2. Laban Tall thinks Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a self-centred hysteric.

3. Real Street is annoyed at the bastardisation of the word ‘equality’.

4. John Ward cannot believe the degree of self-interest shown by the trade unions.

5. The Last Ditch discusses the political exploitation of the Jon Venables case.

- a spokesman from the Communication Workers Union, after it was announced that Royal Mail staff will receive a 6.9% pay rise over three years and will work shorter hours – down from 40 to 39 hours a week.  In addition, Royal Mail has agreed to keep 75% of the workforce as full-time rather than part-time staff, and full-time workers will get extra payments worth up to £1,400 when all the agreed changes to working practices have been made. (full story HERE)

I hope you enjoyed your International Women’s Day.  Now that the likes of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman have been put back in their box, temporarily at least, following their crass remarks yesterday, I thought it was only fair to give your manifesto for “21st-century feminism” a bit of blog airtime.  Mind you, as soon as I read that it aimed to ”begin to organise for real equality”, I knew I was in for a fun ride.  Here is your manifesto in full, along with my *ahem* observations:

• Globalisation and neo liberalism have had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women. Capitalism itself has created new forms and manifestations of women’s oppression. – globalisation has indeed had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women.  Better wages, better healthcare, better education systems, better life expectancy, better access to medicine… need I go on?
• Women’s oppression is a product of class society which has existed for thousands of years. It was only with the development of capitalism that large numbers of women developed a consciousness of their position and the ability to do something about it. – Wait a minute, I thought you just said that capitalism was the problem, not the solution?! And what evidence do you have about women’s “oppression” being a direct result of class?  I would say that religion could be just as relevant, as could a few biological inconveniences, like having children, which has inevitably had a huge impact on human civilisation throughout the ages.
• Women have been drawn into the workforce in millions but working in factories, offices and shops has not led to an improvement in women’s lives far less to liberation. Women suffer exploitation at work as well as still shouldering the double burden of family and childcare as well as paid work. – Not led to an improvement in women’s lives?!  Tell me, have you spent anytime in a Third World or developing nation recently?  How unbelievably stupid of you to suggest that women going into the workforce has been a bad thing, and since when were women confined to “factories, offices and shops”?  What century are you living in?  I’m fairly confident you’ll also find women in schools, hospitals and goodness knows how many other places.  Where is your evidence of exploitation at work?  Since when did men not contribute to childcare costs and bringing up their family? 
• Women’s traditional role as wives and mothers has not disappeared but has been reinvented to fit in with the needs of exploitation. They are now expected to juggle all aspects of their lives and are blamed as individuals for any failings in family or work life. – What the hell does “the needs of exploitation” mean?  Everyone has to juggle different parts of their lives, but I’m sorry to say that men can’t (yet) have children so there are some things that men can’t help with.  To suggest that women are blamed for problems in the family or at work is unbelievably warped.
• The talk of glass ceilings and unfairly low bonuses for women bankers miss the point about liberation, which is that liberation has to be for all working women and not just a tiny number of privileged women. – I never said women got paid unfairly low bonuses.  I think you’ll find that most bonuses are paid on the basis of performance, so maybe men justified their higher bonuses by performing better?  Is that really so far beyond the realms of possibility?
• Although all women suffer oppression and face discrimination, their life experiences are radically different. Women are not united as a sex but are divided on the basis of class. Middle and upper class women share in the profits from the exploitative system in which we live and use this benefit to alleviate their own oppression. Working class women are usually the people who cook, clean and provide personal services for these women, receiving low wages and often neglecting their own families to do so. – Since when is cooking, cleaning and providing services restricted to working class women?  I think you’ll find that men perform these tasks in huge numbers, certainly in London.  Your suggestion that middle and upper class women share in the profits of exploitation is just bizarre, as it’s more than likely that some of these women have successfully juggled bringing up a family and having a job, which is precisely what you were suggesting led to exploitation of the women in question.  This is just confused nonsense.  Presumably using profits to “alleviate their own oppression” can be translated as ‘women spending the money that they have earned’?
• Women are more than ever regarded as objects defined by their sexuality. The commercialisation of sexuality with its lad and ladette culture, its pole dancing clubs and its post-modern Miss World contests keeps women being judged as sex objects as if nothing has changed since the 1950s. – yes, because women would never ever ever objectify men or stare at them in magazines or go and watch a show where men take their clothes off….
• This objectification, alongside women’s role as supposedly the property of men, leads to domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse. This abuse is under recognised and under reported. It was only in the 1960s and 70s that these issues began to be viewed as political. – I think you’ll find that domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse have existed since the dawn of mankind.  Where is your evidence that there is a causal link between objectification and these acts?  If you want to talk about under recognised and under reported abuse, shouldn’t you be discussing domestic violence against men as well?
• To control their own lives, women must control their own bodies and sexuality. – women already do have control, it’s just that some women choose to flaunt their bodies on a Saturday night down the local high street rather than stand up for your faltering cause.
• Capitalist ideology prioritises the family and the subordinate role of women and children within it, while at the same time forcing individual members of the family to sacrifice ‘family life’ because of the pressures of work and migration. – ah yes, the classic ‘women are forced to stay at home and look after the children’ argument.  With all due respect, every survey that I have seen in the last few years shows beyond any doubt that many women want to stay at home rather than return to work after having children.  Capitalism has nothing to do with it. 
• The priorities of the profit system and the existence of the privatised family means that women’s oppression is structured into capitalism. Any genuine liberation has to be connected to a wider movement for human emancipation and for working people to control the wealth that they produce. That’s why women and men have to fight for liberation. Socialism and women’s liberation are inextricably connected. – I love that, a “privatised family”.  You mean a family who don’t want you telling them how to live their lives, right?  Working people controlling the wealth they produce also has hints of Marxism about it, which is not exactly encouraging.
• We will not win without a fight. Every great social movement raises the question of women. In the 19th century the movement for women’s emancipation took its name from the movement to abolish slavery. In the 20th century women’s liberation took its name from the movements against colonialism around the world. 21st century women’s liberation has to fight to change the world and to end the class society which created oppression and exploitation in the first place. – *roll eyes* so even though capitalism and freedom has presented women with more opportunities than ever before in the history of women’s rights, you want to destroy it?  Oppression and exploitation are such wonderfully loaded words, as if women are forced into work, forced into having children, forced into sacrificing everything for men, forced into jobs they don’t want etc etc.  Maybe you come and chat to the women that I work with and tell them that they are exploited?

It is people like you who do far more harm to women’s rights than men ever could.  Your obsession with grossly unfair stereotypes, your failure to provide any concrete evidence to support your assertions (otherwise known as ‘Harmanism’), your appalling vindictive view of men, your disgraceful attempts to ‘play the victim’ at every opportunity and your shocking lack of understanding of freedom and liberty all combines into this confused, naive and generally dreadful manifesto.  The sad truth is that, as always, you have taken an issue that does need discussing and morphed it into a man-hating freedom-hating spiel that totally undermines your own credibility and ultimately undermines the very cause that you are fighting for.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

2. The Appalling Strangeness discusses (the lack of) neutrality at the Guardian.

3. Quiet Man finds that some people just cannot let go of the past.

4. Moments of Clarity thinks he has a rare example of a Government minister being correct.

5. Adam Collyer finds Labour in disarray over education spending cuts.

- guidance on Harriet Harman’s new Equality Bill, explaining why vegans and teetotallers amongst others are to be given the same protection against discrimination as religious groups.  The Bill makes it a legal requirement for public authorities, including schools, to consider the impact of all their policies on minority groups, but these groups include Scientologists and pacifists as well as vegans, teetotallers and many others.  The guidance has already caused controversy after warning that schools which force girls to wear skirts may be breaking the law because the policy apparently discriminates against transsexuals by breaching the rights of girls who feel compelled to live as boys.  Religious leaders have also condemned Harman’s equality laws for sideling religion to promote a false idea of ‘tolerance’.  (full story HERE)

*yawn*

Yes, it’s still going.  Last night, Mandelson said that David Cameron’s failure to confront his billionaire deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft over his tax status exposes the “fundamental weakness” of the Conservative leader and undermines his claim to be a moderniser.  In an interview with the Guardian, he said that Ashcroft had Cameron “by the balls”, the affair showed Cameron was “too weak to pick a fight with his own party” and the Tories were “fundamentally unchanged”.

Ok, let’s run through that attack again but this time remove any reference to a particular party:

‘The leader of a party has failed to confront their wealthy donors, which exposes the “fundamental weakness” of the party leader and undermines their claim to be a moderniser.  Critics claim that the wealthy donors have the leader “by the balls”, the incident showed that the leader was “too weak to pick a fight with his own party” and that the party remains “fundamentally unchanged”.’

Pray, Mandelson, tell us lesser beings, how exactly did your old mate Tony manage the finances when he was in charge?  Hmmm?  From what I remember, he jumped into bed with any rich donor he could find and handed out peerages for fun when someone passed him a sizeable cheque.  Blair never picked a fight with his own party because he always knew he would lose – reforming public sector pensions and reforming public services being classic examples.  The Left of the Labour Party always hated his love of big business and rich donors, but the party itself never really changed its spots and has ended up back in bed with the unions now that most of the wealthy donors have fled.  The Labour Party has never truly modernised, Tony just put on a different mask for a little while, but it’s all gone full circle now.  Add to that Harriet Harman’s epic fail on TV yesterday when she said did not know whether Labour donors Lord Paul, Sir Ronald Cohen and William Bollinger were non-doms, and Labour have themselves one fine attempt at deception.  Pickles said: “For a week, she and other cabinet ministers have been bleating about accepting donations from them. Yet when confronted with Labour’s £10m -plus of non dom donations, she could only obfuscate. When will she learn that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?”

Labour’s desperation to continue flogging the non-dom horse signifies two things: first, their desperation to make the public think that the Conservatives are less than savoury; and second, their desperation not to talk about their own policies because they don’t have any.  Even if the public have given up on this story (which I’m fairly sure they have), Labour need to keep it going as long as possible to fill the gaping policy void that their failure over the last 13 years has left behind.  Make no mistake – this non-dom flogging is about as deliberate and calculated as you can get.

- Tory peer Norman Tebbit on the new breed of Conservative parliamentary candidates

2. Laban Tall thinks Labour are finally giving up on Britishness and Englishness.

3. Tim Worstall finds something that probably won’t be appearing in the Guardian.

4. Prodicus reminds us that Gordon Brown’s public debt is our debt.

5. Counting Cats says Labour are doing Osama Bin Laden a huge favour.

- David Cameron, speaking at the Welsh Conservatives’ annual conference