No Use Crying For Mother

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.

A Good Day To Bury A DNA Database

police01a

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.

How They Suffer

Only the principle that it’s only fair we should see what we paid for, the new shiny technological Telegraph has published a Google Earth gallery of what MP’s bought with their expenses.

Totnes MP Anthony Steen, for example, claimed more than £80,000 from the taxpayer over four years for work on his Devon estate:

Anthony Steen sought help from the taxpayer to inspect 500 trees on his land

To well-off Tories like Steen the allowances scheme must’ve seemed like just another wizard tax wheeze, just like all those other little wizard tax wheezes Tories’d been using from time immemorial to avoid their full tax obligation and maximise their income stream; just business as usual.

But it’s getting quite hot for some MPs now That we know exactly what kind of lavish lifestyles the taxpayers have been funding all this time, and less well-off Tory Nadine Dorries, whose expenses are also being questioned, has been expressing concern that the media pressure and invasion of privacy may lead to a suicide in Westminster:

“People are constantly checking to see if others are OK. Everyone fears a suicide. If someone isn’t seen, offices are called and checked.”

If MPs want to kill themselves, well, that’s their choice – but far from being suicidal, Steen’s openly defiant. We’re all “Just jealous” (I’m sure he meant envious, but whatever) he says, a view I suspect is shared by many MPs of both parties.

One thing I don’t understand. MPs are just as subject to envy as anyone and Labour members are better at it at than most, so why did none of them ever publicly question the lifestyle their colleagues were suddenly living? MPs are acutely status conscious, always checking out their colleagues to see they aren’t one-upped in some way. Why did no-one object to the sudden acquisition of wealth?

I can only conclude that Labour regarded expenses as the licensed union scheme to beat all licensed union schemes, all the Christmases and birthdays of a lifetime rolled into one. At last former civil servants, union officers and junior lecturers could have the lifestyle they always felt they deserved. Qualms? What qualms? The public voted for them, the public must have wanted them to have the money, QED. Besides, the public would probably never know. As usual few Labour MPs considered the long-term effect of their own legislation.

Now their greed’s been exposed, MPs are threatening suicide. I certainly don’t want anyone to die, for heaven’s sake, but I find it hard to have any sympathy for the poor suffering members. They must have known the voters would think what they were doing was greedy and wrong, but they still chose to do it; and those colleagues who said nothing about the suddenly comfortable lifestyles of formerly cash-strapped MPs condoned the wrongdoing by their silence. What else do they expect? Applause?

It’s no use Dorries trying to blame the media for the pressure MPs are under either. She may have some justification; journalists have always known the allowances scheme was a cover, she says, and for the media to be whipping up outrage now is hypocritical, which is true, and it has been common knowledge that MPs were on the make, witness Alan Duncan’s complicit smirk to camera and response of “Great, isn’t it?’ when tackled by Ian Hislop about excessive MPs expenses on Have I Got News For You.

But ‘everyone knew’ is no excuse: journalists couldn’t publish such wide-rangingly explosive accusations without the actual evidence to back it up and MPs fought tooth and nail not to be forced to reveal that evidence to journalists. So rumour was not substantiated. Nowthe evidence is beginning to be revealed and we all know now, not just a coterie of Westminster insiders.That’s where the pressure coming from, not the media, the voters. No complicit smirks from the voters.

MPs have only themselves to blame: they chose to claim what they did because they thought they wouldn’t be found out. What MPs choose to do now is their choice too: they should stop theatrically threatening suicide like a spoiled teenager who’s had their allowance stopped, and act like responsible adults for once, vote no confidence in the current government and force a general election. Maybe then we might let them leave this discredited parliament with a tiny little bit of respect left.

We’re Not Having It, Either

noifsnobuts-1

If anyone’s looking for tips on how to move ahead investigating our MPs and their expenses, this old post of mine from 2008 has some good ideas:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs? is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out.

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, ‘it’s all on the database.’

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

How could any MP object to such investigation? Those aren’t my words, those are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s in a speech by to the 2008 ‘Anti-Social Behaviour: We’re not Having It‘ conference.

Of course she was admitting to using the power of the state to harass individuals because they behave in ways the government disapproves of or finds politically inconvenient, not because they’re committing any crime.

But we’re told that if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear, so I’m sure Honourable Members, especially Labour Members , won’t mind such close scrutiny at all.