I am absolutely delighted that Val Shawcross is to be Ken Livingstone’s running mate for the election for Mayor of London in two year’s time.
Val is an excellent choice. I have known her for many years and have always been impressed by her sincerity, intellligence and integrity. Val has already served Londoners well for eight years as Chair of the London Fire Brigade and now heads the London Assembly Transport Committee.
Val is also a champion for women and intends to put women’s concerns top of the agenda at City Hall. We have worked together in the past on women’s issues and on a personal level I am very pleased to have a campaiger for women in a leading position in the mayoral contest.
Good luck to both Ken and Val. They are a strong and balanced ticket well placed to lead Labour to victory.
Even though I am getting more and more fed up with Boris Johnson’s pitiful failures to keep his promises or to do anything useful for London and consequently in a state of readiness to hear about any possible new personnel at City Hall, two things about Val Shawcross put me off considering that she will be good for London.
I had a look at her web site. What a disappointment to find that she says, ‘This year, I am chair of the Transport Committee again and remain Labour Spokesperson for Transport’. Why is she the chair, not the chairman? ‘Man’ does not always indicate gender, who but a fool thinks that women are not part of mankind. Even worse, she neglects to use the definite article. Surely, she is the chair or the chairwoman/the chairperson of the Transport Committee.
This irritating neglect of the indefinite or definite article is particularly irritating when people use it about a conference. A friend of mine who used to be a Head Teacher and who should know better, will insist on refering to the NUT Conference he sometimes attends, as ‘conference’. Why is saying or writing ‘the’ or ‘a’ so difficult?
Perhaps it is just arrogance in that he does not want to use the indefinite article and calls it ‘a’ conference or the definite article ‘the’ because it is such an important conference that everone knows about it and just calling it ‘conference’ will serve well enough. I have seen some NUT conferences on the TV and they are not that significant. I recall seeing one inexperienced speaker after another making trite observations to an audience which seem to have been told that the dress code is unsmart casual. An audience which also indulges in that irritating habit, much favoured by socialists, of clapping with their arms in the air. It is a silly habit, not only does it make the clappers look like performing seals but it also often exposes what the NUM conference would probably call a pit disaster.
As well as the missing parts of speech there is also an ommission in the ‘About Val’ section. We read that she is proud to be from south of the river, that she has degrees in Politics and Education and all about her committee memberships but nothing about any real job she might have had.
She might have been a police officer, a hairdresser or a speech therapist but she does not say so. I would have been re-assured to learn that she had followed any of these occupations. This current breed of politicians who have not done anything but politics are a worrying bunch. They have no hinter land, they have to be the slaves of their political party because they have no other occupation on which to fall back and most importantly they have no life experience outside the ‘bubble’ of politics, research, PR, committee membership, campaign groups, journalism or quango-ism. They are bound to be out of touch.
Perhaps it is appropriate in the week of the 50th Anniversary of Coronation Street that Ken and Val are running mates??