the wrong inference from an irrelevant comparison.

The public sector is not to blame for rubbish private sector pensions, it is not to blame for private employers’ abandonment of employers’ contribution to private sector pensions; nor is it to blame for the relentless march of inequality over the last 30 years – synchronising exactly with the rise and rise of neo-liberalism in the global economy.

The Britain bequeathed by the neo-liberal thrall is one of the most unequal societies in Europe – since 1980 workers’ share of the national income has declined from 45 per cent to 157 per cent.

There is an unspoken, inchoate resentment shadowing the resentment of the public sector and indeed the values of public service: it is called misogyny. Sixty-five per cent of public sector workers are women.

They aren’t to blame for the 25 per cent that was wiped off private pensions by the credit crunch, according to Ros Altman, director of Saga:  http://www.rosaltmann.com/independent_metlife_may09.htm

Nor are they to blame for the five years worth of contributions estimated by PriceWaterhouse Coopers to have been wiped off during the 2011 summer stock market crash.

There is a semantic ‘surge’ being mobilised by the deniers: a vocabulary borrowed from the language of class and privilege in Britain is being mobilised against public service. Tories now cite the private sector, hailed for three decades as the paragon of economic virtue, as a victim.

But pensions expert Ros Altman reminds who is the private sector pensions banker – it isn’t the public:

‘The idea that equity markets might not deliver over the long term was never seriously entertained by policymakers. Nobody explained to workers that they were effectively gambling their future security on the stock market without any form of insurance to protect themselves against the risks of poor equity returns and rising life expectancy.’

Society wrought in the image of the private sector, equity markets and neo-liberalism has produced Britain as one of the most unequal societies in Europe.

Since 1980 the workers/taxpayers share of national income: from 45 per cent 1980 to 157 per cent 2007.

Private sector employers have largely abandoned contributions to private pensions. The desperation felt about the declining value of private pensions has to be located alongside the declining value of the basic state pension: it is one of the lowest in Europe.

‘The entire UK pension system has been based on a bet that equities would always do well enough over the long term to deliver good pensions,’ says Altman. ‘Generous final salary schemes – as well as forecasts for good personal pensions – all relied on the equity gamble paying off. The expected strong equity returns also enabled successive governments to cut UK state pensions over time.’

Britain has the largest funded private pension system in Europe – and lowest level of pensions as a percentage of earnings in Europe.

Women employed in the public sector are not responsible for any of this. They probably didn’t vote for it, they certainly didn’t cause it.

To Be or Not to Be On Strike…

The strategic implications of the government’s plan for pensions take us to the re-structuring of the state itself, and to the ethics of industrial action in the public sector. They are connected.

The industrial action is vulnerable to the charge that it is about individual interests v public interest, and that charge that the victims are not big power but people dependent on public servants.

Listening to strikers it is apparent that they are very afraid of the coalition government’s surgical attack on the public sector and the culture of public service: November 30 it is about money, jobs, services and the people who need and use those services.

It is about everything.

But after all the years of purgatory into which trade unions were thrown by Thatcherism, no new idiom of ‘industrial action’ has been invented to address the historic anomaly of strikes in public service: the target isn’t profit or corporate power, it is a person; it is persons whose needs make them powerless.

Without doubt the day of action has concentrated the collective mind on the detail of the coalition’s re-distributive consequences, but it has not resolved the anxious hesitations of people who support the theory behind the strike but not its practise. If trade unions are recovering their nerve and purpose, they also need to improvise action that can inspire and engage those who need them most: the people like them – the people.

Here is a terrific analysis of the Tory Euro Sceptics’ significance

The Conservative Euro revolt: 10 points to note

Oh happy days. Just when we think we’re getting a bit tired of doing this rebellions lark, along comes something like Monday’s Euro rebellion.  We knew it would be big, but we were surprised it was quite that big.  Today’s Sun has a Rebelometer, which points to: Utter Disaster.  That’s going a bit far, but not much.

The Guardian has rendered a great public service in exposing the News of the World, mobile phone hacking and the difference between investigative journalism and inappropriate tittle tattle and  invasions of people’s privacy.

But what is this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/deccaaitkenhead

Exposing Louise Mensch for having a facelift.

What was brave, illuminating or newsworthy about sharing with Guardian readers little telltale signs of cosmetic surgery? I thought it was – as Omar might say –  unseemly. As it happens, Mensch gave as good as she got. But the game the Guardian interviewer played with Mensch, trying and failing to extract a denial, revealed more about faux journalistic heroism than Mensch’s body politics.

Are we to be enlightened by revelations of dandruff on politicians’ suits, nail biting habits, hair in ears and noses? No of course not, because that’s about blokes and who cares.

a delegate "dances" for protesters at the pornographers conference

Feminists organised a cute  protest on  23/9/11 outside XBIZ EU, an international pornography trade summit, at the Edwardian Radisson Hotel in Bloomsbury Street – dressed as butchers and businessmen trading in women’s body parts. Delegates – some of them already, obviously, having begun their happy hour early – came out to see the kerfuffle. Perma-tans and exotic coiffure were de rigueur.  The gentleman above was very enthusiastic, as you can see.

Swiftly, however, the police and later Radisson staff, escorted the gentlemen back into the hotel so that the women could carry on, unharrassed, with their peaceful protest.

Speakers at XBIZ EU included porn baron Berth Milton, Chairman and CEO of Private Media Group, and Michael Klein, president of Hustler, founded in 1974 by Larry Flint, is now a major producer of pornographic DVDs and online content. In 1978 the Hustler magazine featured an infamous front cover image of a woman’s body being mutilated by a meat grinder.

The global pornography industry is estimated to be worth $97 (US) billion.

OBJECT has launched the STOP.PRESS.PORN campaign to call on the Government to end the sexual objectification of women in newspapers and to end the Page 3 phenomena – already been supported by the Lib Dem Party Conference.

Kat Banyard, Director of UK Feminista, said:

“The pornography industry butchers women. Brutal, body punishing acts are now routine in mainstream porn and women are presented merely as a collection of body parts, deserving and desiring of pain. The pimps and porn moguls gathered at this are part of a global industry ruthlessly seeking new and profitable ways to carve up sexuality and trade away women’s equality. The Radisson Edwardian hotel is hosting a brutal meat market, not a lavish corporate conference.

“For decades the pornography industry has enjoyed unchecked expansion. It’s time to wrestle power back from the pornographers. With a review into the culture and ethics of the press underway, the Government must ensure that pornographic imagery – like ‘Page 3’ – is a key part of this review.”

Anna van Heeswijk, Campaigns Coordinator at OBJECT, said:

“This is not the porn of yesteryear. Pornography today is increasingly violent, body punishing, degrading and woman hating. Hardcore porn is the norm and it is being accessed by boys as young as 11 on the internet and on mobile phones. The messages and images from porn are infiltrating every aspect of our popular culture and women and girls are bearing the brunt of increased levels of violence, sexual abuse and harassment that accompany pornification.

Our message is clear: ‘women are human, stop treating us like objects’.”

Julia Long from the London Feminist Network said:

“This summit is being presented as a lavish, respectable corporate event, when in fact it is a brazen opportunity for the porn industry to plan new ways of profiting from the exploitation of women. No matter how slick and sophisticated the presentation, it is the still the same old meat market just below the surface. This protest is sending an important message that Xbiz is not welcome in London.”

Sabinra Qureshi from Million Women Rise said:

“The public deserve to know the truth and reality behind the so called sex industry and the harm that underpins it, not the glamorised version the media and events like this tend to promote.”

 

 

 

Protesters meet and greet Porn Industry

 

 

 

 

 

There is no way that Rupert Murdoch’s proposed offer of around 3 million to the Dowler family can be anything but unsettling. The money – mighty to the family, miniscule to the Murdochs – draw attention to the contradictions swirling around the deal.

This is not to join the tendency to deride ‘compensation culture’: redress and reparation are important contributions to individuals whose wellbeing has been vitally injured, to their recovery, and to social recognition.

The cruel irony for the Dowlers is that these millions compromise their own wellbeing: this money is about someone who can never profit from it, Millie. The Dowlers will now have to manage Murdoch’s largesse. Nothing can ever be enough, and yet this is already too much.

They will also have to manage the meaning of Murdoch’s offer. There is no restorative justice here. Murdoch himself needed to meet the Dowlers, he needed  his face-to-face humbling because he and his empire needed forgiveness. He needed to perform virtue and to have it rewarded and recognised by his victims.

So, this offer denotes neither contrition nor conscience nor compensation – because those words imply change.

What is Murdoch giving the Dowlers? The money is peanuts for an empire that is almost the most powerful media organisation in the world. It is pennies for the man himsef, reckoned to be the 13th most powerful  person in the world.

What he is not giving the Dowlers nor the other hacking victims, nor British culture, which has been so degraded by his presence, is the promise of dignified and deep reform of his media practices.

The context of the offer is a salutory: in the very same week the Metropolitan police tried to mobilise the Official Secrets Act to scare the Guardian, the scourge of News International.

It was the Guardian’s revelations about the NoW hacking and interference in the Dowler investigation that detonated the hacking scandal – it morphed from a scandal about celebrity privacy to a scandal about the the breaching of any code, public or private; and it exposed a most dangerous triangulation: the intimate circuit connecting the News International, the Met and Conservative Party HQ. The promiscuous spread of NoW personnel into the police and the highest echelons of a political party secures for the Tories illicit access to information. Knowledge is power.

The Dowlers they didn’t put themselves into that scandal – but they are in it, nevertherless.

The Met’s audacity in trying to terrify the press with the Official Secrets Act shows that it is still trying to lock the gates of the Temple rather than  cleanse it. The Met is still trying to protect itself rather than the public and the public interest. The Met’s managers don’t seem to know what world they are living in after Dowlergate – until the outraged reaction forced withdrawal.

Not to have anticipated the calumny caused by the Dowler case ad then by the Official Secrets Act caper, exposes its media department – a quarter of its staff former NoW hacks – as equally unworldly.

This week Conservative Party HQ isn’t in the narrative, but if the Met is News International’s security arm – see Jonathan Freedland: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/20/new-met-chief-u-turn-misjudgment

- then the Tories are also hardwired into this circuit. This is very sinister.

Unwittingly the Dowlers found themselves positioned in this narrative and the campaign to crack hacking -

http://hackinginquiry.org/news/hacked-off-manifesto/

- it is to be hoped that the money won’t take them out of it.

D’you know, I don’t understand why people of sound mind aren’t voting Green. The Lib Dems have been for many a tactical alternative to the dismaying trajectory of New Labour, slinking into neo-Liberalism.

For a ravishing account of that journey see Stuart Hall’s latest intervention in the new edition of Soundings, www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/contents.html  and its shorter version in the Guardian

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

For many, Ed Miliband’s election as leader of the Labour Party  seemed to promise a twinge, a flicker, of hope that Labour might renewal itself and it might achieve that by transplanting a bit of radical DNA into its bloodstream. But Miliband’s performance at the TUC this week showed a man entrapped, not a man empowered. Does he and his milieu have any  how to think positive and think progressive at the same time? This is not a leader expecting to lead. Only a man expecting to manage.

A bit of canvassing for the Greens in the Highgate local by-election this month has yielded interesting insight into the agonies of Labour voters: there are 29 Labour councillors in Camden. Unassailable. There is one Green councillor. For left of centre voters the contest is between the Greens and Labour. The Greens are seen as the progressive option, and yet the sense of Labour supporters being snared by loyalty is palpable.

In England lending support to the Greens is the hopeful thing to do, it releases the possibility of re-discovering the joys of politics as the art of the simultaneously reasonable and the radical, of engagement rather than the dismal experience of political pessimism and loneliness.

What, anywhere, is better than the Green Manifesto, as a way of thinking about how to sort stuff out.

www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/resources/EasyRead_Green_Party_Manifesto_web.pdf

www.neweconomics.org/projects/green-new-deal

What’s not to like? 

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.