When all the Mail on Sunday could come up with as a reaction to Ed Miliband’s election as Labour leader was to point out that he was unmarried and his name wasn’t on the birth certificate of his son, I must admit I was mildly amused. After all, in my little left-wing, progressive, socially liberal bubble of the universe, Mr. Miliband’s choices about how to conduct his private life really should have no impact on his job performance as leader of the opposition or even as Prime Minister.
Yet, by Tuesday that nasty persistent whining from the right on the subject still hadn’t gone away. Richard Littlejohn, that paragon of right-wing family values, and Tim Montgomerie have both weighed into the conversation yesterday, trying desperately to sabotage the political debate and keep the already annoying Miliband family soap opera on the front pages while the Labour party conference fades into the background.
And yet, the trick that Messrs Littlejohn and Montgomerie are missing is that the personal is political – something feminists have known for decades. So let’s look at how Mr. Miliband’s family status matters, and what the right’s focus on it really tells us about the kind of society these people envision for us.
Richard Littlejohn finds it ironic that while in “fashionable left-wing circles” marriage between a man and a woman is seen as something reactionary and old-fashioned, civil partnerships for same-sex couples are celebrated. If, he asks, Mr. Miliband and Ms Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives, then why not get married. There is a tangled mess of underlying assumptions behind these comments.
For a start, we don’t know – and frankly shouldn’t care – whether Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives. Yes, they have been together for five years, and they have a child together, with a second one on the way. Yet, the rest of someone’s life can be a very long time, and not just because futurologists predict that the first person to live to 1000 years old could be in their fifties today. People change, their goals and outlook on life change, and even the children grow up. A modicum of awarenss of the long term is the minimum I expect from my political leaders, and Mr Miliband for me is showing that by not binding himself in an extremely restrictive legal way to another person.
There is also a certain presumption in all of this commentary that Ed Miliband is the only person in the relationship who has a say over whether they get married, or whose name is on the birth certificate. The right is trying to treat Ms. Thornton here as a “trophy wife” – the same way the press dealt with Sarah Brown (Anyone remember her toes?) and “Sam Cam” whose greatest contribution to anything was to make us feel that her husband was a real man by being visibly pregnant during the election campaign. It is time for commentators like Mr. Littlejohn to realise that women – even politicians’ partners – are human beings, that they have agency and free will of their own.
Finally, Mr. Littlejohn seems to be starting from the assumption that “one size fits all” when it comes to relationships: if you like gay “marriage” then you should like straight marriage; if you have children you should be married. It’s a terribly restrictive view of human relationships, and just because the traditional “one man, one woman, two kids” model may have worked out for him doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone else. Why is it always the right – the proponents of a small state and the worshippers of market-enabled choice – who want to regulate human relationships, who want to deny us the basic rights of choice in the most personal areas of our lives? Is it so difficult to comprehend that context matters; that a person’s experience and outlook on life matters; that two people (and sometimes three, or four – I know it’s a shock!) can have an adult covnersation about how to run their own lives, and make their own decisions, without the state or the Daily Mail having a say in it?
Richard Littlejohn shows grave concern for the kind of role model Ed Miliband, in his new role as leader of the opposition, will be for the country. Here is the kind of role model that he is to me:
He is clearly a man of passion – someone who cares deeply about the biggest social and political problems of our times. And yes, perhaps he prioritised a climate change conference over getting married, or getting his name on a piece of paper – this for me makes him a man who can see the bigger picture. Again, this should be a minimum requirement for our political leaders.
I am making my own assumptions here, but I suspect Ms. Thornton would have had a strong voice when it came to the couple’s decision on how to conduct their relationship. This to me shows that Mr. Miliband is the kind of man who can respect his partner, have a mature and adult conversation about their relationship, and reach an agreement, even if that may not be to his political advantage. In a culture where women are routinely treated as objects, Mr. Miliband is brave to show us a different way.
Of course, Ed Miliband’s success in the leadership election also sends a strong message that “people like him” – people who have children out of wedlock, and whose name isn’t on those children’s birth certificate – can be successful, can be deemed worthy of maybe one day even becoming Prime Minister. That is a very powerful message, as it contradicts the constant pressure for conformity we face from the likes of Mr. Littlejohn.
I do not support the Labour party, but I would like to hear Ed Miliband’s political vision, not see his message drowned out by a media-generated strom in a teacup over issues which stopped being issues back in the 1980s.

The long boredom of the summer recess is over and Parliament is back in session. (Do remind me to tell you about the great idea I had for a new reality TV show to run during the next summer recess.) Anyway, Parliament is back, debating mostly electoral reform of one kind or another: the AV referendum, fixed term Parliaments, etc. So I guess it’s time for me to write about electoral reform again, too.
I believe I’ve made my views on FPTP clear in the past, but for the record, it’s an appalling, undemocratic, unrepresentative voting system. It’s about as unfair as they come, and not to the ever-complaining Tories. Let’s remind ourselves of the number of votes required for some of the parties in the UK to win a seat in Westminster: Lab: 33k, Con: 35k, LibDem: 126k, Greens: 200k.
Another effect of FPTP which doesn’t get talked about very often – but is kind of obvious from the above numbers – is that it severely penalises small parties and strongly encourages large ones. No society, however, can easily be split in just two camps: we are not all simply either Labour or Tory, either Democrat or Republican. I may be economically left-of-centre, and politically liberal; I am also a woman, a bisexual, middle class, an immigrant, childless, working full-time, I believe climate change is the biggest challenge we face, and have many, many other interests and facets to who I am which have a political aspect. The same thing goes for any one of us. However, the party of middle class bisexual immigrant childless women would be quite small – and even smaller if you only took the women who agreed on every single policy issue. The First Past the Post political system would strongly discourage its existence. And so we look to get together with another party whose views we more or less share – they might be the middle class immigrant childless lesbians, they might be the working class bisexual childless women, or even the middle class immigrant men; and then we find another group, and another, to join our ever-expanding political party. You can probably already see how easy it is to form a daisy-chain from you to anyone anywhere else on the political spectrum, even if you’re only taking tiny incremental steps with each new association.
So what we end up with in an FPTP system is a political landscape generally dominated by two parties. Those parties are large and far from homogeneous – they are “broad churches” (yes, that is a technical political science term – remind me to explain about cross-cutting cleavages some day). In fact, it is fair to say that the large parties produced in an FPTP system are coalitions in themselves. You can see plenty of evidence of this in the three main parties in the UK: The LibDems split reasonably neatly into a social wing and the Orange Book wing; Labour have a hard-core left wing trying to cohabit with the Blairites who in turn would actually not be too out of place in the more centrist wing of the Tory party (I may be being charitable here).
Remember back in May all the fear-uncertainty-doubt talk about how coalitions were undemocratic because they made shady deals in smoke-filledfree rooms and were thus not accountable to the public who had voted for the parties involved based on their manifestos and not based on some sort of coalition agreement? So what do you think produces said manifestos other than shady deals and back-room politics, except in a much less transparent, scrutinisable way?
That much about the theory. As a quick postscript, let’s have a look at the damage FPTP is doing to the UK political landscape in practice. So we have the two main parties (the LibDems will forgive me if I treat them separately here) which historically represented different class interests: Labour, economically left of centre, representing the working class (or, well, labour); and the Conservatives, economically right of centre, representing the upper classes (in other words, capital). The LibDems are a freak of nature, a misshapen merger of what was left of the 19th century Liberals and a centre-left off-shoot of Labour. Under Tony Blair, Labour moved to the right, and up along the authoritarian axis for those of you playing along at home on Political Compass. The LibDems’ social wing (which I’d still like to believe makes up the majority of the actual membership) has been submerged by the Orange Bookers who are now solidly forming the leadership of the party. And so the British political landscape is left with a large social-democracy-shaped black hole in it – not so good for those of us who would like someone to represent us in that part of the spectrum.
That’s it for tonight. In the next instalment, by popular request, I’ll be trying to convince myself to campaign for AV.