My new piece on the Independent. Bitchy celebrity journalism, Kate Moss’s toes and the Mail Online’s perfect storm of misogyny. Would love it if you would stop by and read it, and ideally leave a comment, Facebook like it or tweet it. Thanks very much!
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/21/how-the-mail-online-turned-us-into-misogyny-addicts/
Tags: addiction, beach bodies, bikini body, celebrities, Daily Mail, feminism, Kate Moss, Mail Online, misogynistic, misogyny
This is my new piece up at the Independent. Recent revelations show that Catholic Schools have been pushing an anti-gay agenda in the classroom. With suicide rates amongst gay teens shown to increase when schools create a homophobic environment, should the Church really be allowed to be educating vulnerable children? Please check it out, and ideally like it, tweet it, or leave a comment. Thanks so much.
Odd as I find it to have written a piece in defence of David Cameron and George Osborne, here is the link to my latest blog over at the Independent. Why inverted snobbery is not a million miles away from the conventional kind. It would be great if you could read it, and ideally like it, tweet it and/or leave me a comment there. Thanks!
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/04/25/time-to-stop-the-inverted-snobbery/
Come and read my new post about UK abortion law and the Coalition Government’s attack on a woman’s right to choose. It’s on the Huffington Post right here.
Thank you!
Tags: abortion, abortion law, Andrew Lansley, Nadine Dorries, obama, Republican party, Rick Santorum
Samantha Brick, Sexism in the media and why women don’t write about politics. It would be great if you would check it out, and ideally like it, share it or leave me a comment over there. Thanks!
(Also published on the Huffington Post- come and visit me there!)
Britain’s 90th richest man, and eponymous founder of the ‘Peter Cruddas Foundation,’ dedicated to the “development of …lasting qualities of good citizenship” is now entering his third day of unemployment. Peter ‘Cash for Access’ Cruddas was forced to resign his position as Conservative Party Treasurer on Sunday, after an unfortunate encounter with a recording device made it clear that he had been soliciting vast donations to the Conservative Party from the super-wealthy with the promise of access to the Prime Minister and the chance to influence government policy. “It will be ‘awesome for your business!” he was recorded enthusing. It is still unclear whether he was speaking from personal experience- Cruddas has himself donated over £350,000 to the party- we will probably never know what, if anything, he got in return.
Meanwhile, David Cameron, after several days of foot-dragging over the need for action, has finally taken control of matters by commissioning a rigorous enquiry by a Tory peer to tell him who he ate dinner with last week.
The ensuing moralising from the great and the good has been full of ironies, with perhaps the most choice being Rupert Murdoch’s series of tweets on the matter: “trust must be established! Without trust, democracy and order will go.”
But the most disingenuous attempt to claim the moral high-ground has to be the repeated attempts by the government and its supporters to portray this latest scandal, and the Conservative Party’s more general financial dependence on a small handful of glitteringly wealthy donors as the moral equivalent of Labour’s funding by the Trades Unions.
It started with the barbed official response from Tory HQ to the Cruddas scandal:
“Unlike the Labour Party, where union donations are traded for party policies, donations to the Conservative Party do not buy party or government policy.”
Then Frances Maude picked up the union-bashing ball in his ill- fated Common’s performance yesterday, with a janglingly desperate attempt to characterise Labour’s relationship with the unions as some kind of corrupt Mohammed Al Fayed style “cash for policy” scandal. The meme has been picked up in a series of comment pieces in the press. The right wing amongst them are making the bald-faced argument that union influence over policy making is morally akin to political influence bought by hefty donations from billionaires. The left wing press is more muted on the subject, but even the Guardian lumps the two together in a shrugging “they’re all as bad as each other” editorial.
But of course, the two are not the same at all. The analogy is deeply flawed, and its constant repetition is just further evidence of the Tories increasing detachment from ordinary citizens.
Firstly, there is the question of transparency. The Labour Party was founded by the trades unions explicitly to represent the views of working people and the relationship between the two is not just transparent but fundamental to the constitution of the party. In contrast, the Peter Cruddas affair has shown the many shades of grey that characterise the relationship between government and its major individual donors. The Tories are keen to portray Cruddas as a rogue dealer, and the very idea of ‘cash for access’ as abhorrent, but this point is difficult to argue convincingly when even the Party’s official website is pretty clear about the level of ‘access’ that money can buy you, featuring a detailed menu and price list for varying degrees of exposure to policy makers.
Any influence wielded by highly wealthy individuals over government policy, however indirect, is by definition in the interests of the very, very few. In contrast, union donations are the combined contributions of millions of individual members, acting in their common interest. These donations are entirely voluntary for each member- when an individual joins a union they are offered a choice as to whether a proportion of their individual subscription fee goes to the Labour Party or not. The suggestion that the combined modest donations of over six million ordinary people is equivalent to the vast endowments of a tiny handful of wealthy plutocrats is ludicrous.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly is the issue of democracy. Unions, are among the most democratic, not to mention politically engaged organisations in the country. Union leaders are elected regularly by the grass roots membership and are fully accountable to them in their decision-making. In contrast, individual super-rich political donors are accountable to nobody. Consequently any influence they wield over government is deeply undemocratic. The dangers of this have become evident in the US where a small group of business people wield vast unaccountable influence over legislation.
The process of finding an equitable, democratic solution to the problem of party funding is a complex one, and change is long overdue. But lumping the unions in with the super-rich as moral bedfellows is lazy and disingenuous.
Tags: Coalition government, Conservative party, David Cameron, Labour Party, party funding, Peter Cruddas, political donations, political scandals, Trade Unions, Trades Unions
(This piece was first published on the Huffington Post Come and visit me over there!)
It’s strange, given their intensity, how fleeting human emotions can be. Feelings that are gut-wrenchingly powerful when they first hit, almost always disappear without trace as time passes. My mind now can’t conjure up even a dim imprint of the bone-crushing despair I felt when my post-college boyfriend broke up with me on New Year’s Eve, 1994. The intense devotion for a brewery salesman from Northampton that overcame me a few years later barely even registers as a memory any more, and even the husband-leaving anger that gripped me at 9 o’clock last night over ‘The Matter of The Tax Return’ seems, this morning, like an extract from the therapy session of an unhinged stranger.
But, for some unfathomable evolutionary reason, there is one emotion that doesn’t dwindle even the slightest bit with time, often maintaining total integrity no matter how many decades have gone by. Seemingly the only human feeling that is experienced as keenly after twenty years have passed isn’t anger or love or elation. It’s embarrassment.
There are petty humiliations I suffered in high school that still, when recalled in my late thirties, give me the overpowering impulse to shout “NONONONO!” and hide my burning cheeks under the duvet. I’m confident that when I’m in the old people’s home, drooling in front of the Antiques Roadshow, my brain crumbling with dementia, the memory of the time I bared my 9 year old adoration in a note to Saul Berenstein in a Social Studies lesson and he laughed in my face, will still hold the power to make me crumple and blister with shame.
It wasn’t just the Berenstein moment. I was pretty-much an all round awkward kid. Nowadays, with thirty odd years of accumulated minor embarrassments of torturous haircuts and unrequited crushes lapping at my ankles, the only thing that makes it possible for me to forget, move on, and live a meaningful and productive life is the merciful fact that my mother never wrote a blog.
Me as a child. Glad no one blogged it!
When I was growing up, WordPress did not yet exist, and so thankfully there is no public record of my years of painful gawkiness. Things will be different for my son’s generation. It’s becoming more and more common for mothers to publish minutely detailed accounts of their children’s daily lives, part of a wider social trend which means that my son and his peers will be the most documented generation in human history. There are an estimated 3.9 million mommy blogs in the US alone and their readership is greater than that of the print editions of the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune combined. It’s a strong possibility that the mother of the next-but-three President of the United States is currently compiling a handy online resource for future voters to check out her potty training record and tantrums policy.
Don’t get me wrong. I love mommy blogs. I follow several, and at their best they can be moving, insightful, hilarious and uniquely honest. It’s a meritocratic writing marketplace that allows the cream to rise to the top far faster than in the mainstream media. I have often been tempted to start one up myself, combining one of my favourite pastimes (writing) with my all time favourite subject (my son.) But so far I’ve resisted that temptation, because, at some level, I feel that to blog about my son would be to write a lengthy unauthorised biography of another person.
At 18 months old, he is unable to consent to such a project, and he has no right of reply or ability to present an alternative view if I get it all wrong. In the future, any attempt to reinvent himself, to appear mysterious to a girlfriend, or hold back embarrassing information from an employer will be thwarted by my bulging archive of his early exploits.
I also know from my career making documentaries, that it’s not just the telling of the stories in the first place, it’s also the way you tell them. A subtle shift in emphasis can alter the whole narrative, and different people’s perspectives on a single event can vary wildly. What may seem like a cute or funny story to me as a mother, could be cripplingly embarrassing to him in the future, his own personal Saul Berenstein moment. Many mommy bloggers manage to pull off the teetering high-wire act of balancing humour, insight and privacy with grace and finesse. They are both better writers and better mothers than I am. I’m just not sure I trust my own judgement enough to get the balance right.
For all of us, our stories define who we are as people. I worry that if I tell my son’s stories for him, I get to decide the official version of not only what happened, but to some extent who he is. And somehow, I don’t feel able to do that.
I want my son to be able to tell his own stories, in his own time, in his own way. And having the privilege of watching the star of his emerging personality burn ever brighter, I know he’s going to have a lot of stories to tell.
What do you think? Is this fair? How do you manage to maintain your children’s privacy and still write insightful interesting posts about motherhood? Would love to hear from people.
Journalist and documentary maker writes about the news, popular culture and feminism on both sides of the Atlantic.
