Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Fundamentalist Christian influence – a real cause for election concern

May 2, 2010 – 8:33 am

The Observer today has an expose on Philippa Stroud, expected on Friday to be a Tory MP. She’s a fundamentalist Christian who has been praying to rid Britain of homosexuality – not in some sort of metaphorical sense, but directly and purposefully ecause she believes that’s what God wants and she wants to get him to do it. And she’s tried to do the same thing with individuals.

At a personal level, this kind of thing has a hideous effect on people – as the Observer quotes… “Angela Paterson, who was an administrator at the Bedford church, said: “With hindsight, the thing that freaks me out was everybody praying that a demon would be cast out of me because I was gay. Anything – drugs, alcohol or homosexuality, they thought you had a demon in you.”

It is something that I feel strongly about after an experience in Bankok. A Christian woman I knew had lots of personal issues, and also physical health issues. She arrived on my door one day in a terrible state, because she was ill (mostly related to diabetes), but mostly because the Christians with whom she lived had thrown her out because they were convinced the illness came from demonic possession. Not only had they thrown out an ill woman, they also dumped her possessions on the street, in case they were possessed…. She had been brainwashed into more than half believing they were right.

Of course all parties have prospective MPs with odd views, but Stroud apparently has great influence in the party – this a party that has Chris Grayling, who wants to allow prospective B&B guests to be thrown out on the street if they happen to be gay, and a leader who wants to reduce the abortion limit.

And this isn’t only limited to the Tories. Shockingly the allegedly “liberal” Liberal Democrats have had at least three MPs who have had interns from the heavily misnamed Care (Christian Action, Research and Education), which is anti-homosexual and anti-abortion rights – Paul Burstow, Tim Farron, and Steve Webb. (And there are also at least three Labour MPs.)

And there are also three Labour MPs, and SEVEN Tories.

Unfortunately none of these issues have been really aired in the election debates, but it does raise the question of whether the nasty, bigoted, “back to the 50s on ‘moral’ questions” party has really changed. Just look at where the money comes from.

Abortion Rights is already gearing up for a huge fight in the next parliament to defend access to abortion, and I fear similar struggles on other ‘moral’ issues.

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A weekend roundup of political facts

April 11, 2010 – 7:28 am

From the Child Poverty Action Group:
* Benefit fraud is at an all-time low, costing £1.1bn a year – less than 1% of claims.
* Overpayments cost £1.9bn a year
* £16bn goes unclaimed
* Tax fraud each year costs £15bn

Sir Peter Gershon, who is now advising Cameron on “efficiency savings”, provided the analysis that allowed the Tory proposal for scrapping most of the government’s planned national insurance increase, and told the Financial Times that up to 40,000 public-sector jobs would have to go. He also chairs General Healthcare Group, Britain’s largest private healthcare company.

A number of the business people signing up for the Tory anti-National Insurance increase letter – “including the bosses of mining group Xstrata, SAB Miller and Tullow Oil, have only small UK workforces, and so cannot claim their companies would be hard hit.”

Nice work if you can get it: “Matt Emmens, the chairman of Shire, the pharmaceuticals group, received £10m last year, even though he has only a part-time role”. Perhaps they could cut drug prices instead?

The proportion of MPs who went to comprehensive schools is likely to fall even further after 6 May: from 46% to 30%.

In the UK, the pregnancy rate among teenagers aged 15 to 19 years is 27 per 1,000. In the Netherlands, the pregnancy rate for teenagers of that age is five per 1,000. Both nations become sexually active at the same age, but while 85% in the Netherlands use contraception the first time they have intercourse, its 50% in the UK.

The UK ranks 17th in the league table of industrialised countries for the number of asylum applications per head of population (in a very powerful piece about the dreadful Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

And finally the best piece of comment I’ve read this weekend – Will Hutton on how business as usual just won’t do.

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Are we innovating our way to non-function?

April 2, 2010 – 11:50 pm

What started this chain of thought was the less-than-wonderful Dyson Airblade, which after colonising the loos at work seems to be spreading like some slow-moving cockroach to public facilities around London. It looks hi-tech, and makes grand claims, but has more than a few drawbacks.

First, it sounds like a 747 warming up, which rather destroys any peace and tranquility the facilities might previously have had, as well as making impossible those convenient little business chats that enable you to casually float some extra work for someone without marching up to their desk. It also removes the larger drops from your hands, spraying them around your feet and the floor, without actually drying your hands, and leaves a large puddle to gently ferment on the floor.

Then I got to thinking about my laptop computers – probably while I was wrestling with one. The best one I’ve ever had was a little 12 inch or so Toshiba that I bought back around 1997. Since then I’ve been through a Dell (never again – it died beyond hope about five days after a one-year warranty ended), an MSI Wind (which died hopelessly within warranty and after a month away for major repairs came back and is still struggling on, but with a hopelessly noisy fan that almost rivals the Airblade), and an Acer (“blessed” by some regular total-freeze-up problem that seems incomprehensible and irrepairable, and a keyboard that couldn’t be a better fluff collector if you’d designed it for that purpose).

Then I think of a set of nearly new lifts I know that are out of order more often than in, and have recently acquired the laughable mechanical voice addition saying “express service”, as they take you from one floor to the next very, very slowly.

Yet I regularly leaflet in Bloomsbury mansion blocks using some delightful, reliable lifts that are certainly Edwardian. And I’m old enough, just, to remember when you expected an electrical appliance to last decades – more or less the lifetime of the young setting-up-a-household buyer – and trust it to do what it was supposed to without adding minor miseries to your life.

It’s not just designed obsolescence, although that’s certainly part of the problem. More, it’s the mad desire for innovation and change, driven by the desire to sell new stuff, every year, which means that change for change sake is taking us away from functional, sensible designs into mad, barely functional excesses.

I’m reminded of the wonderfully prescient Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and the Nutri-Matic, which “made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

Come to think of it, I know a high-tech machine that while it doesn’t quite make those claims, certainly delivers a hot brown liquid designed to appear like tea, while tasting like dishwater…

An heretical thought: Once a good sensible design for a practical need is devised, why change it?

Dare I suggest a towel? Adams certain thought it a practical and useful object.

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The pains of politics, Roman-style

March 14, 2010 – 11:52 am

Robert Harris’s 2007 The Ghost was a political roman a clef par excellence – in its unflattering picture of Tony Blair it piled outlandish premise on outlandish event, until it came to present an astonishing lifelike image of the man.

His latest, Lustrum, is a different beast – still about politics, but the politics of the dying days of the Roman Republic. It’s a well-trodden tale, with Cicero at its heart, and the giant characters of Pompey, Caesar and Cato stalking around – familiar at least in broad outline to anyone with a touch of classical history in their education.

As far as we know, it is true to life in outline, and makes reasonable deductions about the points of controversy, and the motivations of the main characters, so there is at one level no real surprises in the novel, despite its thriller-like opening with a mutilated body.

What it is, above all, is a superbly well-told, gripping tale, presented to us by a classic narrator, Tiro, Cicero’s slave secretary – a man who has his own hopes, dreams and passions, yet whose life is entirely centred around his master’s. He’s that unfashionable thing these days, an honest, intelligent, caring narrator – and the Cicero he, and we, see is true to the nature of the political man that history has handed down to us – intelligent, skilled, marked by the classic flaw of a “New Man” eager to play up his own importance, yet ultimately buffetted and scarred by forces beyond his control.

Politics of our own day, as the latest British polls show, is turbulent, fast-moving and often surprising, but Rome was in another class of mercurial altogether – a single clever speech, a quip even, could swing the Senate, or a huge mob – Prime Minister’s Questions has nothing on this.

Harris is interesting in his treatment of the women characters. In a story primarily set in the Senate, in the senator’s studies and the streets, they can’t be central, and Tiro doesn’t often see them in detail, but the portrait of Terentia, Cicero’s wife, no paragon of virtue, but an intelligent, strong-minded, often independent woman is an attractive one.

In the shadow of The Ghost, it is tempting to read this as yet another view on British politics. Yet if there’s one real lesson from it – which applies very clearly to the present moment, although the first man to which it should apply, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, is not yet known, is the dictum attributed to Enoch Powell – “all political careers end in failure”.

Given that as I write this I’m preparing to stand for the Westminster parliament, I might take that as depressing -but I’d rather take away a slightly different Ciceronian message – that you’ve got to try, and put your heart and soul into the effort. And be prepared to fail…

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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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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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