Monthly Archives: February 2010

Blogging/IT Politics

Britblog Roundup No 261

February 21, 2010 – 11:35 pm

Welcome to this weekly roundup – you might have noticed there’s an election almost on, so to start this week, a look at some of the events you might not have read about in a weekend one-story deluge…

Plaid Cymru had its pre-election conference. Welsh Ramblings was focusing on the coverage of the public sector, particularly pay, while the Monmouth Blog has been celebrating some excellent media coverage for its MPs.

The Green Party has also had its conference over the weekend (declaration of interest, I was heavily involved) and on Green Despatches you can find a roundup of the blogging action. It was backing the “Robin Hood tax” – something that A Very British Dude has strong feelings about, as does the Britblog’s founder, Tim Worstall.

The Devil’s Kitchen is less than impressed with the Pirate Party and its view of copyright issues.

Now I suppose there are some other parties that I should cover, so let’s start cheerfully, with the way James Purnell didn’t resign, although how a guest blogger on The Socialist Way thought he should have.

Turning on the Tories, on Mark Reckons there’s an account of the woes of the soon-to-be ex-MP Andrew Mackay. And Cath Elliot on Too Much To Say for Myself has some scathing thoughts about a slightly misplaced – one spot only – decimal point in the Conservative figures on teen pregnancy.

Also related to politics, Mr Eugenides is less than impressed by Scottish rail workers, on The Melangerie, Phil is concerned about the definition of Hooverite economics, and Jonathan Calder on Liberal England mixed nostalgia, a damp suit and a bit of politics to pleasant effects as he reflects on the Market Harborough swimming pool.

Neil on A Place to Stand looks a little further afield, towards the former Irish Tiger, suggesting the economics may not be as bad as suggested, and Laura on The F-Word has been contemplating a government move to allow faith schools to opt out of effective sex education.

Now there’ll be plenty more where that came from for the next ten weeks, so let’s get right away from politics to explore the weird and wonderful range of British blogging topics.

Starting with something completely different, Airminded, subtitled “Airpower and British society, 1908-1941 (mostly)”, hosts the military history carnival. And Elizabeth Chadwick has been revisiting the surprisingly short siege of Framlingham Castle – in 1216, in case you were wondering…

Penny Red is reflecting on what you need to do now to get into journalism, while Greener Leith is reflecting on what you need to do to get a phone box removed (and maybe one day the bin too!)

Barkingside 21 is working to save access to local history and Chris on Capital Nature is counting London birds.

Diamond Geezer has been visiting the real Albert Square and the Onion Bag Blog has dropped in on the new year celebrations in China Town.

And that’s all for this week…. host next week will, I believe, be Matt Wardman.


You might be surprised by some of the links here: the way the Britblog works is that nominations are made, and the host is generally obliged to use them – and to use them without undue editorial bias.

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Feminism Politics

Powerful support for Green Party policy on sex work

February 21, 2010 – 5:22 pm

I was very pleased to chair on Friday what many afterwards said to me was a powerful session on the Green Party policy on sex work, which is, in short, in favour of the New Zealand, decriminalisation, model, which aims to protect the safety and wellbeing of sex workers by ensuring that they receive the coverage under employment law and under criminal law as anyone else, and that the stigma against them is minimised.

Catherine Stephens, of the International Union of Sex Workers, said that estimates suggested 80,000 people were working in the sex industry in the UK. Estimates for street sex work range from 3,000 to 22,000, and the Home Office says a maximum 4,000 women are trafficked. “So between 70-90% are non-trafficked off-street workers: an invisible majority who have no reason to the attention of the authorities or rescue organisations.”

Catherine said that streetworkers were generally accepted to be some of the most vulnerable people in the UK. “Street sex work shows a high prevalence of problematic drug and alcohol use, a correlation with a background in care, frequent low educational achievement, homelessness and a host of other problems.”

She added: “These women – referred to by a recent Home Secretary as a “blight” – are criminalised under the Street Offences Act of 1959. That’s now had a 50-year trial period and signally and completely failed to solve the problems associated with street sex work. However, recent legislation has intensified the existing approach, including defining “persistence” for soliciting: twice in three months. That gives this profoundly vulnerable group of women the opportunity to have contact with the police four times a year without fear of arrest.”

Yet even those women working indoors were, Catherine said, threatened by current legal conditions, which ensured that while prostitution itself was legal, many acts commonly associated with it were not. “Working indoors, the only way to be free of the risk of prosecution is to work for yourself in complete isolation. No current legislation actually targets coercion, violence, abuse or exploitation. Two people working together fulfils the legal definition of a brothel, so the law builds in isolation at the most fundamental level. … Would we be safer working together? Yes. Is that legal? No.”

“It is vulnerability which creates victims, not sex work itself, and the law makes us vulnerable.”

This was a powerful argument, but I think the most striking contribution was from Thierry Schaffauser, who has worked in the sex industry for sex years, in Paris and London, and is an activist with the IUSW, president of the GMB sex workers branch and I am International Relations for STRASS, the French sex workers union that includes more than 300 sex workers. (He also stood for Les Verts in local elections in Paris. (And he has also written on Comment is Free.)

He said: “I am happy to be invited to speak today because most of the time political parties don’t want to hear sex workers’ voices and even less if it’s a male sex worker although male and trans workers represent easily 30% of the sex industry in London.

“…When you are convinced to know better for others what is good for them, this means oppression. The only experts on sex work are sex workers themselves.

“The portrayal of sex workers as poor victims, sex objects, commodities, slaves, drugs addicts, victims of Stockholm syndrom and post traumatic disorders. All that, is not meant to help sex workers. But to deprive us our capacity to speak for ourselves and to allow false experts to present themselves as saviours and to confiscate our voice.

“…Anti-prostitution activists say that we are not workers. They say that we don’t sell our labour but our body. This is still the same strategy to deny our agency and intelligence. But this is also to prevent solidarity with other workers and exclude us from the labour movement. We can’t separate ourselves from our body. We all have to use our body in a way or another to work.

“…My body is more than just my sex. Being penetrated doesn’t mean that I give my body. The most important organ I use when I have sex is my brain. Being paid for sex doesn’t make me an object, at least not more than when I was working for minimum wage for a boss and that my legs and my back were hurting after 40 hours a week of work.

“What makes me an object is political discourses that silence me, criminalise my sexual partners against my will, refuse me equal rights as a worker and citizen, and refuse to acknowledge my self-determination and the words I use to describe myself.”

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Environmental politics Feminism

Things I failed to learn from my grandmother

February 14, 2010 – 9:07 am

Since I tried to make my first ever batch of preserves, at the age of 43, I’ve been musing on how much knowledge my grandmother had that she took to her grave, because I failed to learn it from it.

Sure, when I found myself with a very large pumpkin, home-grown, a feat achieved rather more by good luck than good management, I could look up a recipe for pumpkin chutney on the internet. I could look up the process for sterilising jars, then sterilising their contents, and off I went. But there are aspects of such things that are by far the best learnt from watching and working with an expert. (The onion definitely needs to be chopped small, I learnt, too late…)

And I’ve no doubt that my grandmother was an expert. She lived in a classic Australian house on a quarter-acre block, and the whole of the extensive back yard was devoted to fruits and vegetables. Well into her 70s, she tended that garden, producing an extensive range of produce that she stored and preserved in a wide variety of forms.

Not that I often ate it as a child, although there must have been great quantities of it. But I was taught to regard this lovely, homegrown, almost-zero-food-miles produce as embarassing, laughable even. “Proper” food came out of a supermarket freezer or from a can or bottle. Homegrown was a sign of embarrassing poverty and failure. (And it required skilled labour to process.)

Many other aspects of my grandmother’s life were also a cause for family embarrassment. She almost never threw anything away, and bought very little – the house was furnished with the furniture bought on marriage, and every potentially useful item – string, wrapping paper, bits of wire, were carefully arranged in drawers, available for use whenever required.

This all required thought, organisation, planning, system – things that I failed to learn from her.

Yet now, as I try to live an increasingly “green”, environmentally-friendly life, I’m forced to reinvent the knowledge that was second nature to my grandmother.

I’m trying to cut to almost zero my use of throwaway plastic containers, where it be Chinese takeaway or packaged berries, bottled soups or coffee cups. Yet I doubt my grandmother used in her life as any as I still use in a year, much as I try to cut down.

Whenever she left home, she took a packed lunch wrapped in paper, and a thermos of tea. There might have been a tin or two of soup in the cupboard for emergencies (when she was ill), but basically she cooked everything fresh, from scratch. And if berries weren’t in season on the bush outside, she went to her preserves.

I remember her telling me a story, very late in life, she was probably in her nineties by then, about a pair of scissors she was still using. As I recall the story her sister had been cutting some flowers, and had accidentally left these scissors in the newspaper in which the clippings were thrown on the compost heap. A couple of days later my grandma realised what had happened and rescued the now rusty implements. She soaked them in oil, then sandpapered off the rust, and here there were, perhaps eight decades later, still in effective use.

I was too young then, and perhaps too wrapped in consumer culture, to really grasp what I suspect she was trying to tell me, about more than a pair of scissors: get quality things, treat them with care, and make them last a lifetime.

And yet there’s also a darker, feminist moral in my grandmother’s life – she had made much of it, yet she lived as a virtual slave, her fine cooking, food-growing and preserving going to the service of a husband who treated her very poorly, who dropped his dirty clothes on the floor for her to pick up, and ordered a cooked breakfast every morning.

I certainly would never wish to be using the skills she had, should I be able to reconstruct them, for such a purpose, so as we do return, as we must, to these skills, this careful, preserving lifestyle, there’s something we’ve got to be very careful to do differently than did this early 20th-century generation: these must be skills for everyone to learn, everyone to exercise – men, women, and children too.

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Miscellaneous

Women’s rugby – that takes me back

February 8, 2010 – 12:09 am

Was pleased to see in the Independent a very decent piece on the England women’s rugby captain, which only occasionally slips into the “gosh, girls are really playing” mode.

Catherine Spencer’s comment about not being recognised without mud in her hair takes me back to my rugby days – well my one rugby season.

I played for the really-not-very-good University of New England (Australia) team, which only made up the numbers with some “friends of players” who’d been talked into it without wanting to be there. Which meant when you got to the wings there were some players really not at all keen to tackle anyone.

I was No 8, a position for which I was way, way too slow, but we had a surplus of second rowers, which was probably where I belonged.

The mud line reminded me of my sporting fame moment when the local television stringer – who’d worked for me when I’d been news editor of the local daily paper – turned up to film a game, and was absolutely delighted to film me at the end of it, with a face as red as a desert sun, and hair that had reached the indescribable stage. (I do hope that tape has been safely confined to history, since I was also so high on adrenaline I was probably incoherent.)

Probably fortunately, I’ve forgotten the score of our biggest thrashing, when we played Newcastle Uni, which actually had Australian team members playing for them. One of them was a centre, who I recall only from the back, chasing her fruitlessly down the field…

File under nostalgia…

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