Monthly Archives: November 2011

[Elsewhere] Uniquely Scottish Tory

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When asked to justify her deviation from mainstream Tory policy in the area of child care, newly elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson seemed to imply that this was a uniquely Scottish issue which needed a uniquely Scottish solution.
Commendable and progressive though Ms. Davidson’s engagement in the area of child care is, this is not an issue that is particular to Scotland. All over the UK, families find themselves in a position where both parents either need or want to work, and where child care is inaccessible or affordable only to those whose incomes rival the Prime Minister’s. If I was making a case for Scotland’s need for unique policies or solutions – either under a devolved or independent arrangement – the area I would be most inclined to look at is pensions.
Read more over at Scottish Times.

[Elsewhere] God help us. The Revolution runs on Windows.

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Last weekend, I found myself at a loose end in London for a couple of hours so thought I’d look in on Occupy LSX. I pottered about, had a few chats, helped put up some posters and headed over to the tech tent. I only had a brief chat with the guys there, but was dismayed to discover that most of their kit was running on Windows XP. The reason, they said, was that Windows was what most people were familiar with. They had one Ubuntu box which was currently not around, and were toying with the idea of maybe putting Linux Mint on a couple of the machines, but it wasn’t a high priority. My jaw was on the floor.
Read more over on ORGZine.

Sex is not the enemy (*)

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(*)The title of this blog post is taken from a (NSFW) tumblr.
I spent yesterday at Fem11, the feminist conference organised by UK Feminista. It was great to be in a room with a thousand other feminists, and you know your event is successful when the hashtag on Twitter attracts both trolls and spammers. Sessions at the conference covered a wide variety of subjects, from violence against women, through abortion and the plight of asylum seekers. As usual, I wished there were two of me so I could attend more of the sessions.
There were a few themes through the day, but the one that really struck me was around sexualisation, objectification and the sex industry. The opening session had Cllr Rania Khan speaking about her campaign against lapdancing clubs, Isabella Woolford Diaz telling us about tackling lads’ mags in Tesco, and Bjorn Suttka introducing the Anti-Porn Men Project. The absolutely packed workshop on ending violence against women covered a lot of ground, including exploring the role of sexualisation and objectification of women in creating an environment conducive to violence against women.
A session by campaign group Object showcased their campaigns against lapdancing clubs, lads’ mags, demand for prostitution, Page 3 and Miss World. Some of these were highly satisfying. There is something inspiring about a representative of the lads’ mags industry being intellectually floored on live television by Object’s extremely articulate campaign manager Anna van Heeswijk.
During Feminist Question Time, we were told by Matt McCormack Evans (founder of the Anti-Porn Men Project) that a feminist future could not exist with the sex industry. Thundering applause from a thousand feminists followed.
Yet I find this debate somewhat one-sided. One or two voices suggested alternatives. One woman brought up the subject of women working in the sex industry by choice. This was not addressed – we were just given more statistics about the women who are forced to work there. Another audience member posed the question of what impact the closure of some lapdancing clubs following stricter regulation would have on the women working there. This was met with yet another explanation of the terrible working conditions for women in these clubs. Yet in no other industry would we see appalling working conditions and campaign for the entire industry to be shut down. We would campaign for those working conditions to improve.
To me, the objectification debate as presented yesterday at Fem11 seems to miss the point. Sex is not the enemy. Heck, porn isn’t even the enemy. As you may have spotted if you followed the link to the tumblr this post takes its title from, porn doesn’t have to objectify and exploit women. Just as it’s possible for pornography to promote objectification, it can also promote values like respect, consent, safety, pleasure and joy.
The issue we face is much bigger, and when we strike at pornography or lapdancing clubs or lads’ mags, we are only striking at expressions of a bigger underlying problem, cutting off the hydra’s head so it can grow two new ones. The issue is that objectification and exploitation of women is the only socially and culturally sanctioned expression of sexuality – for both men and women. Take a step back. Read that sentence again. Think about it. It’s important.
If we truly want a feminist future of gender equality and respect, we can’t start with pornography and lads’ mags – we have to start with the romantic comedy which teaches us, before anything else does, that the only sex that “counts” is penis-in-vagina sex where the man has an orgasm. More to the point, we can’t just fight against things we don’t want – we have to create a positive vision of what we do want. We have to establish a space, an environment, a culture where men and women can explore and express their sexuality free from gender norms, social expectations and moralising. As @feorag put it, sex negativity is as objectifying as the current social norms: humans have emotions and feelings, and lust is one of them. We can’t replace one type of objectification with another. We can’t just have half the debate.
We freak out about the message pornography and lads’ mags send to children and young people about sex and relationships between men and women. In many cases, this message is truly harmful. What we need to do is give young people the tools to engage with and question that message. We need to enable them to explore their own sexuality, find what feels right for them, escape the limiting social norms they are currently presented with. We need to give parents and teachers the tools to help young people do this. We need to create safe spaces – not just for young people but for all of us – where sexuality can be discussed in an open and honest way, without fear of being judged. We need to make information available to help people separate fact from fiction when it comes to sexuality.
Some of this work is already happening. Brook do an amazing job engaging with young people on the subject of sex, sexuality and sexual health. Blogs like Sex Is Not The Enemy challenge our perception both of pornography and of the socially acceptable expressions of sexuality. Shops like Sh! provide a safe space for women to engage with their own sexuality, light years away from the unimaginative exhibitionism of Anne Summers or the seedy places from which men emerge looking shifty and carrying non-descript paper bags.
We need to welcome work like this into the mainstream of feminism. We need to have the other half of the debate. If we do not, we are making it more difficult to achieve our objective of gender equality, and we are actively harming women, men and young people who are trapped by the objectifying, exploitative socially acceptable expressions of sexuality.

Economic Literacy Tuesday

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The Ernst & Young ITEM Club – an independent economic forecasting think tank which uses the same economic models as the Treasury – yesterday published a report on the inflation outlook for the UK over the short to medium term [PDF]. Coverage of this has been slow and not terribly helpful. I caught a snippet on Radio 4, but to get anything even vaguely meaningful, you would have had to listen to Radio 5 Live’s Wake up to Money at 5.30 yesterday morning.
On “Wake up to Money”, Neil Blake, a senior economic advisor at the ITEM club suggested that a lot of the inflation we have seen over the last three or so years has been “imported” or outside the control of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This kind of imported inflation was due to sharp increases in commodity prices, primarily food and energy. “Domestically generated inflation”, he said, was relatively low. Given the economic outlook, Mr. Blake suggested, the MPC’s current inflation target of 2% may be unrealistic and he proposed two options for addressing this:

  • Option 1 would be to increase the MPC’s inflation target. Even a modest increase of half a percentage point for 2.5% would give the MPC considerable flexibility to absorb imported inflation.
  • Option 2 would be to target a different measure of inflation – one that allowed us to strip out elements beyond our control such as food and energy, and enabled us to focus on the “domestically generated” part of inflation.

It is that “domestically generated” inflation that I want to look at. In basic terms, inflation is a general rise in prices: items which yesterday cost you £1 to buy today cost £1.02. The same amount of money, therefore, buys less “stuff”. Obviously increased prices of raw materials or energy will have an impact on inflation. So will raising sales taxes such as VAT – something which has happened twice in the last two years, once at the reversal of the temporary VAT cut and once at the beginning to this year when the rate went up to 20%. These are either external factors beyond our control or one-off occurrences which will not affect inflation next year. There are, however, other factors domestic factors which can influence inflation, and by far the biggest of those is wages, followed by profits. These are the “domestically generated” pressures on prices and components of inflation. What Neil Blake is therefore saying is that while food and energy prices will continue to rise and that is beyond the MPC’s control, one way of keeping inflation down is to focus on – essentially – keeping wages down. It is an interesting euphemism, that “domestically generated inflation”.
In all fairness, if you read the full ITEM Club report, a slightly different picture emerges. Far from making any specific recommendations, the report acknowledges the weaknesses of both options. It stresses that any attempt to keep the domestically generated parts of inflation down is likely to have a strong negative impact on growth and thus highlights the challenges facing policy makers. It also looks at the shares of wages and profits in gross output – in other words, how much of GDP goes to labour and how much to capital. There are a few items of note here:

  • Over the last 40 years, there is a slight but perceptible downward trend in labour’s share of GDP and an equally slight but perceptible upward trend in capital’s share. The downward trend for wages as a share of GDP is particularly pronounced from the 70s until the mid-90s (say around 1997), after which labour’s share of the pie stabilises.
  • The ITEM club looks at the effect that changes in the share of GDP of imports and indirect taxes have on the shares of labour and capital. What they find is that taxes tend to squeeze labour’s share of the economy, not capital’s.
  • Globalisation, together with rising commodity prices and competition in international labour and product markets, is likely to further squeeze labour’s share of the pie.
  • Finally, “the recovery when it comes will benefit capital more than labour.” This will, of course, further exacerbate already high levels of inequality in the UK.

Overall, the ITEM club report makes for very interesting reading and acknowledges that we will continue to face economic challenges over the short to medium term. The most important conclusion I draw from the report is this: If the government suddenly decides to change what the Bank of England is targeting in its efforts to manage inflation, and particularly to “exclude factors beyond our control”, remember what this means. Remember that “targeting domestically generated inflation” is code for “keeping wages down”.