Category Archives: Politics

Feminism Morvan Politics

Why has Saone et Loire never sent a woman to the French parliament?

June 1, 2012 – 1:05 pm

I keep an amateur interest in French politics, particularly in the region that I visit regularly. A story in my local paper, however, made me pay closer attention than usual – the department, I read, has never sent a female representative to parliament.

And while there are supposed to be statutory rules about gender balance of candidates, the conservative UMP is standing no women as main candidates in this month’s elections and only one alternate. (Although they do seem to have one “shared” female lead candidate.) The story above says that they explained they “rely on the experience of the outgoing members to ensure our chances of having elected officials” (these are all my translations, with machine help – I’m not an expert!).

I’m pleased to see that the Greens, when alternates are counted (each post has a main candidate and an alternate standing), have gender balance. Two of the five main candidates are women.

Jérôme Durain, quoted for the Socialists, and identified as a “reformer”, says women “still have difficulties in discussions where the codes are very male”. National Socialist Party policy is for them to have parity – the story doesn’t spell it out, but I’m guessing they haven’t achieved that in this department from the tone.

Oddly the National Front has women as three of its five candidates, despite the fact a rep said it “proposes a traditional vision of the position of women in society”.

The journalist concludes: “if parity is to improve women’s representation in public space, it is not necessarily a guarantee of social progress”.

The paper also ran another story quoting some of the female candidates on their views on the situation.

Isabelle Dechaume (who if I’ve read it right is a joint UMP and Parti radical candidate) says she is always asked how she can hold down a job, look after her children and do politics – but no one asks the men that.

A Socialist candidate, Cécile Untermaier, says women are never allowed to make mistakes, while men are.

A Green, Nicole Eschmann, says that the men stick together and women have to constantly defend their right to equal treatment.

Edith Gueugneau, a Left candidate, says: “Men feel still legitimate while for women more questions arise.”

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Books History Politics

A historian deeply out of touch with the modern world – who’s he advising?

May 30, 2012 – 7:58 pm

I think it is sometimes good to read books by people who come from a very different perspective, different political slant and academic, even generational, background. It was in such a spirit that I picked up After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent by Walter Lacqueur, former director of the Institute for Contemporary History in London.

But I nearly regretted it – because I nearly did myself an injury falling off my chair laughing. It wasn’t the whole book that did it – I found its perspective on Islam and Muslims deeply disturbing (as did the Economist) rather than laughable, but one phrase about France and Sweden: “family-friendly legislation (providing long holidays after childbirth)” (p. 234). Come on, really, “holidays” … this is a man clearly utterly unattached to the physical realities of life.

Indeed his whole perspective is stuck in some idea of 1950s great power politics – indeed often 19th-century great power politics. A declining population is a terrible thing because it reduces a nation’s power, which can only be measured by raw, brute military and economic clout. What he wants is a Nietzschean will to power – he complains even Europe’s fascists have lost it. (p276) The First World War broke Europe’s confidence, he explains – and such a pity that desire to colonise and dominate was lost, he seems to be saying. (p. 150)

He’s concerned about oil and gas supplies – but only in the way that he thinks another power could cut supplies. The environment as an issue, peak oil, the security of food supplies for a growing population, has entirely, wholly, passed him by. Military might and economic muscles are not simply the major issues, but the only ones, together with He regards “small is beautiful” as a now-past, “frequently discussed fad” (p. 276). Climate change – what’s that?

I might put this down to a couple of wasted hours and move on, except that I wonder how much of a grip such perspectives still have. He found a publisher for this work that is apparently unaware of the past 40 years of scholarship after all, and his CV suggests he’s the sort of emeritus professor type likely to still have the ear of current policymakers.

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Books Environmental politics Science

Understand the birds – I do now, at least a little more…

May 27, 2012 – 10:52 pm

A shorter version of this post was originally published on Blogcritics

Today I was watching a buzzard soar above the Morvan National Park in Burgundy. Tonight, I’m listening to one owl – maybe more – hooting gently in the valley below me that the raptor was dominating earlier, as the scene is very gently lit by a waxing, but still small, moon. They seem mysterious, unknowable – hard to track their lives and imagine what they would be like, but I’ve got a bit more of an idea after reading Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense: What It Is Like to Be a Bird.

I know that the raptor has a preponderance of cone cells in its retina (“like low-speed colour film – high-definition and performing best in bright light”), and the owl a majority of rod cells (which “can be thought of as working like old-fashioned high-speed black and white film – capable of detecting low levels of light”). While humans have only one fovea – a spot in the back of the eye where images are sharpest, some birds, including raptors, shrikes, hummingbirds, kingfishers and swallows, have two. So that buzzard’s visual acuity, ability to see fine detail, is roughly twice my own, while I probably didn’t need the science to tell me the owl can see a lot better in the dark than I. (I do sometimes go walking in the forest at night without a torch, but it’s a case of walking by feel rather than sight.)

That might sound quite technical, but really this is a highly readable book, that puts sometimes quite complicated science into terms entirely accessible to any interested lay person. The task of a mallard duck seeking food at the bottom of a muddy pond is likened to a human being given a morning bowl of muesli and milk to which has been added a handful of fine gravel.

“To understand how this is possible, first catch a duck. Then turn it over and open its beak so that you can examine its palate. The most striking feature is a series of grooves radiating around the curved tip, but you need to look beyond these at the outer edge of the bill. What you should be able to see now is a series of tiny holes or pores – some 30 of them. If you look on the lower jaw, you will find even more – about 180. Examining these pores with a magnifying glass, you will see that from each one protrudes the top of a cone-shaped structure called a ‘papilla’, inside which is a cluster of around 20 to 30 microscopic sensory nerve eningds – these are the touch receptors – that connect to the brain.” (p. 78)

Migration is of course one of the great mysteries of bird life, and what stands out from Birkhead’s very clear explanation of the current state of knowledge is just how sketchy and uncertain it is. He begins the chapter with an account of his own work with guillemots on Skomer Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast, getting from new geolocating technology finally, in 2009, after decades of working with them, a detailed understanding of where they go when not nesting on the island. (In short south at the end of July for a few weeks in the Bay of Biscay, before flying 1,500km north to spend most of the winter off northwest Scotland.)
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Books Environmental politics History Science

A wise look at “weeds” and their place in our world

May 27, 2012 – 6:46 pm

A shorter version of this review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Arriving in France to a spring garden in which the nettles stand chest-high with the grass-seed heads waving alongside, it seemed the ideal time to pick up Richard Mabey’s Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. It also turned out to be a book that crossed across many of the environmental news stories of today – as well as being simply a cracking good read. Mabey as a writer really knows how to let an anecdote rip across the page, and his sources and interests are wide and broad though never overwhelming, but he’s also a thinker, and the overview of human interaction with nature – our sheer blazing ignorance and careless destructiveness – come strongly through as a theme of Weeds.

One topical story is that of ragwort – a “weed” that last year got a UK government minister hellbent on its destruction as a “vile” plant into a lot of (entirely deserved) hot water. He quotes the country poet John Clare’s early 19th-century view of it as displaying “beautys manifold” in a “sunburnt & bare” spot on a degraded meadow, contrasting it with 20th-century hysteria about the poisoning of grazing animals, particularly horses. Mabey notes: “Neither wild nor domestic animals will usually eat growing ragwort if other forage is available. The vast majority of poisoning cases are from dried plants which have been cut with hay and, ironically, from wilted and shrunk specimens which have been sprayed with herbicide (the plant is just as toxic when dead, and less easily recognised by animals.)… Clare accepts ragwort as one of the adornments of the summer landscape, even by the side of the ‘waggonways’ used by horses. \the absence from the poem of any reference to local hostility (often mentioned in connection with other species) suggests there was some kind of rapprochement with the plant. It was a weed to be respected, not demonised.)” (p. 123)

Another strong theme now in the news is the overall massive loss of diversity over past centuries, but particularly last decades – highlighted today by news of how “the wholesale ripping up of hedgerows, draining of wetlands and ploughing over of meadows” has led to the loss of 50% of Europe’s farmland birds, and about the farming time-machine needed to try to reintroduce the short-haired bumblebee into Britain.

Mabey travels with a young Finn, Pehr Kalm, who in 1748 visited the farm of the celebrated British improver William Ellis. It was March, before plants had flowered, so the young visitor sorted through dried hay to establish what mix of species grew in the rich pastures. (The same method, Mabey notes, is still used by ecologists today.) There were 29 species, only nine of them grasses, “including several that would be regarded as grassland weeds today – hoary plantain, daisy, yarrow, knapweed, hawkweed” and, predominately what we now see as a lawn weed, bird’s-foot trefoil… which Ellis “praised beyond compare and set before all other grass species in his Modern Husbandman … to be in the highest perfection the most proper hay for feeding saddle-horses, deer, sheep and rabbits, as well as cattle”. (p.129) Mabey notes we now know that many of these despised “weeds” have higher nutritional value than the grasses they are killed with herbicide to make space for.

He also notes how many of the plants we now seek to destroy with noxious chemicals were put to good use – gorse, as a fuel plant, especially for bread ovens, and bracken, used to fuel brick and bread baking, and also as a litter for animals in the farmyard that then became an excellent manure for wheat, pea and corn crops. Mabey explains how on a common near his home, a radical local landowner in 1866 led a campaign of direct action against the enclosure of the common the Finn was describing. “On the day the fences were torn down, the local people flocked up to Berkhamsted Common and picked token sprigs of gorse to celebrate that the place was theirs again. Until the commons were finally sold off in the 1920s, the locals adhered to courteous and frugal codes to ensure the survival of their weed resource. There was a close-season for the gorse and bracken, between 1 June and 1 September. On 31 August the commoners would listen for the chimes of the parish church at midnight, and go up to stake out their claims, like gold prospectors.” (p. 130)

Then there’s the “hot” question of how much we can continue to engage in large-scale monoculture, maybe with genetically modified crops to deal with the multiple problems, an issue that’s being played out in Britain today in a dispute over GM wheat. There’s good cause to be worried about the risks of this controversial trial, but even more cause to be concerned about an attempt to use a simplistic solution to allow the continuation of our destructive broad-scale farming systems. Nature’s a lot smarter and faster than we are, as Mabey illustrates with the example of the rice bred for South-East Asian conditions too “out-smart” weed grasses. “In the rice paddies… there are weed grasses so similar to cultivated rice that farmers are unable to distinguish them before the wild grasses bloom. Plant breeders thought they might be able to trick the weed into showing itself by developing a variety of rice with a purple tinge. Within a matter of years the weed grass had turned purple too. The slight pigment that had enable plant breeders to develop the coloured rice also occurs occasionally in the weed. With each successive harvets it was this strain that … passed into next year’s seed store.” (p. 45)
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Books Politics

Paul Mason’s colourful, thoughtful History 1.3 version of this turbulent, unfinished period

February 5, 2012 – 12:22 am

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

BBC journalist Paul Mason in a blog post early in 2011 titled Twenty reasons why it is kicking off everywhere, which almost instantly filled my Twitter feed and discussion on multiple email lists. You might have called it the History 1.0 version of explaining the Arab spring, Occupy, the indignados of Europe – everything important from 2011. He has just returned to the subject, with Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. You might call it version 1.3 – a few initial kinks ironed out, a little more perspective obtained, a few more experiences added.

Wisely, he very explicitly says this is journalism, not history, and he disavows any claim to be trying to provide a unifying theory of events, or to be the movements’ guru.

Nonetheless, he does provide a useful perspective for thinking about the current state of world protest – in simple terms, what is the best historical parallel, and what lessons might be drawn from it? He looks at 1848, which followed an economic crisis, the politics starting in Paris where the Parisian workers overthrew the monarchy (“a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat”) and the subsequent wave of revolutions in Austria, Hungary, Poland and states in what is now Germany, with monarchies forced into constitutional form elsewhere.

His general conclusion about what then went wrong then? “Once the workers began to fight for social justice, the businessmen and radical journalists show had led the fight for democracy turned against them, rebuilding the old, dictatorial forms of repression to put them down. conversely, where the working class was weak or non-existent, the radical middle classes would die on the barricades, often committed to a left wing programme themselves.” (p171) He doesn’t explore how that translates into modern times, but the possibilities are obvious.

Other options he proposes are 1917, but these were events led by “hardened revolutionary socialists” and involving a “large industrial working class”; 1968, but that was more “surge of protests with students in the lead, workers and the urban poor taking it to the verge of insurrection only in France, Czechoslovakia and America’s ghettos,” and 1989′ but that occurred, with the exception of Romania, by “demonstrations, passive resistances and a large amount of diplomacy”. (p171)

Soberly, he concludes 1848 is the best parallel, events which ended of course in widespread war and the general triumph of reaction.

If he does provide one simple philosophical framework for understanding today – and I think it is a pretty good one to be working with – it is that 2011 is “a revolt against Hayek and the principles of greed and selfishness that he espoused”. (p207) (his explanation of Hayek runs “he said that social justice was unachievable and that the inequality and misery produced by capitalism we both moral and logical”.
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Books Politics

The ‘precariat’ – a useful idea, stretched beyond its limits

January 16, 2012 – 12:41 am

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

I finished Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class thinking that the parts were rather more than the whole. There’s lots of fascinating statistics, facts and anecdotes, and the idea of the precariat – while already well established in general form in debates about casualisation and commodification of workers – is a useful one, but the author’s determination to fit without a particular political framework, to declare, with a specific set of technical meanings, that this is a new class, weakened rather than strengthened his arguments.

The definition of this class slips and slides all over the place. At one point Standing even seems to suggest that it includes “gays and lesbians [who] feel insecure in a society geared to heterosexual mores and standard nuclear families”. (p. 63) It includes the obvious migrant workers in low pay jobs in meat processing and care, but also, it seems, a 24-year-old social worker on £28K (reported in the Observer) who’s denied the chance to progress in her career, but has to wait for a post to become available. (p. 20). As the use of a newspaper case study as a key part of the argument in that case shows, it also has the feel of a very 21st-century cut and paste job, with inadequate digestion of the mass of material amassed. Nonetheless, I’d still call it as a well-worth-reading.

The accumulation of the statistics about the decline of the place of the working person is impressive, and depressing. The slide of the Nineties is obvious in US figures – the number of firms offering healthcare benefits fell from 69% in 2000 to 60% in 2009. But the decline had gone on longer – US employers paid 89% of retirement benefits contributions in 1980, 52% by 2006. (p. 42)

Quoting the National Strategic Skills Audit of 2010, England’s fastest growing jobs over the previous decade “included a few modern professions and crafts – conservation officers, town planners, psychologists and hairdressers – but mainly consisted of semi-professional jobs, such as paramedics, legal associates and teachers’ assistants.” (p. 40) Standing notes how entitlement to benefits is dependent on regular participation in the labour market, or a “breadwinner” in the household. Market demands had to be met to obtain a social income. (p. 41)

And there’s determination to force those on benefits into unattractive, unrewarding, hopelessly paid jobs. “Lawrence Mead, an American libertarian invited by Downing Street to advise the British government immediately after it was elected in 2010. His view of claimants is that ‘government must persuade them to blame themselves.” (p. 143)

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