Better all-woman shortlists than the Leadership Programme

Last year, I was in the audience for a panel discussion at a professional conference. Every single member of the panel was a balding middle-aged man. It was, as several members of the audience pointed out, cringe-making.

It has reached the stage where the low number of women in the Liberal Democrat group in the Commons strikes me the same way.

You can say in our defence that we do not have safe seats into which we can parachute female candidates. You can say we had plenty of women candidates in promising seats at the last election – but the problem is that we did not win them. You can say we are selecting plenty of women in seats that look promising next time around.

Now Nick Clegg, according to today’s Independent, is considering imposing all-woman shortlists on the party.

That, of course, is not in Nick’s gift. He would have to convince the party conference to support the measure.

And my heart is not in the idea. My ideal is still Liberal Democrat members selecting the best candidate for the seat, irrespective of sex, race or anything else.

But if you feel we have reached the point where Something Must Be Done, then I would much rather see all-woman shortlists than the Leadership Programme we have at present as the solution to this problem.

This is for two reasons. The first is that it involves the party establishment picking favourite sons and daughters who will then expect to be provided with agreeable seats to fight. This gives that establishment too much power, and I would rather see candidates fighting their way up from the bottom. There is also the point that some of those chosen, for the initial intake at least, seemed to be doing very well without any special help from the top.

More fundamentally, the Leadership Programme fails to challenge the party sufficiently. It says, in effect, that women candidates are not as good, but with the proper training they can be just as good as white men. What looks radical at the outset turns out to be deeply conservative.

When you set it against all those faults, it is hard to argue that all-woman shortlists would not be an improvement.

This post first appeared on Liberal England.

Lib Dem conference sex ban shock horror

The world was rocked to its foundations by news that Liberal Youth has banned shagging at its conference this weekend.

The story was published yesterday by the Blue Guerilla blog under a sensational headline:

EXCLUSIVE: Lib Dem Youth Leaders Impose Shagging Ban.

It was rehashed in this morning’s Daily Star under the salacious headline:

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS IMPOSE SEX BAN ON RANDY ACTIVISTS

The Star suggests that Liberal Youth has split into two factions, between “budding politicians hoping for an early night kept awake by their randy colleagues” and those who regard the LY conference as “the one and only pulling event in their annual calendar”.

It turns out that there is less to this story than meets the eye. One of the comments beneath the Blue Guerilla blog is from Liberal Youth member George Potter, who dampens down the excitement:

I hate to break it to you but this is old news. Sex has been forbidden in crash since 2009. This announcement by the LY Chairs is just a reminder of that rule.

O tempora o mores! I recall a Young Liberal Movement council weekend in Manchester in 1977, when I entered a large bedroom in David Senior’s flat that was being used as a crash pad. It was like stepping into a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

Not everyone was shagging in those days. There were rival attractions, such as putting the world to rights or heavy drinking or roll-your-own cigarettes (which may have contained more than just tobacco) – or all three. But “hoping for an early night” rarely featured on any conference agenda.

Several participants in this hedonism went on to become respected MPs and councillors (and, no, none of them were those involved in subsequent scandals), so today’s more austere youth should not assume that getting a good night’s sleep is a guarantee of future political success.

Postscript: Apparently the main reason for Liberal Youth’s policy is concern about “child protection”. Liberal Youth has a minimum age of 14 and, while it is necessary to ensure the safety of under-16s (and no one of any age should be subject to sexual abuse), all but a few of those attending Liberal Youth events are over the age of consent. The fact that all participants, irrespective of their age, are subject to worries about “child protection” says more about the current moral panic about paedophilia than it does about any actual risks.

Pornography on Radio 4

Yesterday’s edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme Analysis examined the evidence for whether pornography is harmful.

The presenter Jo Fidgen began by describing her liberal dilemma:

I have a dilemma I’d like to resolve... I’m a feminist and a liberal. I’m troubled by degrading images of women but I’m unwilling to condemn private behaviour if it’s not causing serious and direct harm. So I’m looking for hard evidence about the effects of pornography that will persuade me to come down on one side or the other.

I don’t wish to get into that argument here. The programme was a calm, deliberative examination of the issue and the latest research, and you can listen to it online and make up your own mind.

The argument I do wish to get into is how you resolve such dilemmas, and in particular the importance of rationality.

I was struck by the arguments of one protagonist on the anti-pornography side, Professor Gail Dines. Fidgen introduced Dines by explaining that “she doesn’t feel constrained by the research from invoking cause and effect”. Dines argued that the anecdotes she heard were evidence enough, and that it isn’t worth bothering even to define pornography. She dismissed any research that didn’t meet her prejudices as “junk science” and rejected the need for further research, arguing that it is merely an excuse for inaction. For anyone employed as an academic, let alone a professor, these attitudes beggar belief.

Fidgen exposed the weakness of Dines’s case:

[Dines is] a feminist, first and foremost, and it’s that ideology that underpins her search for proof that pornography is bad for women. Now I’m a feminist too, but that strikes me as a risky approach because, if it can’t be proved in a way that would persuade a neutral observer, then she’s lost the argument. I wonder if her case mightn’t be stronger if she dropped her reliance on evidence and instead argued purely on the grounds that she disapproves of the depiction of women in pornography.

That was the approach taken by Professor Roger Scruton, who opposes pornography on moral grounds and thinks that any evidence, one way or the other, is beside the point. Although as Scruton admitted, subjective moral disgust is not a basis for legal bans.

But if you are going to argue from an evidential basis rather than a purely moral standpoint, the belief that feelings trump facts, emotion trumps reason or anecdotes trump research is simply not acceptable. It takes us back to a pre-enlightenment age when behaviour was governed by superstition.

We rightly criticise UKIP and Tory MPs like Peter Bone for their gut politics based on groundless beliefs. We should show no greater tolerance for this behaviour when it crops up on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.

Are there scientific reasons to oppose gay marriage?

There aren’t.

The strange case of Tory homophobia

Former Tory MP Jerry Hayes has written a highly entertaining piece for the Guardian about the Conservative Party’s conflicted attitudes towards homosexuality.

He notes that history is repeating and quotes some of the vile things said during the decriminalisation debates of the 1950s by three Tory parliamentarians; Lord Winterton, William Shepherd MP and Sir Cyril Osborne MP. Hayes makes this delicious observation:

I suspect that nowadays Winterton, Shepherd and Osborne would be welcomed into Ukip, the sort of party one instinctively feels watches Roots backwards so that there is a happy ending.

Mad swivel-eyed loons? I’ll take that back...

In a post the other day, I questioned the use of the term ‘mad swivel-eyed loons’ to malign Conservative party members.

As if to disprove my point, Norman Tebbit has been interviewed in this week’s Big Issue on the topic of gay marriage and his eyes seem to be rotating through 360 degrees:

“The government discussed it for twenty minutes on the morning of its announcement,” former Conservative Party chairman Lord Tebbit told The Big Issue. “They’d done no work on it beforehand. I said to a minister I know: have you thought this through? Because you’re doing the law of succession, too.

“When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?

“It’s like one of my colleagues said: we’ve got to make these same sex marriages available to all.

“It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I’d be allowed to marry my son. Why not? Why shouldn’t a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn’t two elderly sisters living together marry each other?”

Swivel-eyed, maybe, but not a ‘loon’. There is not a full moon till next Saturday.

What’s wrong with rights

Our thanks to the grumpy old blogger Grumpy Old Liberal, who recommends a new book called Defending Politics by Professor Matthew Flinders of the University of Sheffield. The publisher’s website summarises the book’s central thesis:

Matthew Flinders makes a highly unfashionable but incredibly important argument of almost primitive simplicity: democratic politics delivers far more than most members of the public appear to acknowledge and understand. If more and more people are disappointed with what modern democratic politics delivers then is it possible that the fault lies with those who demand too much, fail to acknowledge the essence of democratic engagement and ignore the complexities of governing in the twentieth century rather than with democratic politics itself? Is it possible that the public in many advanced liberal democracies have become ‘democratically decadent’ in the sense that they take what democratic politics delivers for granted? Would politics be interpreted as failing a little less if we all spent a little less time emphasising our individual rights and a little more time reflecting on our responsibilities to society and future generations?

If this publisher’s blurb is anything to go by, Flinders is right on the money. We need more emphasis on the need for a just society, in which people’s life chances are not diminished by social class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or any other factor beyond their control. The emphasis on individual rights has hindered not helped the cause of social justice. It has turned the debate into a pissing contest between self-interested groups with competing claims to victimhood, while those most in need have been left behind.

Things went wrong in the 1980s. The main reason the left completely failed to mount a serious intellectual challenge to Thatcherism is that it had become self-obsessed. As I wrote in my chapter of Reinventing the State:

The right may have believed that ‘there is no such thing as society’ but there is a tendency to forget that, during the 1980s, the left became just as self-indulgent. It was the decade of being ‘right on’, when the left abandoned its traditional social concerns and instead emphasised the solipsistic obsessions of identity politics, a movement that rapidly descended into our present-day culture of victimhood.

We can see this phenomenon at work within the Liberal Democrats. The party has set up a ‘Candidate Leadership Programme’ “to identify, develop and support some of the best candidates from under-represented groups within the Party”. Yet some of the 40 places on this programme have been allocated to privileged white women at the expense of ethnic minority candidates, which has led to a furious dispute between those responsible for the programme and Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats. Such outcomes are inevitable when attempts to create greater justice are perverted by competing claims to victimhood, especially when this enables the sharp elbows of the middle classes to hog resources and opportunities originally intended for those who are genuinely disadvantaged.

Self-centred demands also create a problem for democratic politics in general, because they are bound to lead to dissatisfaction. With the best will in the world, democratic politics simply cannot satisfy millions of individualised wants simultaneously. Markets can do that, which if fine if you are choosing a car, a washing machine or a packet of breakfast cereal – and you have sufficient money to make a real choice. But when it comes to the ‘commonweal’, our shared interests, democratic politics is the only power available to most people to make meaningful choices. However, the job of democratic politics is to reconcile rather than gratify. It cannot function properly without a sense that we share the same space and are not merely out to seek personal advantage or instant gratification.

Liberals are always vulnerable to charges of promoting selfish individualism. We must always be clear that, when we talk about individual liberty, we are cherishing the uniqueness of each and every person, and seeking liberty and life chances for each and every person. But this approach can work only in the context of a society in which mutual respect is fostered. That is why we should always place individual rights in the context of an overall demand for social justice, and why demands for ‘rights’ irrespective of other people’s needs are wrong.

So the next time you hear a wealthy and privileged party member pleading victimhood to gain personal advantage, challenge them with this simple question: “Why is it always about you?”

Charles Bradlaugh – the musical!

Well, not quite. But there is a new play.

Charles Bradlaugh is a hero of several members of the Liberator Collective. He was Liberal MP for Northampton from 1880 to 1891, and an atheist. When he first entered the House of Commons, he asked to be allowed to affirm instead of swearing a religious oath of allegiance. After a protracted battle, including imprisonment and several by-elections, he eventually won the right for members of both houses of parliament to affirm instead of swear an oath. It is thanks to Bradlaugh that non-believers won the right to sit in parliament, and it is for this achievement that he is best remembered.

However, Bradlaugh was also an early campaigner for birth control. Together with Annie Besant, he published a pamphlet advocating birth control and was prosecuted for “obscene libel”. The ensuing trial is the subject of the new play – the National Secular Society has more details:

A new play by Derek Lennard, The Fruits of Philosophy (Such a scandal!) which examines secularism and free thought in Victorian Britain will be presented at Conway Hall on Friday 15 March at 7.30pm.

It is based on the true story of the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh (founder of the National Secular Society) who were accused in 1877 of publishing “Obscene Libel” – a sixpenny pamphlet advocating family planning and describing contraception.

The play will give a dramatised account of the trial, the scandal that surrounded it, the way it affected the lives and careers of the accused, and the impact on wider society.

Entry to the play is free (book a place here) but there is a suggested donation of £5.

Woman’s Hour gets it wrong

Who are the 100 most powerful women in Britain? This morning, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour finally unveiled it’s ‘Power List’, defined as “the 100 most powerful women in the UK at the start of 2013”.

Like any good Liberal Democrat, I studied the list to see whether there were any party members included. There is one person with a particularly good claim, Sharon Bowles MEP. She chairs the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, the parliament’s most powerful committee. That makes her arguably the second most powerful woman in European politics after Angela Merkel.

Sharon Bowles is not on the list at all. And neither is Lynne Featherstone, who has played a key role in advancing women’s rights in the coalition government.

But look who has been included. The Queen occupies the no.1 spot, even though she has no real power. The list also includes pop singer Adele, comedians Dawn French and Sarah Millican, and Victoria Beckham.

Who chose this list? The readers of Take a Break? No, it turns out to have been a panel comprising Eve Pollard, Jill Burridge, Oona King, Val McDermid, Dawn O’Porter and Priti Patel, assisted by some unnamed ‘expert witnesses’.

Admittedly, the list takes a broad definition of the term ‘power’, going beyond politics and business to encompass society and culture. Even so, there is a difference between power and fame. To suggest that Victoria Beckham is more powerful than Sharon Bowles is frankly ridiculous.

Left Foot Backward

In today’s edition of the Left Foot Forward blog’s ‘Look Left’ newsletter, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather has been named as ‘Regressive of the Week’ for voting against gay marriage.

No mention of the 22 Labour MPs who voted against gay marriage, then?

The real significance of the gay marriage vote

Yesterday’s debate in the House of Commons on gay marriage ought not to have been a seismic event. Social attitudes have changed markedly in recent decades and homosexuality has ceased to be an issue for most people. The introduction of civil partnerships a few years ago, although controversial, passed without the uproar we have seen this week. Yesterday’s vote was not even the final vote on this bill.

What is really going on? Why has gay marriage become such a totemic issue, less for its supporters than for its opponents?

In part, it is to do with the internal politics of the Conservative Party. Throughout his leadership, David Cameron’s strategy has been to detoxify his party. He is well aware of the Tories’ reputation as the ‘nasty party’ and he also understands that social attitudes have moved on. He is economically right-wing but doesn’t see why this agenda should be contingent on attitudes towards sexuality. The political value of supporting gay marriage is therefore symbolic; it is to signal that his party is no longer nasty.

You could say that yesterday’s vote was the Conservative Party’s ‘Clause 4 Moment’. But if this was Cameron’s intention, it hasn’t worked as planned. 127 Tory MPs voted in favour of gay marriage but 136 voted against (with a further 5 registered abstentions), so the opponents cannot be isolated or depicted as an unrepresentative minority. If anything, the Tories’ association with intolerant values has been strengthened.

The real significance of yesterday’s vote is that it is a political watershed. It marks the point when political divisions in Britain ceased to be mainly about economic interests and became more about values. This shift was anticipated in an Observer article by Stephan Shakespeare published during the 2005 general election campaign:

So perhaps what the modern campaign is really about is defining our values. After all, we are now beyond ideology: the left have given up on the idea of total state control, even as a distant aspiration. The right have given up thinking about shrinking the state. The collapse of Rover is a political non-event. No-one seriously proposes a shift away from public services. Instead, there is a new line which separates one side of the electorate from another: recent YouGov research suggests that we no longer range along a left-right axis, but are divided by ‘drawbridge issues’.

We are either ‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down’. Are you someone who feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other? Depending on which side we take, we regard ‘drawbridge up’ people as unpleasant, or ‘drawbridge down’ people as foolish.

Gay marriage is a classic ‘drawbridge issue’, like the current arguments about the EU. This is why yesterday’s vote was so significant. It is not that gay marriage per se doesn’t matter; it is that something much deeper is going on.

Just as, in the USA, many poor working class people support the Tea Party even though it is against their economic interests, so we will encounter similar phenomena here. As I argued long ago in Liberator in 2004, Liberals need to understand where the new political fault lines are and to be prepared to fight battles about values.

The Liberal Democrats have fudged too often on ‘drawbridge issues’ for fear of causing offence (notably on Europe and immigration). They are missing a trick if they lose opportunities to associate the party unambiguously with ‘drawbridge down’ values. That is why the failure of the party’s MPs to vote unanimously in favour of gay marriage was so damaging.

Gay marriage – never mind the Tories, what about the Labour and Lib Dem rebels?

Most of the media attention regarding today’s House of Commons debate on gay marriage has focused on the behaviour of the large number of Tory rebels. Relatively little attention has been paid to opponents in other parties.

The Huffington Post is one of the few media to cover this angle. For the latest data, however, one must check the Coalition for Equal Marriage’s list. 15 Labour MPs are currently known to be against gay marriage, while at least three Liberal Democrat MPs (Gordon Birtwistle, John Pugh and Sarah Teather) are also opposed. A further seven Liberal Democrat MPs have yet to declare their intentions, so there could be more (those undeclared are Alan Beith, Annette Brooke, Duncan Hames, Charles Kennedy, Greg Mulholland, Robert Smith and John Thurso).

Well it’s a free vote for MPs of all parties, so they can do as they please. But given that the Liberal Democrats (and the pre-merger Liberal Party) pioneered gay rights policies long before they became fashionable, the decisions of any opponents are hard to justify and undermine the credibility of the party on LGBT issues.

John Pugh’s explanation in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s World at One earlier today was incoherent and unconvincing [listen online here – zap forward to 13:30]. It was not at all clear what his call for more “gradual” reform would mean in practice. If he opposes gay marriage on religious grounds, he should just say so, instead of waffling apologetically in a way that will impress no one on either side of the debate.

Gordon Birtwistle, meanwhile, simply asserts that gay marriage is “not on” – whatever that means. Why Sarah Teather opposes gay marriage is anybody’s guess.

Is your bishop gay?

The results of the 2011 census for England and Wales, reported recently, made depressing news for the church. There was a sharp drop in the number of people describing themselves as ‘Christian’. The Church of England’s latest pronouncement on gay bishops is unlikely to reverse that trend.

The basic cause of the collapse in religious belief, religious observance and religious affiliation is not church policy on gay bishops. But the church’s ability to tie itself in knots over such issues shows how far removed from society it has become, and provides a clue to why it is seen as out of touch and irrelevant.

Most people (apart from elderly UKIP voters) have simply moved on from the issue of whether anybody is gay, bishop or not. A church that opposed homosexuality under any circumstances would win little favour but would at least be morally consistent. A church that believes that what matters is whether people love one another, and did not prescribe how they expressed that love, would both win favour and be morally consistent.

But it is hard to understand a moral position that says a bishop may be gay so long as he remains celibate. What is the moral difference between a homosexual priest having sex and a homosexual bishop having sex? What is the moral difference between a heterosexual bishop having sex and a homosexual bishop having sex? Is it OK for a homosexual bishop to have heterosexual sex? And if the church relents and allows female bishops, where does that leave lesbian bishops? In any case, how does the church propose to enforce its arcane rulings? Your guess is as good as mine.

While we are waiting for the C of E to clarify its new policy, Victoria Wright in the Independent has produced this helpful list of dos and don’ts for gay bishops.

What this controversy reveals is a church obsessed with the mechanics of sex (i.e. which dangly bit may be inserted in which orifice) rather than whether people love one another. It is a completely abstract doctrinal view of life, which makes little or no sense to the rest of society.

The Church of England’s self-imposed moral torture reminds me of this old limerick:

There was an old dyke from Khartoum,
Who took a young girl to her room,
But they argued all night,
About who had the right,
To do what, and with which, and to whom.

The worst claim of 2012

Admit it. You always thought Jimmy Savile was a bit of a perv. You weren’t surprised when the allegations became public. You’d known all along.

Except that you didn’t know. Nobody knew, apart from Savile’s victims and a few people who worked closely with him who were too scared to talk.

Saturday’s Guardian ‘Weekend’ magazine perpetuates the myth that everybody knew, in an article by Oliver Burkeman ironically titled “Worst ideas of 2012: ignoring reality”:

Savile wasn’t a man who concealed his creepiness behind a respectable facade. Creepiness was his brand; looking back now, it’s as if he was daring the world to point out that he seemed so much like a sex offender.

This is utter bollocks. Savile was a genuinely trusted figure. That is why he was chosen to front advertising campaigns for British Rail (“This is the age of the train”) and road safety (“Clunk click every trip”). The advertising agencies that planned those campaigns knew what they were doing. In their search for the ideal front man, they would have been looking for a face that people trusted, and their audience research would have told them that Savile fitted the bill.

In the highly unlikely event that you actually knew Savile was a sex offender, you will by now have presented your evidence to the police. Otherwise, your claims that you ‘knew’ are a fantasy.

What if...?

What if the main reason there are so few women at the top of business and politics is not because of discrimination or the lack of family-friendly policies, but because women choose not to pursue those avenues?

Kay Hymowitz (a woman, by the way) argues:

...women are less inclined than men to think that power and status are worth the sacrifice of a close relationship with their children. Academics and policymakers in what’s called the ‘work/family’ field believe that things don’t have to be this way. But nothing in the array of work/family policy prescriptions – family leave, child care, antidiscrimination lawsuits, flextime, and getting men to cut their work hours – will lead women to infiltrate the occupational 1 percent. They simply don’t want to.

I need hardly add that Hymowitz’s article is thought-provoking. In any case, if you feel like responding (angrily or otherwise), please read the whole of her article first.

Having lit the blue touch-paper, I will now retire...

Vile, sexist and sad

Giles Coren wrote a review of the new James Bond film Skyfall for the Times. But the Times wouldn’t publish it, probably because Coren refused to join the crowd and heap praise on the film.

So he borrowed his wife’s recipe blog and published it there instead.