Acting Labour Leader Harriet Harman gave a very revealing interview to the Guardian this weekend, looking back on her career as she prepares to return to the backbenches after serving in the party leadership since 2007.
Whilst one can – and should – strenuously disagree with Harman’s politics, no one can deny her role in the feminist movement or the trail she blazed by standing up to the horrifically sexist club that Parliament was when she was first elected in 1982. Given these accomplishments, it is a shame that she now ends her frontbench career presiding over a farcical leadership contest and the potential splitting of her party.
But the most memorable part was when Harman spoke about how terrified she was of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that she actually hid round a corner in the Houses of Parliament in order to prevent the approaching prime minister meeting her newborn baby:
Couldn’t the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher have taken her [to the Strangers’ Bar in Parliament]? Harman recoils. She wouldn’t have dreamed of socialising with her, she says.
“Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her at the other end of the corridor. She was bearing down on me with two adoring parliamentary private secretaries trotting at her side, and she looked as if she was going to come and admire the baby. I had this terrible feeling of thinking, ‘I don’t want her to look at the baby’, almost like one of those cartoons where the witch looks at the baby and the baby shrivels. I didn’t want my perfect baby to have Thatcher’s eyes upon him.” Did she hide her baby from Thatcher? “No, I just shot off down a side corridor. It was very visceral, very heartfelt.”
I’m not sure quite what Harriet Harman intended this little vignette to reveal about herself, but it speaks volumes about the way many in the Labour Party see themselves and view their conservative opponents.
The conventional wisdom holds that Ed Miliband managed to land a serious blow on David Cameron at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, exposing the Tory leader and his party for their chronic shortage of women in leadership positions and the key offices of state. Miliband makes a good point – an abysmal 4 out of 22 cabinet ministers in the coalition government are women, and only one of those, Theresa May at the Home Office, occupies a position that really matters (Culture, Northern Ireland and International Development, the other ministries headed by women, are either irrelevant or decidedly junior-league). That simply is not good enough, and David Cameron has just cause to feel ashamed.
[David Cameron] was taunted about the Conservatives’ “women problem” by Ed Miliband in the same week it emerged several prominent women have recently been sacked from government jobs and Anne McIntosh, a high-profile female Tory MP, was deselected by her local association.
The Labour leader also claimed a prominent businesswoman, who is the wife of a Tory donor, had been greeted by Cameron with the remark: “Where’s your husband?”
He then accused the coalition of failing women across the UK by allowing the pay gap between men and women to widen for the first time in five years.
“You promised to modernise your party, but you are going backwards. You run your government like the old boys’ network – that’s why you are failing women across your party and across the country,” Miliband said.
And the initial exchange between the two leaders at Prime Minister’s Question Time can be seen here:
Less reported is the fact that the Labour Party has a record on promoting women every bit as appalling as do the Conservatives, as Dan Hodges correctly observes in his Telegraph column:
Women still aren’t allowed to hold senior positions in the Labour party. The three major political briefs are Prime Minister/Leader, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary. Apart from a short period during the fag end of Tony Blair’s administration when Margaret Beckett was placed in charge of the Foreign Office, and 14 weeks when Yvette Cooper oversaw the shadow post under Ed Miliband, none of those offices have been held by women. The Labour party has been in existence for 114 years. And during that time – under Labour – a woman has held or shadowed one of three major offices of state for a period of 14 months.
Fourteen months. And yet you would not think that Labour was sitting on such a poor record when Ed Miliband stood preening at the dispatch box in the Commons on Wednesday. One could have been forgiven for thinking that women made up a statistically and politically perfect 51% of Labour seats in Parliament and in the shadow cabinet, particularly given the rather unusual concentration of the Labour Party’s female talent on the front bench alongside their leader:
When PMQs started, several people commented on the fact that a number of Labour’s women shadow cabinet members were artificially concertinaed together close to Miliband. The reason they did that was because if they hadn’t done that they wouldn’t have been in camera shot. And that’s because there’s a convention that people sit alongside their leader based on seniority.
If something about the picture below strikes you as odd – don’t worry. There is indeed something different about the Labour front bench at PMQs this week – namely, a lot more women clustered on either side of Eds Miliband and Balls than is usually the case. It is hard to determine which is worse – Ed Miliband’s disingenuous photo opportunity, or the willingness of a number of female Labour MPs to go along with it by essentially allowing themselves to be used as props by their leadership.
Not your standard distribution.
A less-reported fact amid the furore is that all four women cabinet ministers in the coalition government are Conservative MPs, which rather begs the question of how the Liberal Democrats have managed to fly under the radar and avoid being called out for their own shameful inability to recognise and promote female talent within their own ranks. But somehow the party of Lord Rennard seems to be scoring a free pass on their own institutional sexism for the time being – at least as far as Ed Miliband’s focus is concerned.
The lack of women in senior positions in all political parties is a real problem, one which Miliband does little to debate or address by trading barbs with the Prime Minister. Some advocate all-woman shortlists as a solution to the problem, and of course the Labour Party has adopted this particular approach. This blog disagrees with it – firstly on the grounds that it robs local constituencies of the opportunity to select from the widest possible pool of talent when choosing who they want to represent them in Parliament, and secondly because if we must tolerate reverse discrimination as a necessary evil to help put right historic wrongs (and I’m far from convinced that we should), it should be done at the earliest stage possible and certainly not at the point of parliamentary candidate selection.
But while we may condemn Miliband’s posturing on the subject and question his methods, we must also acknowledge that at least the Labour Party under Ed Miliband is engaged in a bona fide effort to increase the number of women in their parliamentary party. There is a lot of rueful head-shaking from the Conservatives at the conspicuous lack of women in theirs, but not much action of any kind at all.
The Conservatives, the party of Margaret Thatcher, should be leading the charge on anything to do with meritocracy. The fact that they are not currently doing so is alarming.
One ball more than Patrick Stuart – CEO of Strong Rock Christian Academy – possesses.
Some depressing but thoroughly unsurprising news from the land of segregated school proms, this time concerning sports and religion today, centering on a private Christian school in Atlanta where apparently the teachers and administrative staff are every bit as immature as some of the students.
ThinkProgress reports that a twelve year old girl was kicked off her school’s football team for a reason so jaw-droppingly moronic that it took me several minutes to come to terms with the knowledge that something of this nature could take place in the twenty-first century:
A private school outside Atlanta recently informed 12-year-old Madison Baxter that she would not be welcome at tryouts for the 7th-grade football team, even though she started on the sixth-grade team and has been playing football since second grade. The reason she won’t be allowed on the field? Because her male teammates are beginning to have “impure thoughts” about her, Strong Rock Christian Academy school administrator Patrick Stuart told Baxter’s mother.
“In the meeting with the CEO of the school [Patrick Stuart], I was told that the reasons behind it were one, that the boys were going to start lusting after her and have impure thoughts about her and that the locker-room talk was not appropriate for a female to hear even though she had a separate locker room from the boys,” Baxter’s mother, Cassy Blythe, told Atlanta’s WXIA-TV.
So the school’s reaction to finding out that the boys on the team were lusting after the one girl (which is pretty much what twelve year old boys do), was not to tackle the problem with any sense of proportionality, or direct their action at the people doing the “lusting” (which goes mysteriously undefined throughout the article and the school’s statements), but rather to penalise the innocent girl and remove her from the team.
The article caustically concludes:
There are more than 1,500 girls playing football at American high schools, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and that number has increased more than 17 percent in just four years. It’s not just a boys’ sport anymore. And more than that, playing football with a girl could have been a valuable experience for Baxter’s teammates about how to appropriately interact with women and girls, about how a person’s sex doesn’t make her inherently inferior athletically or in any other way, and about how having “impure thoughts” doesn’t mean you have license to act on them. They won’t get that lesson, though, because the adults in charge of Strong Rock Christian Academy’s athletics program apparently have yet to learn it themselves.
Absolutely. This poor girl is being denied the opportunity to continue to represent her school on the football team because the “adults” supposedly in charge of the Strong Rock Christian Academy (with a name like that, you can already be quite sure that they harbour and teach some fairly wacky views) are too prudish or squeamish to sit down with the boys on the team and have a serious – and yes, mildly uncomfortable and awkward – discussion about acceptable behaviour toward people of the opposite sex. If, given this gold-plated opportunity to impart some useful information to the boys on the team, the adults choose to duck the challenge, how much does this diminish the chances of those boys to grow and develop healthy attitudes to their female peers?
My shock at reading this story, not in 1953 but 2013, was tempered, however, when I realised that the unfortunate events took place in the great state of Georgia. Georgia is, of course, famous for being the last state in the union to have a school district that continues to hold racially segregated proms.
Semi-Partisan Politics 