Tuesday 14 April 2015

Hilary Clinton's Presidency Bid Will Be Determined By Her Ironing Skills

My best friend is a woman and I am one myself so I’m obviously not a misogynist. Having said that, it’s more than my feminist sensibilities can bear, to see women vying for space in the political arena.

First we had three women making cameo appearances in the leadership debate here in the UK. Then this week, Hilary Clinton threw her hair net in the ring for the US presidency.

Has she not learned anything from her previous attempt at the presidency? All those men who interrupted her speeches to chant “Iron my shirt”, were not the sexist pigs that the political correctness brigade would have us believe, but rather the voice of a frightened, marginalised, increasingly alienated group in American society. The white male.

It’s not that these men hate Hilary per se. It’s what she represents. In the unlikely event that she was to become the first female president of the US, what kind of role model would she be to the young women of America? It would be bye bye babies and hello back room deals. What message would it send to young men, who have been raised on the absolute promise of higher pay and male dominance when it comes to the jobs that matter? Suddenly they’ll have to accept equal pay and share power with women. Societal order, the thing that makes us feel safe (apart from nuclear weapons) would collapse.

The writing has been on the wall for sometime. We only have to look at other women who’ve made similar bids for power to know it always goes tits up. The Times (UK) captured the outstanding victory of Sonia Gandhi 10 years ago with the headline “The Italian housewife with a lot on her hands”. Voted for by 675m people, the focus of the article was that of her gender “handicaps”.

When Segolene Royal made her presidency bid in France the media questioned who would look after her 4 children if she were successful. Women who have children are mothers first, and everyone knows a good mother wouldn’t leave a 16 year old child at home with flu while she swanned off canvassing to be the first female president. She was lambasted for allegedly doing that and rightly so. That’s tantamount to child neglect.

Of course the same rules don’t apply to men. In a meritocracy, we have to accept that men are better at leadership, that’s why they have wives to whom they can delegate child care duties, leaving them to get on with the business of war mongering and creating global economic carnage. After all, if there’s no crisis there’s no fear and without fear the masses are far less malleable.

At least Angela Merkel had the good sense not to enter politics with womb manufactured baggage. She didn’t have children so she can never be accused of neglecting them. Genius. She may also be the most powerful woman in the world and preside over the strongest economy in the euro-zone, but she can’t dress for toffee and she reads from her notes, for gods’ sake. It’s only a matter of time before she’s toast.

Commentator, Janet Street-Porter, recently outed Leanne Woods for reading from her notes during Question Time. Rule number 1 of politics, it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters. Street-Porter was so irked by this that she attacked Wood for criticising HRH David Cameron. Dismissing any criticisms of the Tory austerity regime, S-P shouted “If that’s true, why is everyone so bloody happy, as proven in a recent happiness survey commissioned by the happiness society (or some such)? Eh eh? Cat got your tongue? you bloody Welsh, note reading upstart”. I’m paraphrasing slightly but I feel I captured the essence of the occurence.

Coming back to the UK leaders’ debate, various commentators picked up on crucial, vote losing faux pas, committed by the female panellists. One of them was far too intellectual for her own good (as evidenced by the fact she was wearing flat shoes), the other was too confident (for a woman) to be credible and the other had a wardrobe malfunction. She turned up wearing a casual collarless ensemble. Everyone knows that’s political suicide.

I toyed with the idea of becoming more engaged with local politics. If plans to close our A&E succeed, it would be quicker to drive to Luton (300 miles away) and catch a Ryan Air flight to Australia (that’s where all the best doctors go when they burn out here) than to dial 999. When you factor in the 3 hour wait in this county for an ambulance, then the added journey time to the next nearest A&E (1.5hours) then waiting in the queue of ambulances that backs onto the motorway, you’re looking at about 8 months before you get to see the inside of a cerise A&E cubicle.

When you do get in, the nurses and doctors will have lost the will to live and will have emigrated to Australia, so why not just go straight there in the first place?

I digress. I put the notion of political activism to my 7 year old who was horrified. “We’re supposed to be making Victoria sponge tomorrow” he protested. “What would you rather have, a mother who stays at home making cakes all day or one who makes a stand for social justice?” He didn’t miss a beat, “I’ll take the cake option”. Obviously children are not naturally predisposed to decisions that involve deferring gratification but nonetheless, that was my dalliance with politics over. A woman’s place is in the home.

The harsh truth is that politics is a precarious career choice for women. Hilary Clinton’s presidency bid won’t be decided on her stellar track record or her proven competence. It’ll be decided on where she stands on ironing shirts, what she wears and whether her ambitions undermine her ability to be a good mother and grandmother. Even if she overcomes those hurdles, she’ll know better than most that, however well she thinks she’s doing, it takes just one bad hair day and its curtains.

Thursday 2 April 2015

The NHS Conspiracy of Silence

I’d have more luck publishing a piece about colonic irrigation than the NHS right now.

Despite the fact that it’s the one thing that unites the electorate, the NHS was airbrushed out of the budget. That should have been a media talking point, but it wasn’t. In the first of the leaders’ non debates (King Cameron threw Milliband to his Tory attack dogs, Paxman and Burly, instead), there were no scripted questions about the NHS. As soon as random audience members were allowed to speak, it was the NHS that stirred the audience. One woman accused Cameron of breaking his promise about no more top down restructuring. “You broke your promise before, how can I trust you again”. The answer is, you can’t.

This week 100 business bosses, who happened to have either OBEs after their names, or Lord/Baronness before them, signed a letter supporting the Tories. Shut the front door! There’s no other group in society that can cheat the exchequer of tax and get away with it.

This week Sports Direct hit the headlines for giving staff in one of their warehouses 15 minutes notice of their redundancies. The subsidiary was put into administration then immediately bought back by Sports Direct, wait for it, without the debts. The taxpayer was left to pick up the bill for the staff redundancies and suppliers. Then there’s the unpaid tax bill, which comes to almost £700,000. What is staggering about this scandal, is that none of what Sports Direct did was illegal, apparently. A Conservative Government has presided over a system that allows big business to exploit loopholes at the taxpayers’ expense.

Trillions of pounds that should be going to our health service is being siphoned off into offshore tax havens. The Conservatives had 5 years to redress this injustice but chose not to. They chose instead to clamp down on the disabled and the most vulnerable in society. Many of whom have been driven to suicide as a result of the hideously inhumane bedroom tax and other savage benefit cuts, which after all, are not a nice to have but the difference between eating and starving. Keeping warm or freezing to death.

Last Tuesday, David Cameron got heckled by an Age Concern audience for presiding over, what actor Michael Sheen described last month as, “a systematic dismantling of the NHS”. A report published on the same day, showed that mental health related absences in the NHS, due to stress, depression and anxiety, have doubled under the Tory administration. Apart from the tragic human costs, sickness and absence costs the NHS millions every year.

There has also been a 3 fold increase in the use of agency staff, who can charge as much as £1,600 a shift (most of which goes to the private company). The total agency bill to the NHS this year is expected to be £980 million. Peter Carter, RCN chief executive, said: "This report shows the true financial cost of a health service which takes a 'payday loans' attitude towards workforce planning”.

One NHS hospital paid more than £3,200 for a locum doctor to cover a single 24 hour shift over the Christmas crisis. No organization could withstand this level of gross mismanagement. It's no wonder the NHS is on its knees. We know from history that running down public services is a precursor to privatization (see Privatising the World by Tory MP Oliver Letwin).

The coalition’s Health and Social Care Act (waved through under the media’s radar) means CCG's (Clinical Commissioning Groups) can privatise chunks of the NHS without the inconvenience of consultation. Taxpayers, won't know about it until it's a done deal. Last week, leaked documents showed this is exactly what's happening at Staffordshire, where the CCGs are pushing through plans to privatise cancer care. A contract worth £1.2bn is up for grabs without any safeguards for quality of patient care or provision for what'll happen when it goes belly up. This barely got a mention in the mainstream media.

Despite the disastrous failed privatization experiment at Hinchingbrooke hospital (which was recently handed back to the NHS when Circle Holdings were exposed by the Care Quality Commission as having scant regard for quality of patient care), CCG’s are still blindly pursuing the reckless strategy of outsourcing to private companies, who are driven by profit, not patient care.

That, in the words of one of the doctors interviewed in the incisive documentary “Sell-Off: The Abolition of the NHS, “is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank”.