On Ruth Padel’s attempted academic nobbling of Derek Wolcott as potential Professor of Poetry:
it’s like dynasty with cardigans!
Octopus In Lurrve
Aww, romantic cephalopods. Cute, clever and animated:
I posted this once before quite a while back, but it’s so good it deserves another airing.
Alas Smith & JonesMcShane
I really must stop starting my morning paper-reading with the Guardian, if only for the sake of my health. I was already feeling a bit nauseous and then I read this gobmackingly crass opinion piece from Joan Smith:
I am sick of my country and this hysteria over MPs
Until now, I have not written a word on this subject.
She had my back up right there. Joan Smith? Who she? How very gracious of her to address us..
Smith‘s a fully-paid up member of the metropolitan politicoliterati. A journalist, dramatist and detective novelist, formerly married to Eustonite and Marx’ biographer Francis Wheen, she’s now the partner of the ex-BBC journo and NUJ activist, Labour MP Dennis McShane.
That would be the Dennis McShane MP who claimed 20 grand a year for the cost of running an office conveniently located at home – in his garage in this scruffy suburban semi?
I’m sure it was all legit, but was it in the spirit of the rules? Who knows:
…one fellow Labour MP privately said he was ‘very surprised’ at the scale of Mr MacShane’s claims given that he does not have to pay to rent an office. ‘I pay £6,000 a year in rent so if he doesn’t have to pay that, it sounds like a lot of money,’ said the MP.
This Denis McShane:
Voted moderately against a transparent Parliament.
Voted moderately for introducing a smoking ban.
Voted strongly for introducing ID cards.
Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
Voted strongly for introducing student top-up fees.
Voted strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
McShane’s right there in the vanguard of the New Labour, do as we say, not as we do, war-criminal brigade. Obviously Smith has her own opinions but presumably, as partners, Smith and McShane are sympatico on many things. So we could surmise where she’s coming from, even if she hadn’t already damned herself with her own words:
In this uniquely poisonous atmosphere, years of conscientious public service count for nothing; decent people are being terrorised out of public life and the perverse consequence is likely to be their replacement by a motley collection of minor celebrities, attention-seekers and outright fascists. Democracy itself is under threat, not because a handful of MPs have behaved greedily but because the public reaction has been (and continues to be) hysterical
An hysterical public that can’t be trusted to vote, obviously. Smith says that we, that’s you, me and J. Arthur Blokeuptheroad, are violent, sanctimonious automatons being manipulated by the press. Probably not untrue in certain cases. But when you’re addressing Guardian readers, accusations like that don’t go down very well. It gets worse when she invites us to compare MPs and their expenses to 9/11:
Being “monstered” may mean that you have to leave home for a few days and put up with being the butt of jokes in pubs. Some bounce back or rehabilitate themselves through tragedy, as Goody did when she discovered she had terminal cancer. But when the target is our elected representatives, most of whom have not done anything terrible, the consequences are grave. The sense that we are in the midst of a crisis has been stoked by banner headlines – it is as if 9/11 has happened every single day for the last two and a half weeks…
The coverage and vilification MPs are getting because of their own actions is a tragedy comparable to death from cancer or the news coverage resulting from 3,000 deaths a day for 19 days, she says. There’s spin for you. You understand my nausea.
True to her apparent Labour leaning Smith is not only blind to the moral nuances of life she’s hard of political hearing too :
…one of the weirdest aspects of the witch-hunt (for that is what it is) is that I haven’t heard anyone accuse the vast majority of MPs of doing their jobs badly.
Oh no? HELLO!
There’s a couple of million complaints right there. The public’s been forcefed a lot of crap for a long time by their supposed representatives and corruption’s the waffer-theen mint that’s made them justifiably explode as they have done at Smith in comments.
Lots of people have benefited from the MPs allowances, however indirectly; all she’s doing is using her privileged media platform to whinge ‘you’re all horrible and I hate you’ because she, like many others, sees her cosy life threatened. Fallout from the expenses scandal is inevitable. There is bound to be. Even though some of it may be misplaced, as long as it happens to people like Joan Smith I shan’t be bothered.
No Use Crying For Mother
Usually the big reveal’s at the end of the post, not at the start. Here it is. I admit it, I’ll be 50 later this year.
Such is my ingrained cultural conditioning that this is the first time I’ve had the courage to publicly admit to no longer being a perennial 42 (I had my children young so I could get away with it for quite a long time). When age discrimination against women starts at around 30, why would I? Having a much younger partner than you makes the pressure even more intense.
But dammit, I don’t want to be 42 any more: trying to keep up a front that insists on sagging and being its age despite your best, most time-consuming and expensive efforts is just too much damn work, and life’s too bloody short as it is. Who am I competing with anyway? Under-fifties? Teenagers? What for, exactly?
I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t care any more, even though admitting to being 50 and someone’s mother, for a woman, is tantamount to declaring that you’re just another perimenopausal, invisible has-been. But I’m 50 – well, not quite, I’ll be 49 for a while yet – and to hell with it.
That said you’d think that this frivolous filler piece lauding the overfifties female from G2 would have struck a chord with me:
They blazed in like a hockey team: gung-ho, no-nonsense, determined to win. First came Joanna Lumley (63), campaigning for the Gurkhas; hot on her heels was Gloria Hunniford (69), lobbying for grandparents’ rights to see their grandchildren. And then came Esther Rantzen (68), speaking out about dry rot and corruption, and contemplating the idea of standing for parliament. Behind her stood Helen Alexander (52), the first female chair of the CBI.
Clearly, the opinions of women who have strayed over the age of 50 have been overlooked for too long. At a time when our TV shows are presented by silver foxes and buxom young blondes, when we’ve no Moira Stuart, no Anna Ford, when we don’t hear enough from Joan Bakewell or Kate Adie, there is something glorious about the arrival on the political scene of these women. They have caught the national mood, underlining the feeling that we have had quite enough of all those silly little boys running the show, ballsing up the banks and pratting about in politics. “Right!” they seem to say, rolling up their sleeves, getting out some elbow grease (and perhaps a bottle of gin). “Let’s do this properly, shall we?”
But no chord struck. For a start, Lumley, Hunniford and Rantzen, haven’t just strayed over fifty – they’re all well into their sixties. That’s not just straying, that’s invading and taking possession. I get the impression the author was in a hurry, Alexander’s name happened to be on the news and it fit. She’s just over 50, true, but she’s only the chair of the CBI, not the chief executive, and she’s female, which are distinctions much more likely to affect her potential power than her age might.
But that’s just sloppiness; more to the point, what utter crap. Or to put it more politely, I disagree with the author’s entire premise. You only have to look at prominent women who are actually over fifty to immediately refute the idea that women over fifty innately have more sense. Take politicians – Condoleeza Rice is 55; Hazel Blears, 53. They’re wise? Or political pundits – Maureen Dowd is 58 or thereabouts, Melanie Phillips is 59. We should listen to them more, just because they’re over 50? I don’t think so. Just because you’ve done a lot or seen a lot or have a platform to spout from doesn’t mean you learned anything at all from anything.
So many journalists recently seem to be unconsciously or even consciously wisting for 1940, when the Women’s Institute was the last redoubt against fascism and capable, strongarmed women in floury pinnies kept the nation going while simultaneously riveting, breastfeeding baby, stirring the porridge and aiming the antiaircraft batteries.
Maybe it’s just another facet of the general nostalgia for the war, this desire for someone capable to to take stern measures and lay down some rules and some discipline. The Americans call for the Cavalry, we want to give the reins of power to the Women’s Institute and have Ann Widdecombe for Speaker. Ooh, strict Nanny…
But even if they were willing, the women who survived the War are mostly now in their eighties and nineties and increasingly fewer in number, and they’d probably deny they were special anyway. The women named in the article grew up in the sixties; the mothers of this current generation of journalists will have been brought up the seventies. The mythical women they’re yearning for don’t exist any more, if they ever did. Sorry, guys – she’s not coming to make it all all right and kiss the nasty booboo better so it’s no use crying for Mummy. There are no eggy soldiers for tea.
We can argue all day about responsibility for the current political chaos and as conscience-relieving and satisfying as it might be for women to put the blame entirely on men, we all of us messed up, if only from inaction. Equally everyone, of whatever gender, whether under fifty or well over, must have input into the shape of any new economic and political realities that result.
Easy to say, but much harder to do. For the time being we women will have to muddle through, frowning at our wrinkles, being capable, making the best of things and finding what little scraps of peace and contentment wherever and however we can. None of us is getting any younger, after all.
A Good Day To Bury A DNA Database
The expenses scandal rolls on and on, and while it may be a disaster for the public’s faith in constitutional government, for New Labour it’s business as usual and every new day of scandal is just another good day for burying bad news.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in particular must be chuffed to bits that the politerati’s bogged down in the mire of the expenses scandal; it all not only takes the heat off her personal travails, it lets her get on with dismantling democracy by the back door in decent peace and quiet:
Opposition parties and civil liberty groups united to condemn plans that are being steered through parliament while MPs are distracted by the expenses row.
The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats claim the government is seeking to make controversial changes to the national DNA database via a “statutory instrument” because it fears losing a vote that would be required if they were introduced by the more conventional method of primary legislation.
A statutory instrument has to be discussed only by a specialist committee which meets for 90 minutes and is usually made up of 16 MPs and a chairman. Critics say the Labour MPs who will dominate the committee will be handpicked by government whips and therefore back the Home Office proposals
How to do things with rules, in a nutshell.
Wounded and weak though he is, Gordon Brown is still PM and intends to stay PM for the foreseeable future; he still wants to get his way and as we already know, bullying is one of his favoured methods of doing so. I’ll bet those MPs will be handpicked – handpicked to be lying awake nights fretting they’ll be found out about something.
I can only hope that because of the unauthorised publication of the unredacted reciepts (with more yet to come) that the whips have lost most of their coercive power over MPs. I can only hope too that enough MPs are roused by this blatant use misuse of procedure to ensure the DNA database isn’t bulldozed through via statutory instrument while there’s no Speaker and Parliament’s in turmoil.
Those are very faint hopes, though. What they’re fretting about nights may not even be expenses at all: milking allowances may be the least of some MPs’ sins. While the latest revelations are certainly juicy and indicative of the unscrupulousness greed of some MPs, not least the whips themselves, not all scandals are financial and the whips probably have plenty of even juicier stuff left to make members sweat with nervousness and suddenly decide to retire ‘because of health problems’.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that publication of the reciepts has enabled whips to join the dots on some very questionable personal behaviour by some MPs. I think MPs will do what they’re told.