Category: Society, Media & Politics

In which I think about how problematic it can be when the news is complicated

Julian Assange, Mr Wikileaks, is currently holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, guarded by the massed ranks of Ecuador’s diplomatic mission to the UK, the Metropolitan Police, and some protestors, who may be related to Occupy London, but may not. This is just the sort of thing I feel I probably ought to have an opinion on. Generally I can generate an opinion on most things. I think that banning smoking in public buildings was a Good Thing. I think that the Health Reform Bill was a Bad Thing. I think that wearing black with navy makes you look like a bruise. See – I’m a barely controlled fountain of random thoughts and attitudes.

But on Mr Assange’s current predicament I’m struggling. I think I think he probably should be extradited to Sweden. As countries go, there are plenty of places with less transparent judicial systems, and the Swedish courts and prosecution service (after long deliberation) have decided there are sufficient grounds to issue a European Arrest Warrant to seek Assange’s extradition on sexual assault charges. I don’t think that access to money and high profile supporters should make answering potentially serious criminal charges optional. I do think that sexual assault and rape are globally massively under-reported and under-prosecuted. I do think there are two women in Sweden who have effectively been tried by Assange’s supporters and found guilty without getting their own day in court. I do think that all of that feels very wrong.

But then, what if that’s horribly naive of me? What if Assange and his supporters are right, and the assault allegations are nothing more than a smokescreen to ease Assange’s later extradition to the USA? America is famously hardcore about pursuing perceived threats to her national interests.  We’re talking about a country that did a whole invasion, apparently because the President was cross that when his Daddy was President the job got left unfinished. We’re talking about the country that has already massively overreacted to WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential diplomatic communications (a publication that you can argue was more embarrassing than actually damaging –  the bulk of the material was little more than embassy gossip.) The US already has the alleged source of the diplomatic cable leaks, Bradley Manning, in custody, and WikiLeaks has found that the number of companies prepared to provide technological or financial infrastructure has suddenly, and markedly, dwindled. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the US would go to extreme lengths to get Assange onto US soil.

But then, why wouldn’t they have just applied to extradite him from the UK themselves? Why go to the trouble of having him sent to Sweden first? The UK has an extradition treaty with the US. The British government has been criticised in recent years for being too willing to co-operate with US extradition requests, notably in the case of Gary McKinnon. And why run for the Ecuadorean embassy when Ecuador also has a valid extradition treaty with the US?

And Ecuador have decided that there are sufficient grounds to grant Assange asylum. Presumably they’ve considered the situation more carefully than just watching a bit of News 24 and reading about it on Twitter. Ecuador are in the process of negotiating a new trade agreement with Europe, so you would think that it wouldn’t be a time to antagonise the UK and Sweden if they could avoid it. The apparent threat by the UK to enter the Ecuadorean embassy also seems disproportionate, but did they actually threaten to do that? The text of the letter in question is here. It’s strongly worded but is it a direct threat? I don’t know. Maybe in the opaque world of diplomatic communication it is.

And Sweden won’t guarantee not to extradite Assange onwards to the US. Maybe they should  promise that, but then again, they probably can’t. The don’t have Assange on Swedish soil, and the USA hasn’t initiated extradition proceedings, so how can they make promises about how they’d behave in a set of circumstances that haven’t yet occurred? Sweden have also been reluctant to consider questioning Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy, on the grounds that this is just another criminal case. In their view there is no reason for special treatment.

The problem here is that there are too many things that I don’t quite understand, and despite the massive amount of media coverage of the Assange case, there’s not a lot of light being cast on these questions by the press. You can find second by second updates on who’s outside the embassy now, what the Foreign Office is saying, what Assange is saying, what the protesters outside are saying, what the Ecuadorean government are saying, but it’s much harder to find in depth analysis of Assange’s claims that he’s the victim of a witchhunt, or consideration of the past record of the nations involved on extradition and human rights.

So should Assange be extradited to Sweden? It’s complicated, but yes. I think so. Probably, because without clear hard evidence that he should be treated as a special case, there’s no justification to do so. Justice has to be blind and has to be applied evenly. Not facing sexual assault charges because you’ve upset the American government is unfair. Not facing sexual assault charges because you’ve become a cause celebre is also unfair. I think, but it’s entirely possible that today I might be wrong.

In which I think about PE at school and try not to succumb to the trauma

So, the Olympics is all over bar the politics, and it’s time to get back to normal telly. The nation is sharing a communal “just back from holidays” feeling where our two week refusal to tear ourselves away from the tv and do laundry or buy sensible food is coming back to haunt us. Mundanity is back with force.

The Olympics haven’t just provided a distraction from normality for us little people though. Our lovely politicians have also had a nice break from boring stuff like the economy and how we used to have a health service. All of a sudden all a politician wanting a picture in the papers needs to do is pop on a Team GB baseball cap and make a pronouncement on how bad we are at teaching PE in school. We are into a period of political PE inflation.

David Cameron kicked off be announcing that what we needed was a more competitive ethos in school sport, a cultural change, no less.  It was quickly pointed out that the current government had actually cut the previous requirement that children do at least two hours of PE per week, but Cameron was quick with his response. The requirement had been cut in recognition of the fact that some schools were not teaching Proper Sport. Some children were doing things like Indian Dance, on which Cameron commented, “Now, I’ve got nothing against Indian dancing classes but that’s not really sport.” This from the Prime Minister of a country that won two golds and a bronze in Horsey Ballet. Now I’m not criticizing the Horsey Ballet – so far as I’m concerned any day when a horsey pirouettes to songs from the Lion King on my telly is a good day – however, we probably can’t afford to be too draconian about the question of what counts as Proper Sport.

Since then we’ve had a kind of sport in schools inflation. Boris Johnson, I think,  managed to win the prize for the most pro-PE politician, when he announced that two hours per week was insufficient and children should be doing two hours of school sport per day. It’s not instantly clear where the rest of the business of education fits into this timetable, but then we’re all going to be athletes and shot putters don’t need to be able to count or read, do they? Of course, that was Boris, so it’s not entirely clear that two hours per day is what he meant. It’s perfectly possible that the data being transmitted from the Mother Ship simply became corrupted and mangled the distinction between hours, days and weeks.

All of the above somehow misses the point. Actually there are two points and it misses both of them. Firstly, we’ve done quite well at these Olympics. This presents an opportunity to get more people enthused about sport. It doesn’t obviously suggest that everything we’re doing at present in the teaching of sport is wrong. Secondly, it fails to ask what the point of PE in school is. Is it to breed new generations of elite athletes or is it to encourage an exercise habit and promote health? There’s no reason that it can’t be both, but if it’s only about elite competitive sport, that screws over the fat kids, the slow kids, the unco-ordinated kids who get turned off exercise for life and grow up into fatter slower less co-ordinated adults. I went to schools with a strong emphasis on competitive sport, and I was terrible at it. I was a podgy child. I’m not a natural catcher or thrower or jumper or runner, so I went through PE in school being not good enough. My favourite PE lessons were those where the teacher abandoned any pretense of involving the whole group and let the fat girls “field deep” (a schooldays euphemism for “sit on the grass and make daisy chains.”) I was probably twenty-seven before I worked up the courage to even enter a gym or go to an exercise class – and imagine my delight when I discovered that plenty of forms of exercise are not competitive. No-one loses. Why was I not told about this earlier?

So, if you’re a politician who likes to pop on your Team GB polo shirt and wander around the Olympic Park like you actually helped in some way (you know who you are), probably the best bet would be to actually talk to some elite athletes about what they need to reproduce these levels of success, and then, maybe, get on with doing that. It’ll probably be very boring and to do with funding and coaching programmes and not very much to do with primary school PE at all. Then, you can leave the primary schools to concentrate on getting children excited about sport and exercise and, if they enjoy it and it gets kids moving, why not a bit of  Indian Dance?

In which I think about the overall quite-goodness of humanity

In a fashion quite unlike myself I actually had a plan for what I was going to blog about this week. It’s my birthday today – it’s only 8.15am and I’ve already opened all my presents and started browsing Amazon for things to spend my vouchers on. I do like a birthday. They’re like Christmas but without all the tiresome Giving to interupt the important Receiving. Anyway, I was going to blog all about birthdays and aging and stuff like that.

However, I then became distracted by the wonder that is the Olympics, so I thought I’d blog a bit more about that, having already blogged a wee bit about it here. The Olympics have been brilliant. Ok, so my “Grenada to top the medal table” plan hasn’t quite panned out (so far – there’s totally still time), but Team GB are doing sterling work and I’ve disovered an unexpected passion for canoe slalom, ten thousand metre running and the pommel horse. Turns out us Britishers give good pommel. I also quite like volleyball, rowing and trampolining, although it amazes me that the trampolinists manage to get through their routines without shouting “Wheeeeeeee!” on the flippy bits.

I then became more specifically distracted by Oscar Pistorius. Wow. I mean just Wow. Oscar Pistorius is amazing. Oscar Pistorius is a double-amputee who runs under 46 seconds for 400m. He’s also had to go through a lengthy legal battle to challenge the IAAF’s initial decision that his running blades gave him an unfair advantage over able bodied athletes. There are still big portions of newspaper space filled with chuntering columns about whether Pistorius gains athletic advantage from having no legs below the knee, generally concluded with a vague “Where will it all end?” vibe.  These articles are silly. Where it clearly won’t end is with able-bodied athletes having their legs voluntarily chopped off so they can run on prosthetics. Assuming you survived the operation, which would be by no means guaranteed, the months/years of physio, the attendant muscle wastage, the re-learning how to walk on prosthetics, let alone run, would be more likely to end, rather than enhance, any athletics career you might have had. So lets just accept Oscar for what he is – an actual real-life (not out of a movie) inspirational person.

And then I got further distracted by this. NASA have successfully landed the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now putting aside the fact that the XKCD comic about the previous Mars rover is the saddest thing I’ve ever ever seen (apart perhaps from the musical montage prologue bit in Up), this is amazing news. The Curiosity rover weighs a tonne and it’s just landed on a planet that is at least 53 million km away from Earth. And we did that. Obviously I mean we – humanity, not we – me and my mates. Sadly our mission to Mars broke down at the planning stage, when we ran out of napkins to draw on and spent the remaining budget on drinking more wine instead.

Humanity though is amazing. When we’re not killing each other and breaking the planet, we’re really rather incredible. We can learn to run when we have no legs. We can overcome great odds to follow our dreams, like Saudi Arabian athletes Sarah Attar and Wojdan Shaherkani. We can send massive great hunks of stuff to other planets. We’re quite inpsiring when you stop to think about our positives. So, that’s what I’m inviting you to do today? Think about the positives. What inspires you? What makes you go weirdly smiley and teary-eyed all at the same time? Please do sharing in the comments, and, if you feel so inspired, please feel free to do following/subscribing too.

In which I think about not wanting children

I don’t want to have children. I’ve never really wanted to have children. Most of my life I’ve been told that this will change, that not wishing to procreate was a phase I would get past, and that, fundamentally, long-term resistance to bringing additional tiny people into the world would be a bit weird.

There were generally agreed to be two key triggers that would send me back onto the right-thinking path. Those were “when you hit your thirties” – this being the age at which the tick of a woman’s biological clock is expected to become overwhelming, and “when you’re friends have children.” Well, I’m 35 next week (eeeek – more on that next Monday) and I can’t move for small people in my social circle, but the urge still hasn’t kicked in.

I don’t dislike children. I have a six-year old nephew and an eight-week old niece and they’re both marvellous fun. Well the six-year old is marvellous fun. The eight-week old is still really at the sleep-feed-poo stage, but she’s super super cute and cuddlesome, and I still can’t imagine wanting one of my own.

What’s struck my lately, much more than in the past, is that this feeling actually is a bit weird. Most (not quite all, but a heavy majority) of my friends who weren’t that fussed about kids when they were younger, did grow out of that phase, and reach a point in life where babies seemed desirable. Either that or a lot of my friends are terrible with birth control and good at putting  positive spin on the outcome.

And it’s not just that the great miscellaneous blame-for-everything “society” that we live in pressures us to have babies. It’s much more basic than that. We basically exist to reproduce. Our fundamental biological driver is to pass on our genes. Not wanting to do that would suggest that I’ve somehow managed to break evolution.  Er…. oops.

Not that I’m going to override my lack of procreational urge. The planet has plenty of people. A few less probably wouldn’t do us any great harm, and might bring big environmental benefits.

So why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it’s Monday and my new found blogging commitment requires that I tel you something, but mainly because of something two different women said to me recently, when I told them I’d never wanted kids. Both said that I was the first person they’d ever heard admit that openly. Now, obviously it’s perfectly possible that I am entirely unique and therefore unquestionably special and important and deserving of a tiara, but, sad though I am not to get a tiara, I don’t think that can possibly be the case. So that’s why I’m telling the internet about my weird anti-biological resistance to perpetuating my genes. It’s because it can’t just be me, can it? Please feel welcome to offer reassurances that I’m not a total one-off or to suggest pretty tiara options in the comments. Do you want kids? Did you always want them? Is it different for boys? Do they make tiaras for boys? Other questions like that…

In which I start off all Venetian and then become distracted by daytime television

Ahoy there! The blog plan for today was to tell you all about my lovely holiday last week, but since making that plan I’ve become quite disastrously distracted by what I suspect may be the worst television programme ever made.

I’m going to try to stay on topic for at least a couple of paragraphs though. So I’ve been to Venice. I went there with darling husband, senior sibling, her hubbie and my favourite nephew. And these are the things that I learnt:

1. Holidays with six-year olds are knackering

Now I appreciate that many of you will have actual children of your own who live in your house and are knackering all the time. Well I don’t, so this was news to me. This particular six-year old, although charming in all respects, does not appear to have been fitted with any sort of activity level control. He runs with two settings: asleep and not asleep (aka totally manic).

I, unfortunately, am quite a sedentary animal, used to sitting still on my rapidly-expanding writer’s bottom, so can only really maintain manic for about seven and a half minutes at a time. Probably, when I am Queen of the World, I shall decree that all children be fitted with some sort of wakefulness dimmer switch, so that the grown-ups can just turn them down to “sitting quietly” when they’ve had enough running about for one day. I am confident that there are absolutely no practical or ethical issues with that plan at all.

I was at this point going to include a pic of aforementioned nephew, but everytime I try to upload it my browser crashes, so you’ll just have to take my word for the fact that he exists, is blond, curly and quite unfeasibly cute.

2. People who don’t like Venice are just wrong.

There are many complex issues in the world. Questions like “why did Germolene stop being pink?” are tricky and deserving of lengthy debate. The question of whether Venice is brilliant is not complicated. It is, without question, one of the best places on earth. It has no cars, which makes it a bit like Center Parcs (which the self-same nephew reliably informs me actually is the best place on earth). It has incredible architechture, amazing art and is bountiful in its provision of gelato.

Some people have told me the Venice smells funny. They are wrong. I’ve been there twice. It smells fine. Other people complain that it’s full of tourists. Well, in places, yes. But it’s wrong to be snobby about touristy places – if lots of people want to go somewhere, that’s just as likely to be a sign that the somewhere is amazing, as it is that the people are fools. And secondly, you just need to walk for 5 minutes beyond St Mark’s Square and it’s actually not that busy at all, or, if you’re too lazy to walk, hop on a boat over to San Giorgio or Salute and get away from the crowds that way.

Venice is brilliant. If you haven’t been, go. If you’ve been and didn’t like it, then go back and do it properly. If you’ve been and loved it, share your highlights down in the comments.

And then I came home, where my attention was rapidly taken up by a “reality” tv wonder which I had not come across before. It’s not actually a new programme – it went out in America in 2010, but I’m in Britain and I don’t have Sky, so forgive me for being a little behind.

Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you the wonder that is BridalPlasty. On BridalPlasty twelve brides compete to win the “perfect” celebrity-style wedding, including winning items off their plastic surgery wishlist. As is the norm with tv reality, each week the brides complete challenges, and the challenge winner gets a prize. On this show that prize is an medically unnecessary major surgery! Whoop-de-doo! Only if they win the show will they get their full surgery wish list, and then they can have their perfect wedding, assuming of course that their thigh skin hasn’t been left too tight to permit walking down the aisle.

Now, the obvious next paragraph would be a big ol’ rant about tv reinforcing the idea that there’s just one form of perfect beauty and that only by conforming to that precisely can any woman expect a man to look twice at her. Probably that rant would come with a side order of “who decides what’s perfect anyway?” and possibly a dipping source of “actually they all look fine to start with.” And all of those would be good points, but you are intelligent readers, so I’m assuming you can fill in the details on all of those rant elements.

I could also wonder why none of these women and none of their fiances appear to be particularly concerned about the risks of major surgery. Surely, when your girlfriend tells you she’s going to enter a competition to win a perfect wedding, with a small associated risk of death on an operating table, most husbands-to-be would have something to add to the discussion. Wouldn’t they?

Anyway, I’m going to jump straight to: Where are the bridegrooms in this process? How come they’re deemed pretty enough to have a perfect wedding without being cut and bandaged and remodelled? How come a groom can have a bit of a big nose, or a hint of a beer gut, or wonky teeth and be considered characterful, whereas brides need to be ironed and stapled until they all look like the same stepford blank canvas?

Here’s the bottom line: faces are supposed to show expressions; lips are supposed to be able to smile and laugh and shout and whistle; boobs are supposed to be squishy and jiggly; years are supposed to add wrinkles; bodies are supposed to change over time, not under a knife. We’re not all supposed to look the same. There isn’t supposed to be a template of perfect beauty that you can buy off the shelf. Love the body evolution gave you, and (and this is important) don’t go marrying anyone who doesn’t love it, in all its wonderful imperfection, too.

That is all. Ciao (cos I’ve been to Italy, see) x

In which I am curiously lacking in views on the Beecroft Report

Hello lovely blog readers. Long time no see. How have you been?

Time, laziness and a lack of righteous anger have kept me from you over recent weeks. Happily the news last week was filled with the wonder the is the Beecroft Report on employment law, and so I am able to return to you with something to muse upon/rant about and blogging normality may be resumed.

For those of you not familiar with the tome, the Beecroft Report is a report into UK Employment Law written by one Adrian Beecroft and recommending a set of changes to the law which the report claims respond to the current situation where “employment law and regulation impedes the search for efficiency and competitiveness.” Efficiency and competetiveness are obviously the guiding aims of any right thinking individual, so impeding them is, very clearly, A Bad Thing.

Shall we take a look at some key points in more detail? I think we shall. Shall we number those points? You better believe we will. Before we do that I just want to make one thing painstakingly clear. It is, and always has been, entirely legal for an employer to dismiss an employee because they are bad at their job. The legal term is “dismissal for reason of capability” and it’s allowed. It always has been allowed. No-one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that it should not be allowed. Remember that point – it’s going to be important later.

1. Unfair Dismissal

The Beecroft Report says: “The ability to dismiss an employee who is not performing is an essential element in managing any business.” With this in mind Beecroft recommends the introduction of “no fault” compensated dismissal, whereby an employer can dismiss a person without giving a reason, if they provide monetary compensation. Now, I don’t know if anyone’s ever mentioned this to you, but it’s already perfectly legal to dismiss a person for being lousy at their job.

If the employee is fine and dandy at their job, I don’t quite understand why an employer would want to pay them to go away, and if they’re terrible at the job, then why would you pay for the privilege of sacking them, when you can sack them for free at the moment.

The change Beecroft is trying to introduce here is create a situation where an employee can be dismissed, given no reason for the dismissal, and have no legal recourse. There’s another thought I’d like you to hold onto…

2. Employment Tribunals

Beecroft lays out his perception of the Employment Tribunal system like this: “Employers in general deeply dislike employment tribunals, a feeling shared by most employees. They are expensive, time consuming and personally stressful.” I’m going to skim over the grossly unevidenced assertion in the opening sentence, assume that I missed the memo where they checked what we all thought about Employment Tribunals, and move onto the specifics in sentence 2.

Employment Tribunals are expensive – to whom? The government is very clear that claimants do not need expensive legal advice to navigate the process. If they did, then presumably legal aid for employment cases would have been retained in the recent Legal Aid Reform Bill. It wasn’t. Submitting an application is free. There’s the cost of travelling to the hearing, and the cost of photocopying submissions and evidence. Compared with most legal processes, from a claimant and respondent’s point of view it’s relatively inexpensive. Having cited the cost of the tribunal process as a problem, Beecroft goes onto recommend introducing fees for claimants. One can only imagine that he’d forgotten how expensive he thought it was when he wrote that bit.

Employment Tribunals are time consuming – well yes, although how time consuming depends on the complexity of the claim. Suing or being sued over any other contractual dispute would also be time-consuming. Strangely, that fact doesn’t appear to lead us to conclude that the wider civil courts are probably a bit of a dodgy idea.

Employment Tribunals are personally stressful – well, potentially. Whether they’re more or less stressful than being fired for no reason and with no legal recourse, is open to debate.

In addition to introducing fees for claimants, Beecroft also supports other BIS plans to attempt to reduce the number of claims that make it as far as tribunal. Do you get the impression that he wants to discourage people from making Employment Tribunal claims? If you do, then that would be a fair impression. But is it needed? If only statistics were available detailing the current workload of the tribunal system. Happily (well happily for nerds like me) they are. You can read them for yourselves, if you are so minded, here.

Between April 2010 and Mar 2011 383400 claimants made an application to the Employment Tribunal. That was a slight fall on the numbers the year before, but still well up on the 266500 claims in 2008-9. Although actually it wasn’t, because to look at things clearly you really need to discount a big hunk of repeat claims that originate from an specific set of problems to do with Working Time Regulations in the airline industry and are resubmitted every quarter. Putting aside that whole hornet’s nest, we see that the claims year on year look something like this:

2008-9 – 242500

2009-10 297600

2010-11 268300

Not such a big variance from 2008-9 to 2010-11 after all. So if claims aren’t significantly rising, why the need to discourage claims? It comes down to a really fundamental question about how employment relationships should work. Should employers have freedom to do essentially what they please, on the basis that it’s their money and their business at the end of the day? Or should we view an employment relationship like any other contract – a binding agreement between two equal parties, wherein if the financially weaker party feels mistreated there is redress under the law? That’s the fundamental question, and that’s what we should be talking about, rather than getting caught up in a set of rhetoric about how not being able to sack people is stopping the economy from growing.

So, how should work work? Does he (or she) who pays the piper simply call the tune, or should employees have strong protection under the law? Does employment regulation stifle entrepreneurism? Feel welcome to let me know what you think in the comments. It’s probably a topic I’ll come back to, not least, because we’ve not had time to discuss Beecroft’s thoughts on equal pay yet. They’re a whole blog post on their own. Watch this space.

In which I offer contemplative musings (and a leaflet-based points system) on how to vote

So this Thursday is election day in locations across the UK. I appreciate how some of you might have missed this exciting news nugget by doing things like living in other countries. However, here in the UK, we are in the grip of election fever. I’m sorry. That’s not right. It turns out I’m in the grip of  fever, but I’ve got antibiotics so I’ll probably be fine in a couple of days.

The local elections have, however, pretty much failed to raise an eyebrow, let alone a fever. The possible exception to this is in our esteemed capital, where they’ve managed to boil the whole business of local elections down to a simple act of trying to remember whether it’s the balding whingey one or the blond bonkers one’s turn this year.

Here, in the hotly contested political battleground of St Suburbans ward in Normal Town, we don’t have those easily identifiable political personalities to pick between. We also don’t have very much sense of what each political party stands for in local terms. A nice Labour leaflet about how the Tories are cutting tax for higher earners is all very well, but I’m not entirely clear how my choice of local ward Councillor is going to change that.

The obvious response to this problem is apathy. And I’m not going to spend too long arguing against that. I’ve never bought the notion that voting should be compulsory. That would just mean that a whole load of people who don’t know and don’t care get rounded up and shoved into polling booths. Frankly, if you’re not fussed enough to put an X on a sheet of paper without compulsion, I’m really not that bothered about you not getting your say.

However, I do think voting is important. People fought wars, threw themselves under racehorses and drafted lengthy parliamentary amendments for my right to vote, so, personally, I’m fairly commited to exercising that right.

Local elections are a conundrum though – if only someone provided a handy set of suggestions for how to select who to vote for. If only that existed in blog form, preferably in some sort of numbered list.

Well here you go. To follow this guide you will need to start by collecting all the random election leaflets off your doormat (or retrieving them from the recycling). We will be adopting a leaflet-based points system. This means that, in my case, I can disregard the Lib Dem and Green candidates straight away as they haven’t even managed to send me a leaflet. Tough break for them, but sometimes you do have to be ruthless about these things.

 

1. Candidates should be rewarded for detail

Detail is good. Detail is what makes the difference between an intention and a policy. Any sentence that starts “We would support…” or “We would like to see better…” should be viewed with suspicion. These sentences merely suggest a willingness to go along with someone else who could be bothered to do something about whatever the issue at hand might be. They don’t suggest definite actions. Look for the detail. They gain points for that.

At my house the Tory is doing surprisingly well – perhaps because he’s the sitting councillor he has more facts and figures about what he’s up to that most of the others. There’s an independent also scoring well. Labour and UKIP are poor so far.

 

2. Look for local policies

There is a tendency to view local elections as a mid-term referendum on the sitting government. This means that parties are tempted to pack their election literature with guff about national policy. Unless it’s a policy that can meaningfully be changed at a local election that’s all just leaflet space filler. Ignore it. If it pleases you, you can even put big red lines through all the stuff that local councillors have no influence over. So that’s everything to do with Income Tax, defence, the NHS, our membership of the EU and university tuition fees, gone. I should warn you, you might not have much leaflet left.

On my count – Tory and Independent are still in the lead. Labour have made a bit of a comeback. UKIP definitely trailing.

3. Be wary of lunacy

There is a certain sort of person who stands in local elections. Of course, I mean civic minded, hard working, community spirited people. There is then another sort of person who stands in local elections. The loon. With care you can spot them. I suggest starting with the punctuation and layout of the leaflet. Excessive use of exclamation marks, randomly placed capitalisation, a willingness to pop quotation marks around almost any word or phrase – all these are symptomatic of an overly excitable mind, and also of a person without a friend prepared to proofread their election leaflet. That’s the first sign.

Further evidence can be gleaned from the obligatory “About the candidate” section on the leaflet. Writing these must be hell – it’s like a personal ad designed to appeal to all ages, genders and proclivities. However, any mention of a self-consiously zany hobby should cause concern.

Don’t want to be cruel, but, from my leaflet selection, I think UKIP are definitely out of the running at this point. Sorry.

4. Oh yeah, and do you actually agree with any of the policies?

Some commentators would suggest you consider this first, but I find that thinning the leaflet pile on the criteria above makes this stage much more manageable. For me, I’m guessing this is where the Tory is going to lose ground.

 

So by my own system the candidate who wins my vote is an independent socialist called Peter. That’s a turn-up for the books. Without this, clearly deeply well thought out, process I’d probably have voted Labour or even for the leaflet-less Lib Dem, but the system doesn’t lie. Maybe Labour and Lib Dem will learn from this for next time.

So that’s me mused out for the day. Please do subscribe in one way or another if you like my occasional ramblings, and do join in the chat. How do you pick who to vote for, if you vote at all? Was it unfair of me to disregard the Green, when leaflet production really isn’t very green at all? Any improvements and amendments to The System will be considered.

In which I offer advice on how to be a government

Well it’s all been a bit quiet over here in blog world for the last few weeks. This has been for the simple reason that I have been super busy. Some weeks I have had to go to work on more than one day. You can only imagine the level of stress and exhaustion this causes to a silghtly flakey freelancer like myself.

However, it has come to my attention that, in my absence, the whole government has got itself into a terrible mess, which would appear to be pretty much entirely of its own creating. Thankfully I’m back and ready and willing to offer some simple tips on how to give at least the appearance of competence whilst in government. Obviously I’m entirely qualified to do this, based on my years of experience as Queen of Narnia. Running a medium sized country is a totally transferable skill. (Please note: some of the experience relayed in that paragraph may only have occured inside my mind).

1. Don’t draw attention to stupid stuff that no-one cares about

So imagine you ran a country where, for reasons forgotten long ago in the time of dragons and crusading and the like, VAT is paid on some items of takeaway food but not others. Imagine as well that, in the rules governing takeaway VAT, there was a whole lot of guff about ambient temperatures, and what constitutes freshly baked and whether food is to be eaten straight away or at a later point. Clearly these rules are not the best thought out regulation ever designed, but, unless you draw attention to it, no-one cares. No-one is marching on Downing Street demanding reform of the unfair fried chicken VAT rules. No-one is camped on the moors building stockpiles of VAT-free pasties to feed their anarchist army during the long years of civil war ahead.  By drawing attention to this issue you would simply pull yourself into the great big pool of stupid, and that is not the right image for a competent government to project.

2. Never express a (spin doctor pre-approved) “personal” preference on anything that isn’t a direct issue of policy.

Don’t comment on what your favourite biscuit is. Never disclose the contents of your iPod. And definitely, never relay in any sort of detail the precise circumstances of the last pasty you consumed. Primarily this rule is in place because, as an electorate, we simply don’t believe you anyway. Announcing that you’re partial to a jammy dodger doesn’t make voters think, “Well my nan likes jammy dodgers and she’s delightful. Clearly this bloke must be an ok sort.” It makes us think either, “Well, that’s stupid. Jammy dodgers aren’t chocolatey,” or “Hmmm… I wonder how many focus groups it took to identify that the jammy dodger was the biscuit that projected just the right level of empathy with the little people.”

And definitely don’t make up pasties that you “bought”. Because you didn’t. If you’re the Head of Government for a medium-sized nation, you don’t go on trains and get stuck at Leeds Station and realise you’ve missed lunch and end up buying an overpriced pasty because there’s nothing else available that you can confidently identify as food. You travel with an entourage – with security people, political advisers, civil servants, and other minions. In the circumstance of needing sudden sustenance on a journey one of those minion’s minions would be dispatched to cater to the party’s culinary whims. So when you’re asked when you last had a pasty, just point out that that’s an inane question and move on. There are 1001 things that you don’t regularly experience personally that it’s still entirely acceptable for a Prime Minister to have policies about.

3. Remember it’s “Don’t Panic” not “Panic”

In any sort of crisis, shortage or other small impediment to the continuance of the nation’s daily routine, the only real role of government ministers is to appear on television looking reassuring and telling people not to panic. The NOT TO bit is quite important there, and it’s particularly important to remember that panic isn’t really measured on a continuum. One is either panicking or not – it’s intrinsically tricky to occupy a state of moderate panic.

So, if a hypothetical government responded to a planned strike by fuel tanker drivers, by advising the populace to “top-up” their fuel tanks, that would be fairly silly. If everyone tries to top-up on the same day, there’ll be no fuel left. Weirdly, that government would have managed to cause exactly the same effect as, for example, the fuel tanker drivers going on strike, without the tanker drivers having to actually go on strike. You would, in that situation, have become the first government ever to undertake a trade union’s strike action for them. Thinking about it, as a dyed in the wool leftie, I should probably be applauding the effort.

4. If all else fails take a break

Fortunately for the current UK government parliament is about to break up for Easter (I know – parliament breaks up for Easter and Christmas and for a really really long time in summer – it’s just like public school). This does mean that the media are temporarily distracted from your stupid policies. All you, as a politician, have to do now is get through the holiday period without any embarrassing holiday fashion photos cropping up in the Sun. I’m sure they won’t though. I mean you’d have to have really annoyed a major media tycoon for them to bother chasing after those sorts of pictures. Ah….

In which I express extreme gratitude, on behalf of all the ladies, at being permitted to act on our own will once every four years.

Something has been bugging me this week. It’s not the fact that it’s February and the weather went all weird and beer-gardeny last weekend. It’s not the fact that lovely budget-conscious husband took this as a sign that it was spring and turned off the central heating, meaning that I’m typing this with my dressing gown on over my clothes because it all went winteresque again. It’s not even the revelation that wine is not my friend, which I noticed for the absolute first time this morning after going out last night and have never had any sort of prior experience of at all at all at all.

No. The thing that is bugging me is that every time I’ve turned on the tv, looked at a paper (or at least a news website, because, y’know, newspapers are so 2005), or fired up the interweb, people are talking about proposing. Well, not actually every time, obviously. That was an exaggeration for polemic effect. It has, however, happened at least twice, and that’s one more time than is needed to cause mild irritation.

The focus for the proposing frenzy was 29th February, the date on which women are allowed to propose to their partners, or indeed to any random male (or female – we’re pro-equality here) that passes their way. Much discussion has ensued in those corners of the media world where the understanding of what classes as news has been warped by too much time spent staring at shiny items and talking about slimming aids. I’ve heard actual grown-up people opine that a woman proposing doesn’t seem quite right, that it’s a bit desperate, that it’s really the Man’s Role.  All this discussion can be met with only one rational response…

What do you mean women are “allowed” to propose on 29th February? We’re allowed to propose anytime we like. We’re also allowed to go out to work, own property, open our own bank accounts, vote, wear trousers in public, paint our toe nails, not paint our toe nails, write great literature, read great literature, get an education, get a career, change our minds about said career and go back and get some different education, stand for Parliament, compete in the Olympics, take up country dancing, become naturists, become baristas, become barristers (which is different), become naturist barristers, drive cars, drive HGVs (like long-distance Clara), read the news, make the news, buy a trawler, buy a fashion magazine, get drunk, win a Grammy, win six Grammys, get angry, get happy, and, if we want to and we’ve found someone else who wants to too, get wed.

We’ve come a long way baby…

In which I get all serious about sexual violence and sexual threats

A slightly disturbing incident got me thinking this morning. I answered the phone to one of those computer maintenance scammers. I work mainly from home so this is a fairly common event. For those of you lucky enough not to be familiar with this scam, there’s a discussion of the details here on the Money Saving Expert Forum.

Now I take a fairly dim view of this sort of call. Most of the time I just hang-up, but sometimes, when I’m bored, I play along for a while just to see how it works. Today was one of those days. I went along with the caller until we got to the point when he wanted me to bring up a Windows command prompt and type in his instructions. I politely declined, at which point he asked if I was a bitch-whore. I said no, and he replied that he was going to rape and sexually abuse me. At that point I laid the phone handset down on the other side of the desk and let the caller rant to himself until he ran out of steam and hung up about two minutes later.

Not a happy phone call, obviously. Not desperately scary though. The call seemed to originate overseas, so the threat, in this case, was very obviously just words, but it’s the choice of words that I want to get out in public and have a jolly good look at. Here we had a man who was slightly irritated by a woman, and chose a really specific set of language to threaten her with. The language was explicit, violent and sexual, but, sadly, it wasn’t unusual.

Female writers and bloggers talk about receiving sexual threats and abuse here. Social networking sites host pages of misogynist “humour” – you don’t believe me? Hop over to facebook and try searching for “rapist” to see just a few of the pages of rape jokes available. If you feel like doing that would rot your soul, you can read the BBC’s take on the story from last year here. The particular page discussed in that article has been taken down, but there are plenty more still live. Similiarly take a look at the youtube comments under any video featuring a female performer. Comments on the woman’s fuckability and the willingness of commenters to force themselves on her are not uncommon.

So sexually violent language is out there on the internet, and, it turns out, potentially coming down the phone lines into your home. It’s also in print. Some of the language in the mainstream lads’ mags is so extreme that readers can’t differentiate between the views of women expressed in those popular magazines and those espressed by convicted rapists. Websites targeting young men use the same language and express similar views. The recent closure of the UniLad website was noted more for the fact that the site apologised for an article lightheartedly advocating rape, than for the fact that they published the article to start with. Even after the website owners apologised, some of their readers took the view that the only problem with the article was that women couldn’t take a joke.

And rape jokes are increasingly mainstream. Comedians including Jimmy Carr, Russell Brand, Brendan Burns and Sarah Millican have all included rape-jokes in their live shows. Now I don’t want to get into an offensiveness of comedy debate here. In principle I don’t think any subjects are off-limits for any art form, but with comedy there’s an issue about whether we’re being asked to laugh at something or someone or to laugh alongside them in a way that normalizes and condones the activity being discussed. So in Jimmy Carr’s joke “What do nine out of 10 people enjoy? / Gang rape” it doesn’t feel like the joke is at the rapists’ expense. It feels to me like we’re being invited to laugh with them, not at them. Plenty of people would say that doesn’t matter. They would agree with those UniLad readers and say that a joke it just a joke, and that to suggest any wider significance is uptight in the extreme.

So are they right? Does the use of sexually violent language in jokes or at an anonymous distance from the recipient necessarily matter? Does it translate into realworld threats?  End Violence Against Women have looked in depth at realworld experiences of sexual threats and violence. They found that nearly 1/3 of 16-18 year old girls had experienced “unwanted sexual touching” at school, and around the same proportion of teenage girls have experienced sexual violence from a partner.

Sexual threat and sexual violence are real. They’re not unusual, and our criminal justice system’s record in addressing sexual violence is pitiful. Around 6% of reported rapes lead to a successful conviction.  I’d suggest our attitude, as a society, to sexual violence is at the centre of that low conviction rate. If we believe that a woman who flirts can’t really have been raped, if we believe that a woman who’s been drinking can’t really have been raped, if we believe that a wife can’t really be raped by her husband, then those women are less likely to contact the police; they’re less likely to follow the process through to trial; and a jury is less likely to believe them, because juries are us. They live in the society that we create. So if we believe that sexual violence is not such a big deal,  that’s what the jury will believe.

Joking about sexual violence, saying we’ve been “fraped” if a mate logs into our facebook, using words like whore and bitch to describe women helps create that society. It makes sexual aggression feel normal, feel ok, feel like an irritation we’re expected to make light of and soldier past. And it’s not. It’s not ok, and the more of us, women and men, who are prepared to say so, loudly and repeatedly and without fear of being told that we’re uptight and just not getting the joke, the better.