Category Archives: Politics

Feminism

Well done Mr Bush

October 8, 2006 – 12:20 pm

That Iraqi women are now having an extremely tough time is hardly new news, but a piece in the Observer today contains some new tales of horror, and an overall picture of the Talibanisation of the country…

It is not only the religious militias that have turned women’s lives into a living hell – it is, in some measure, the government itself, which has allowed ministries run by religious parties to segregate staff by gender. Some public offices, including ministries, insist on women staff wearing a headscarf at all times. A women’s shelter, set up by Yanar Mohammed’s group, was closed down by the government.
Most serious of all are the death threats women receive for simply working, even in government offices. Zainub – not her real name – works for a ministry in Baghdad. One morning, she said, she arrived at work to find that a letter had been sent to all the women. ‘When I opened up the note it said, “You will die. You will die”.’
The situation has been exacerbated by the undermining of Iraq’s old Family Code, established in 1958, which guaranteed women a large measure of equality in key areas such as divorce and inheritance. The new constitution has allowed the Family Code to be superseded by the power of the clerics and new religious courts, with the result that it is largely discriminatory against women.

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Politics

Asbo! Beware the ex-dinner lady, 72

October 8, 2006 – 12:14 pm

… who has been threatened with an Asbo should she set one toe inside her ex-school’s grounds. That’s despite the fact that she escorts several children to school.

No doubt there’s a bit more to this story, but it does demonstrate how these are misused – an Asbo is in effect a threat of jail, hardly appropriate in such a case, not to mention that our jails are now in an emergency state of overcrowding.

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Feminism

A rare piece of good news

October 7, 2006 – 11:17 pm

… on women’s issues in Australia in reforms to the treatment of victims in sexual assault cases:

The historic reforms will include specially devised sex assault educational courses for court staff including judges, new consent laws and “objective fault” laws, which will require the accused to detail the steps taken to ensure consent was given.
Mr Debus will also change committal procedures to reduce the number of times victims must give evidence and be cross-examined.

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Feminism Politics

The veil question…

October 6, 2006 – 5:38 pm

The British mainstream media, the blogosphere, the radio … everywhere seems to be full of the veil debate (eg here and here).

Should you be on another continent, ths short version is that Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, wrote in his local paper that he asked Muslim women who veiled their faces to remove such veils during meetings in his office in the interest of improving communication. (That this column might have had more than a little to do with the Labour leadership struggles I’ll leave to the Kremlinologists to discuss.)

I was chewing over the issue over a very late lunch, and I came to the conclusion that I agree with Straw on this – or at least would entirely defend his right to request of a visitor to his office an action that he thinks will assist the work.

Maybe he had a Hindu yogi visiting who liked to hold consultations while standing on his head. If Straw found this difficult, he could reasonably ask the yogi to sit on a chair. Or indeed, if someone arrived in a bikini and Straw found this uncomfortable, he could ask that visit to wrap up in a beach towel. It is his office, and he can make reasonable requests of visitors.

Of course there is a power imbalance, so he should be very careful of what he asks, but this isn’t unreasonable.

The issues is stewing further since Straw said that he would prefer no women wore the niqab anywhere.

Well, yes. So do I. Of course grown women who have sufficient independence in their life to have the freedom to genuinely make their own choice should be able to choose to wear the niqab if they choose (some very large ifs there), but given that the ideology behind the niqab suggests that women are dangerous, dirty, and do not belong in public spaces, to say that you would prefer them not to be worn anywhere is perfectly reasonable.

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Environmental politics

The revenge of an old land

October 5, 2006 – 9:43 pm

Twenty years ago now, when I was studying agriculture at university, there was just dawning an awareness that much of the arable farming in Australia, and particularly the irrigation farming, was unsustainable. Ancient soils were having unprecedented quantities of water poured on them, and the rising water table was bringing millennia of salt to the surface; trees were still being felled, destroying the land’s capacity to retain moisture (and soil) in Queensland, at the start of the great Murray-Darling system that is Australia’s only great river and on which the entire city of Adelaide depends for water. (And there were even government subsidies for felling these trees, at least until a few years ago – any Australian readers know if there still are?)

Yet still the fantasy continues. A story in tomorrow’s SMH (time difference) starts by excitedly saying record prices are being offered for Australian rice. Then, and only then, does it say that many farmer’s water allocation has been cut to zero due to the acute shortage, so very few of them will be getting these “record” prices.

On September 19, the federal commodities forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, slashed its rice crop forecast to less than 40 per cent of last year’s 1.05 million tonnes.
The next day, the NSW Department of Primary Industries went further, estimating the area of rice-growing land would be 20 to 30 per cent of last year’s.
“This is an incredible climatic event, the worst drought in recorded history, and we’ve got the joy of living through it,” said the president of the Ricegrowers Association of Australia, Laurie Arthur. “There’s not going to be more than a quarter of last year’s production.”

Even if you ignore the strong possibility that the greenhouse effect is starting to have transformative effects on climate (a largish “if”), Australia still, astonishingly doesn’t get the fact that “drought” (by definition supposedly an extraordinary event) is a normal part of the Australian climate.

I’m reminded of an expert I interviewed many years ago who said the only sustainable “farming” in Australia would be to turn nearly all of it over to the kangaroos and harvest the meat from them. Except that won’t go a long way towards feeding 20 million people.

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Politics

Tory conniptions

October 5, 2006 – 10:15 am

You wouldn’t want to take Davd Cameron’s soft, cuddly Tory party at face value – I know some of the people behind him, who are definitely neither soft nor cuddly, and definitely very pro-American – but he certain has convinced some members of the own party and some of its natural supporters.

Anatole Kaletsky is horrified by his apparent tax-and-tax approach (the cynic in me thinks that Cameron’s spin docs will be very, very happy about this piece, in their desperate struggle for the “middle ground”) and you can see the Telegraph visibly gulping as it writes the headline Cameron kills Tory taboos on gays and single parents.

Interesting times in politics, when the Tories are definitely positioning themselves to the left of Labour on many issues. Then again that’s the only bit of the middle ground left, so far to the right is Tony Blair.

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