guardian – Prog Gold

jane

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.

First it’s that gob of neoconnery-infected phlegm they call a journalist Nick Cohen coming down on the side of torture in the Observer, now it’s Polly Toynbee in the Guardian on ID cards:

[…]

Big Brother is the malevolent use of surveillance by a wicked state. But for as long as the state remains democratic we can decide what use is made of it and how we are protected from possible abuses. To refuse to use technology for fear of some monstrous future government is paranoid. Those opposed to the assembling of data are mainly from the anti-state, individualistic right. There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days. Politicians are too mistrusted and civil-service unions too self-interested, so who else speaks up for the collective good of government?

Conspiracy-theory, bad-state rhetoric has become the received opinion. The press fulminating against ID cards has less scruple about its own monstrous intrusions on privacy. The same Sunday Times that ran Rod Liddle’s rant against surveillance also carried a shocking gossip-column item – a journalist had rummaged through David Miliband’s rubbish bin looking at his papers. Press intrusion does a great deal more damage than our much scrutinised state.

Surveillance conspiracy mania is a symptom of something else – the wish for the middle classes to be victims too. This is a middle-class obsession by those who are least likely to be surveyed. There is some decadence in paranoid speculation about imaginary abuses when real social injustice is all around.

I’ve been stewing about that one all morning. In my meanderings through the broad left of British politics I’ve met many women like Toynbee, often very worthy and well-meaning, occasionally very talented, who kid themselves they’re radical and left wing because of their empathy for the poor.

As they’ve never actually had to suffer that particular indignity themselves empathy is all it can ever be – they dispense policy advice to the unfortunate like miniature Lady Bountifuls but they never have to live with consequences themselves, and most of all they never, ever question their basic assumption that the great British democratic system is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, a true democratic meritocracy. After all, they’re doing well aren’t they? The system must be benign. With the ascendancy of New Labour these women are now all over the public sphere like a rash of po-faced Antita Ruddocks, convinced that their great feeling for the unfortunate means their every utterance on any political subject whatever is policy gold.

It drives me insane the way that the likes of Toynbee, with the blithe assurance and security of the fortunately-born, assure us that the state always means the best for us, especially now its run by nice bourgeois careerists with good connections just like them.

I fumed all morning but couldn’t really come up with a cogent response, so I went back to read the piece again. That’s when I came across this comment which neatly saves me the trouble.

[…]

‘There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days’

A lack of trust eh? What is wrong with these ungrateful proles? Nothing to do with false evidence taking us to war, lying ministers, eroding legal rights etc etc I suppose.
‘Why aren’t people as angry about the galloping inequality in living standards between the 30% who will never own homes and the overpaid at the top who are fuelling property prices?’

Well I am angry about this AND about the surveillance state….and so are many other people…of course that doesn’t fit into your left/right mental model I suppose. Polly you SAY you are angry, but I am betting you could feed and house many, many of the scruffy lower orders if you gave away a fraction of the gold mountain you sit on as a result of your birth.

Disgusting, hypocritical, pontificating, self-righteous, parasite….these are some of the words that could be invoked here.

The surveillance state is a blody menace…it is born out of the minds of ‘we know best’ authoritarians who don’t trust anyone to act without their express permission, and seem hell-bent on eroding personal responsibility, social cohesion and a sense of community. The resulting criminality is then used to justify a ghoulish eye in the sky ‘with our best interests at heart’. We are sleep walking into trouble.

Perhaps a little more intemperate than the words I’d’ve used, but then these’re intemperate times.

It’s time that Guardian newspapers took a long look at their current editorial-writing staff with a view to retirement and brought people on board who are emphatically not an integral part of the current political establishment. It’s either an editorial putsch or risk becoming permanently regarded as the house organ of a discredited, criminal regime.

Read more: UK Media, Guardian Toynbee Surveillance

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