February 14, 2012

Murdoch’s Sun ate women’s dignity

Congratulations to campaigning MP (and fellow blogger) Tom Watson for exposing the bullying of women members of staff at the tabloid Sun.

According to Watson, Sun editor Dominic Mohan, told the Leveson enquiry “it is wrong to suggest that the Sun trivialises offences against women.”

Not so, says Watson, and I know who I believe. Watson tells us on his blog he has inside knowledge that at least five female journalists on the paper have been sacked in the last eight years. At least two of the sacked women went on to win compensation after challenging their dismissals. Two out of five strikes me as a high percentage and provides strong evidence of serious discrimination against female employees.

More recently, Whitehall editor at the Sun Clodagh Hartley had a complaint of bullying against her upheld by an independent adjudicator. This will, of course, be of great concern the beleaguered Mohan, who has a lot on his plate after the recent arrests of Mike Sullivan, the paper’s crime editor; the former managing editor, Graham Dudman; executive editor, Fergus Shanahan; and Chris Pharo, a news desk executive.

Appalling though this is, unfortunately it’s not the whole story. The Sun still publishes topless and virtually naked women on page three – a practice deeply disrespectful to women, which I believe should immediately be consigned to the scrapheap.  

The Sun is not just a newspaper, it’s theUK’s largest selling national daily with a circulation of 7,774,000. It’s our most popular newspaper and it behaves in a totally unacceptable way towards its female staff. It also publishes demeaning images of women.

I wholeheartedly agree with the four women’s groups – End Violence Against Women, Equality Now, Object and Eaves – who appeared before the Leveson inquiry arguing that the Sun should ban sexualised images which would not be shown on television before the 9.00pm watershed. As Former Labour MP Clare Short, who has campaigned against page three, said in the Guardian “The bottom line is that pictures that would not be permissible in the workplace or on broadcast media before the watershed can still be published in a daily newspaper.”

What is more, the newspaper reading public do not want page three, perhaps understanding how degrading it is to women. According to the Huffington Post, Platform 51, formerly the Young Women’s Christian Association, commissioned a nationally representative poll which showed that twice as many women would support a ban on pictures of topless women appearing in daily newspapers as would oppose it. And it’s not just women. Almost a third of the men questioned also supported a ban.

So it’s actually the Sun “wot ‘as got it wrong”.

Disrespect to women and actions such as bullying at work and publishing pictures of undressed women are no longer acceptable. Thankfully the world has moved on from the 1970s when the Sun introduced page three. It’s about time the Sun itself caught up with the modern world.  

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February 13, 2012

Women still have a long way to go: Rip Off Britain and abortion at risk in Spain

The audience for Rip Off Britain regularly tops 5 million while Match of the Day gets 4.5 million. This does not surprise me. Football may be the national game and, given the domination of our national news by the Capello-Redknapp furore, you may be forgiven for forgetting that more people are interested in getting a fair deal than 22 men kicking a ball around.

It is therefore grossly unjust that the three female presenters of  Rip Off Britain – Gloria Hunniford, Angela Rippon and Julia Somerville – only receive £1,000 each per episode, amounting to £20,000 a year, compared to Match of the Day presenters Alan Hansen, Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer who are paid astronomical amounts for their efforts on the programme. According to yesterday’s Sunday Times Hansen currently gets £1.5 million a year (to be cut to £1 million next season), Lineker, the show’s anchor-man receives about £2 million a year and poor old Alan Shearer a mere £400,000 a year or £10,000 per show. The lowest paid of this particular football trio receives ten times more than each of the three Rip Off Britain presenters.

Methinks I smell an insidious rat which is all to do with age and gender. Hunniford, Rippon and Somerville are all women of a certain age – 71, 67 and 64 respectively. The three of them feel strongly that they receive so very much less than equivalent male presenters simply because they are women who are no longer in the first flush of youth. Their pitiful remuneration is obviously not based on viewing figures as their programme consistently beats Match of the Day.

The Rip Off Britain case is another example in the saga of the way the BBC treats its older women presenters, Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly has already won an age discrimination case against the Corporation. Perhaps the outspoken anger of Hunniford, Rippon and Somerville will ensure than when the show returns next season not only these three excellent presenters but all other women at the BBC will get a fair deal.

Meanwhile, there is very bad news for women in Spain. The country’s new conservative rulers want to overturn the changes the previous socialist government made to the law relating to abortion. Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardon, one of the rising stars of the ruling party, has announced that he hopes to bring back a law from 1985 that allowed abortions only if the women’s mental or physical health was in danger or if she had been raped. The current law allows abortions on the national health service without the patient having to provide any justification if she is no more than 14 weeks pregnant. Moreover, 16-year olds can have abortions without their parents’ permission.

Abortion campaigners in Spain are appalled, stating that going back to the old restrictive law will lead to an increase in back-street abortions and a consequent rise in termination-related deaths. Dr Santiago Barambio who risked imprisonment for carrying out abortions under Franco told the Sunday Times, “They [the conservative government] want to take us back to the Franco days. They’re going to put moral concepts into laws so that we can all go to heaven.”    

Women across Europe obviously still face discrimination and have to overcome obstacles throughout their lives. These two examples at either end of the spectrum – older women television presenters receiving far less money than their male counterparts and abortion rights being threatened in Spain -  aptly demonstrate just how far we have yet to go.   

 

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February 12, 2012

Britain’s Olympic Greats – Tessa Sanderson

Tessa Sanderson was a true trailblazer, being the first black woman to win a gold medal for Britain.

Sanderson was born in St Elizabeth, Jamaica of Ghanaian ancestry and later emigrated to the UK, settling in Wolverhampton. She was Britain’s leading javelin thrower from the mid-1970s, winning silver in the 1978 European championships and gold in the Commonwealth Games three times (1978, 1986, 1990), but was eclipsed during the 1980s by the up-and-coming Fatima Whitbread, with whom she shared a long standing rivalry.

When Tessa won the gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in the javelin, her victory was quite unexpected.  She remains to this day the only British woman to have won gold in the category, with Fatima Whitbread only ever achieving silver. In the end, her career outlasted Whitbread’s, and she competed at senior international level until 1996.

She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1985 New Year’s Honours, following her Olympic gold, raised to Officer (OBE) in the 1998 New Year’s Honours for her charity work, and to Commander (CBE) in the 2004 New Year’s Honours for her services to Sport England.

Since retiring from athletics, Tessa has worked tirelessly to promote sport in London.  She is currently helping to run an academy in Newham that finds and helps train athletes to represent Britain in the  Olympics. In September 2009 Tessa registered her own charity sports academy carrying on her work alongside the now established Newham Sports Academy.

The name of the charity is The Tessa Sanderson Foundation and Academy, which helps Tessa to work with young people, both disabled and non disabled, from across London. 

I hope that her work continues in this field as it has been proven time and time again that engaging young people in sporting activities can be one of the most effective ways of improving their lives.

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February 11, 2012

Britain’s Olympic Hopefuls – Goldie Sayers

Goldie Sayers, Britain’s number one female javelin thrower since 2003, will represent Great Britain for the third time at the London Olympics this summer.   

Her first Olympic appearance for Team GB at the Beijing Games in 2008, saw her beat her own UK record with a massive throw of 65.75 metres. Despite this record-breaking throw she narrowly missed out on a medal by just 38 centimetres. 

Besides competing in two Olympic Games, Goldie has taken home gold from six consecutive national championships, and has stood on the podium at several international fixtures, including taking the gold medal at the European Cup in 2007. Goldie also holds a first class honours degree in sport and exercise science from Loughborough University. 

Goldie broke her first record for the javelin throw at the age of 11 when, with a throw of 29 metres, she beat her school’s seniors record. It wasn’t until the age of 18 however, that she began to compete in athletics full time. Up until this point, with the support and encouragement of her school, Goldie focused on team sports including hockey and netball.  

Goldie has previously said that playing team games from an early age was crucial in her athletics career. In 2006 Goldie remarked that “Team games are so important and should be on the agenda, without fail, in every school in the country, starting with primary schools”. In the same interview she pointed out that “If we want elite sport to get better, we have to instil competition in schools”. 

Between 2003 and 2010, under the last Labour Government, the number of secondary school children playing sport for two or more hours a week rose from 20% to 85%. Labour also set up a network of school sports co-ordinators who were responsible for working on an inter-school basis to increase the range and quality of sports available for pupils. 

In an interview with the Guardian, school sports coordinator, Jo Marston has called these the “halcyon days” on the basis of a previously unseen breadth and depth of competition in school sports. 

In 2010 Michael Gove abolished the networks of school sports co-ordinators set up by Labour in the face of much outrage from both teachers and athletes. He later back-tracked and continued to fund the position, albeit at a reduced rate of one day per week. He has also ended ring-fencing for the post. 

Luckily for Jo Marston and her pupils, the schools that she works in saw the great benefits of keeping her on for three days a week in this position. Because of the lack of ring-fenced funding, many schools have chosen to use this money to plug holes elsewhere in their budgets. I can only feel sadness for the many children who won’t benefit from this excellent initiative. 

This summer I will be clapping Goldie on as she runs up for her throw; I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will also be able to cheer for her as she climbs onto the podium in triumph!

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February 10, 2012

As Cameron looks to Norway he will see they are far more integrated with the EU than he likes to think

No-one was more delighted than me when David Cameron said at the Nordic-Baltic Summit earlier in the week that, “the evidence is that there is a positive link between women in leadership and business performance, so if we fail to unlock the potential of women in this labour market, we’re not only failing individuals, we’re failing our whole economy.”

It was, of course, Norway that first introduced quotas as long ago as 2003 decreeing that 40 per cent of directors of listed companies should be women. Iceland then followed with a target that 40 per cent of directors be women by 2013.

Meanwhile, in relation to our own country, a British government policy paper presented at the Nordic-Baltic summit estimated that as female entrepreneurship reached the same levels as in the United States, there would be 600,000 extra women-owned businesses contributing an extra £42 billion to the economy.

As we all know, the Scandinavian countries have excellent records on women and deserve full credit. Britain should definitely follow their example. As an active member of the group Women in Leadership, I commend David Cameron for his speech at the Nordic-Baltic summit. I, and many other women from across the political and social spectrum will, I know, now be monitoring this government to make sure Cameron’s promises are translated into action.  

Norway is a magnificent country which has much going for it, not the least of which is its enviable record on women. Many of those who are anti-EU quote Norway as the example the UK should follow, in that it is outside the EU and therefore, according to the logic of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and his acolytes, free of “Brussels bureaucracy” with more home-grown democracy.

It has, for some, been all too easy to accept this argument. It is, however, fundamentally flawed.

A report recently commissioned under the chairmanship of Professor Fredrik Sejersted and published by the Norwegian government states, “we [Norway] are almost as deeply integrated as the UK.” Importantly, the report, covered by the BBC online, expresses concern at the political consequences of this state of affairs as Norway is bound, in practice, to adopt EU policies without voting rights. Professor Sejersted calls this “a great democratic deficit …. but this is a kind of national compromise since Norway decided it did not want to join the EU.”

It is worth noting that two-thirds of Norwegian private sector investment goes to Europe and that there have also been high inward flows of EU immigrants into Norway. These are two good reasons why Norway has felt the need to sign up three-quarters of the legislation coming from the European Union, a total of 6,000 legislative acts.

The overarching conclusion to be drawn from Professor Sejersted’s report is that in 2012 no modern democratic country can exist on its own, cut off from its neighbours. Yet this is the underlying demand coming from the 102 Tory Eurosceptic MPs who wrote to David Cameron on 6 February. Since their number included all the officers of the 1922 Committee – Graham Brady, Charles Walker, Mark Prichard and Brian Brinley – and former Cabinet Ministers John Redwood and Peter Lilley, the Norway lobby is obviously a strong one.

My view is that reverting to the status of Norway would be disastrous for the UK. Leaving aside the democratic deficit – that we would be signing up to EU legislation without any say over it – we need to develop a mature British patriotism for the 21st century. This is not about belly-aching about the reach of Brussels but much more, as Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander wrote in the Guardian at the end of last year, about how we, Britain and Europe, engage with the rise of China and India.

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February 9, 2012

Ed Miliband should follow Merkel’s example and campaign for Hollande in the same way as she is for Sarkozy

The Presidential election in France to be held on 22 April with a further round on 5 May, if necessary, matters hugely to the rest of Europe. Were Francois Hollande to win, there would be one significant voice at the top table in Europe opposed to the current centre-right imposition of continent-wide austerity as the sole solution to the economic crisis. France would provide an alternative policy, and a humane one to boot, which is lacking at present.

Chancellor Merkel has astutely realised the importance of the French election from her point of view, and has already announced that she will campaign for her fellow conservative, Nicolas Sarkozy. Rather sensibly David Cameron, I suspect, realises that his support for M Sarkozy would be a vote loser rather than a winner.

The same does not apply to Ed Miliband and the Labour leadership team. Ed going to France to campaign for Francois Hollande could be combined with a real effort to secure the votes of the 300,000 French nationals living in the UK for M Hollande. Such bold moves would go a long way towards signalling a new era of European co-operation between parties on the centre-left. It may also lead to the emergence of a European centre-left agenda for jobs and growth.

The 60 proposals put forward by Holland in France represent a radical departure from 10 years of conservative government in that country. Hollande is committed to renegotiating the “fiscal pact”. While not rejecting budgetary discipline, the French socialists do not accept austerity without accompanying measures for growth.

What is more, Francois Hollande was selected as the Socialist Presidential candidate by three million socialists in an open primary, the first time such an experiment has been tried in France. This was not some internal political party stitch-up but a democratic election, and as such deserves recognition.

There is also the growing problem of the Front National in France. Its new leader, Marine le Pen, is a more formidable opponent than her openly racist and xenophobic father Jean-Marie. Although she objects to the term “far right”, make no mistake – that is exactly what she is.

It is a matter of huge concern that Le Pen’s opinion poll ratings have been going up, reaching the levels of those of President Nicolas Sarkozy. She even came top in one poll while another said that one in two of those questioned saw the Front National as “a party like the others”.

According to the BBC, commentator Agnes Poirier thinks Mme Le Pen may well “do better than her father in [the presidential elections of] April 2002, that is to say she is very likely to be present at the second round [of voting] and therefore likely to knock Nicolas Sarkozy out of the race… of the elections.”

Despite her softer image, Marine le Pen is the mirror image of her father. The Front National remains a hard, ultra-right party. During a speech in December 2010, Marine le Pen called the regular blocking of public streets for Muslim prayers in French cities an “occupation of parts of the territory”. Marine Le Pen now senses a political opportunity for “a more moderately presented, more middle class, more gently smiling form of extremism, rather than a snarling form of extremism”.

Campaigning in the French Presidential elections would provide Ed Miliband with the opportunity to stand up against racism and the far-right as well as supporting an economic policy with the interests of the people of Europe at its heart. The French campaign to choose their President matters more to us than that in the United States. The Labour leadership has the opportunity to make a bold stand which also has the merit of being the right thing to do.

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February 8, 2012

Godfrey Bloom high on drugs and drink

You may have already seen this on the Political Scrapbook blog.  It’s so good, I am repeating it for for all my European readers who may not have caught it first time round.

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February 8, 2012

Lack of quantative easing is central to the Eurozone crisis

This guest blog is written by Lindsay Thomas who is Director, Sustainable Risks Ltd and a former FSA supervison director  

The Greek crisis goes on, the Euro weakens, Cameron can conveniently continue to blame the Eurozone for his policies failures while looking tough while vetoing their attempt at coordinated action. Why has the Eurozone become the centre of this on-going global crisis? And why is Greece the centre of attention?

Virtually all the world enjoyed the binge on vast liquidity and artificially low interest rates for too long. Greece is as central to this crisis as Northern Rock was to the failure of Lloyds and RBS – its small but just came first. This crisis, it’s the same one since 2007, is a global crisis – government, corporates and consumers all took on more debt than they could afford because it was so cheap and so readily available. Of course, the bankers helped everyone to as much as they could and took the vast bonuses because they were so clever and successful. When it comes to total debt not just government debt  as a proportion of GDP then the Eurozone as a whole is a poor third to the US in second and the UK well out front. So why is the Eurozone the centre stage of this crisis now? Is it basic flaw in the Euro project?

The Eurozone certainly has all the standard symptoms of advanced economies in this crisis – high debts and overpriced assets leading to insolvent banks. Well, there are flaws as they recognise and the straightjacket of a currency union has its disadvantages (the Euro gold standard) but the biggest cause for the Eurozone being so different to the US and UK is Quantitative Easing.

I describe QE as taking methadone to get us off the heroin of too much liquidity and too low interest rates. Our methadone in the UK has been £275 billion of printing money to have even lower interest rates and even higher liquidity. Brown correctly persuaded others at least to boost their economies, if not adopt QE, to avoid the cold turkey of the immediate shocks of waking up to a heroin addiction.  Methadone allows one to plan and progressively withdraw the drugs. The US adopted the same approach to the tune of $1.25tn.

But still why is the Eurozone the centre of the crisis if it had a lower debt to GDP? The answer lies in both the structure of the Eurozone and the attitude of the ECB. The Eurozone has not undertaken anything like full scale QE until just before this past Xmas when it started with a long term €500bn loan facility.  This is because the ECB does not have a mandate for propping up countries (QE was completely unforeseen when the mandate was created) and the ECB fears that QE, with it inflationary implications etc, amounts to debasing the currency and therefore should be avoided at almost any cost. A new head of the ECB has changed the attitude recognising ‘any cost’ is what they had reached. Expect the ECB to undertake at least another €1tn set of three year lending.  Now the ECB is undertaking a form of QE you will see panic in the Eurozone government bond market subside as it did forUK and US.

In summary, the ECB backed by Germany and France, bravely or foolishly, decided to go cold turkey to force as much political alignment as possible before they reluctantly took the methadone.

Whether it will promote sustainable growth is quite another matter. Getting off methadone ( I am no expert on that) will, in a financial sense, require rebasing asset values, deleveraging in the retail, corporate and Government debt (not all at the same time), allowing interests rates to rise but most of all reaching agreeing on all this between the world major economies alongside trade and currency coordination. Something Cameron does not find so convenient politically and his ‘being first to rush for the exit’ strategy brings failed captains of another type to mind. We should stick withEurope- being part of a collective solution not going it alone recognising we have achieved very little ourselves yet and we need all the friends we can get.

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February 7, 2012

Patrick Stewart on domestic violence shows up right-wing MEPs

The actor Patrick Stewart wrote movingly in the Guardian yesterday about how domestic violence blighted his childhood. He condemned the decline in statutory funding going to Refuge, the leading charity in this field.

Sadly some MEPs on the right of the political spectrum take a view diametrically opposed to Patrick Stewart’s. When the European Parliament voted through a Report commending the success of the anti-domestic violence Daphne Programme last week,  Tory MEPs Daniel Hannan, Roger Helmer and Syed Kamall abstained  while UKIP Members Farage, Dartmouth, Agnew, Bufton, Clark, Nuttall and London MEP Gerard Batten voted against.

Voting against the excellent Daphne Programme is really quite reprehensible. Such behaviour just goes to show the right’s views about violence against women are truly prehistoric. Despite what Tory women like Louise Mensch try to tell themselves, David Cameron has still not managed to challenge the ”dinosaur attitudes” obviously still rife within his Party.

The Daphne Programme, run by the European Union, is the only EU-wide programme combating  violence and abuse against women and children.  Established in 1977, it has effectively contributed to hundreds of projects that work towards the elimination of domestic violence, despite continual concern about its funding from the European Commission. I have blogged about this excellent programme on several occasions.  Sadly, it now looks as if Daphne is under further attack, as shown in the  European Commission’s plans for Daphne (or lack of them).

Unfortunately a similar thing to that described by Patrick Stewart is happening with EU work on domestic violence and abuse.  The priority given to the elimination of violence against women by the European Commission has moved down their agenda. It has not even been mentioned as an objective in its proposals for the new ‘Rights and Citizenship’ programme of 2014-2020.  Even though there are some legislative measures in place, including the EU anti-trafficking coordinator and the recent Victims Protection Order, these measures are few and far between. To seriously bring an end to violence against women, an issue which does not discriminate between countries and is, in the case of trafficking for example, a cross border issue we must work with our European neighbours. To think that this is an issue on which we can go it alone is a display of ignorance.

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February 7, 2012

David Cameron’s EU problems, not the Milibands, are the real story

Judging by the amount of media coverage generated by David Miliband’s New Statesman article of the “is he going to challenge his brother for the Labour leadership” variety, you would be forgiven for thinking this the at the very top of the political pops. Yet it manifestly is not.

David Miliband has consistently claimed he is not now going to do anything about trying to become Leader of the Labour Party. In addition, in case the mainstream media hadn’t noticed, the Leader of the Labour Party is only the Leader of the Opposition, not the Prime Minister. He is not the head of our government and, as such, has little real power. 

Power, of course, lies with David Cameron, who has troubles of his own which are real rather than in the media’s imagination. As I blogged yesterday and many other times, David Cameron is facing huge problems with his Eurosceptic backbenchers.

Yesterday’s Telegraph letter signed by 102 Tory Eurosceptics including all the officers of the influential 1922 Committee – Graham Brady, Brian Binley, Mark Prichard and Charles Walker – and two former Cabinet Ministers – Peter Lilley and John Redwood – is just one aspect of Cameron’s difficulty. The signatories make up a third of Tory MPs, 102 out of a total of 307, a massive proportion.

Moreover, the Eurosceptics are not going to go away. This is a determined band, some of whom such as the veteran Bill Cash have been around for a very long time peddling their simple message that all things EU are bad and Britain would be better off outside. At the very least they want powers currently located in the EU to be repatriated to Britain.

Then there are the Liberal-Democrats who are the polar opposite. It goes without saying that Cameron needs to keep the 57 Lib-Dem MPs on side to ensure his government survives.

So we already have a situation which is less than desirable. Yet it does not end there. I think that having now had direct experience of the European Union rather than simply listening to others talk about it, David Cameron is beginning to realise that repatriation of powers is not the piece of cake he once believed.

Poor David Cameron and the Conservative Party whips have to contend with one third of their MPs who will pursue their anti-EU crusade to the bitter end while at the same time needing to maintain support from a substantial number of MPs in the other coalition party whose distinctive policy has always been to favour Europe.  

To make matters even worse, David Cameron’s flagship policy on the EU – repatriation of power – is a non-runner. The policy requires agreement from the 26 other EU member states, which I have never believed will be forthcoming.

It’s all a terrible mess for Mr Cameron and it is real. It should be reported in more depth and detail. David Cameron’s EU problems are the headline news story, not whether or not there will be a Labour leadership challenge.

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