Uncategorized

Towards a world without Whips, not a change of hands.

When the effects and impact of structural, institutionally embedded bias and discrimination, whether rooted in physical characteristics such as skin colour or sexuality, or more social constructs like ethnicity or religion, are demonstrated clearly to someone; when they see the impact that intrinsic bias has on the potential, lives and ultimately on happiness and wellbeing of a group, then people react in one of four distinct ways.

Consider a visceral example; a human being, enslaved, being beaten with a whip. Given the relative numbers involved, that’s most likely to be a black person of African origin, being whipped by a white person of European origin.

Faced with this unambiguous display of racist violence, the four reactions can be examined.

1) The first group denies that the problem exists, or plead exceptions – it happened long ago, it wasn’t their group that was responsible and so on; or even a bare denial of the evidence. In the context of the whipped, abused person, they will simply make excuses; it wasn’t that bad, these are isolated reports, people were just tougher then, it happened to everyone… and so on.

2) The second group acknowledges the bias and subsequent abuse, but insists that it is not an issue; not a problem to be resolved, rather, this is the natural order of things. Importantly, it is not only members of the dominant group in any particular frame of reference who feel this way; during the campaigns for women’s suffrage, there were a large number of female anti-suffragettes, who saw nothing wrong with the position they found themselves in. The group holding the whip constructs a paternalistic mythos about themselves – the “white burden”, the need to correct the ‘flaws’ of the ‘weaker’ group, ‘doing it for their own good’, whilst members of the subjugated group which adhere to this view construct justifications of their own; if they were ‘better’ or ‘behaved’ then beatings would not happen. If they only demonstrated their worth, then the bias would not be show against them.

3) A third group sees the injustice and seeks to end it. They wish to remove the bias, end the discrimination and provide a level platform for all. They seek to see a world without whips; no beatings, for any group. Their desire is to see the notion of distinct groups with perceived ‘worth’ removed. Importantly, adherents of this view resist the implementation of new forms of bias and discrimination, no matter how well intentioned. It is an uncomfortable fact that, in order for abuse, discrimination and bias to end, members of the dominant group in each context must be persuaded to hold this viewpoint, and act to surrender the privilege and advantage which this offers them personally, for the greater good. For women’s suffrage to become law, it required the dominant male legislators to pursue this path. For the slavery of black people to be ended required white ‘masters’ to put down the whip.

4) The Fourth and final group is composed solely of those members of the subjugated group in each frame of reference (sexuality, colour, ethnicity, class and so on). They see the injustice of the situation, but they perceive it differently; for them, the injustice is not that there is abuse, but rather that there is abuse of the group that they identify with. The problem with the beating is not the violence, not the suffering it causes – the issue that they see is that they are not the ones holding the whip. The world that they wish to see is not one without whips, not one of freedom from bias and discrimination; they simply want to see the roles reversed, and be in the positions of power.

The last group is sadly where we find a worrying portion of current writers about feminism and race issues; radical feminists who have no issue at all with bias and discrimination on the basis of gender, as long as it takes the form of a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy.

These people are as much the enemies of progress and personal freedom as the white supremacists and mysoginists who wish to see the current state of affairs continue for their own benefit.

 

Independence, Politics

An “Incredible” future for the UK? Hardly.

A commenter suggested that the UK will have an “incredible” future outside of the EU.

The only way to come to this conclusion is to completely ignore the track record of UK governments in making demonstrably wrong decisions on every key technological shift that has happened in the last sixty years.

The UK remains the only nation on the planet to successfully launch to orbit, then give it up, deciding that space research was “too expensive”.

Post WWII, we bravely chopped early computers into scrap, rather than understand (as the Americans did) how these machines would change the world.

The UK stopped a national rollout of optical fibre in the 80s, instead pushing small clusters of cable TV owned by private operators – that have not extended their services by one metre in nearly twenty years.

The UK has gutted solar and renewables, as those industries start to become a major force worldwide.

The UK abandoned carbon capture projects, and have given up on the chance to lead a new industry as it emerges.

The UK is spending billions on building an unimaginative, yet still ludicrously expensive, GenIII Nuclear plant at Hinkley, yet has allowed our national skill base in the nuclear industry to atrophy to almost nothing, through stopping all research into Fast reactors, or GenIV technologies.

The UK views software and the billion dollar games industry as some little plaything, whilst lavishing largesse on a financial services industry that almost dragged the economy down with it…

This succession of idiots has made poor calls and squandered unspeakable amounts of wealth for the nation, whilst pouring endless money into infrastructure in docklands to support an industry that is completely portable; and which has already started to move to Frankfurt and other centres…

Anyone who thinks that this Etonian Oxbridge freak show will lead the UK to an “incredible” future needs to take off the blinkers.

The UK is being led to ruin, and Scotland’s best, only hope is to cut the cord.

Politics

Getting Tough.

“We have to get tough with ourselves as a movement”

…or, at least, so says Common space.

I have a simple question – who is “we” in this context? because if “we” is all of us across the Yes movement, then CommonSpace have no position to be calling down the things you don’t like.

If “we” IS common space, then they have a greatly inflated sense of their own influence and importance, I fear.

I don’t think anti-BBC billboards are a great idea. I don’t see them achieving much.

Some people say the same thing about the lampost signs and what-not that we use at election times, but I help put those out every time.. and the folks that don’t think they do much still help put them up. We get along.

I’d be much more blunt if the proponents of telephone banks (which I personally despise, and think do more harm than good), starting yelling down me for thinking visual signage matters.

What runs deep through this article is the shift of focus that tears campaigns apart – I have seen it in campaigning against creationists in schools, and I saw it in the sorry demise of RIC… when those on the left (and it’s always the left, for some reason) don’t win a glorious victory right off the bat, they don’t renew the fight by focusing on the other side… they fall into deep introspection, and try to find the reason we failed – and sure as morning follows night, the reason for the failure is always those campaigners on our side who “put moderate people off”. and what puts them off?

why, it’s the things that we, personally, didn’t like.

funny, that.

Politics

The Long Road…

Back in 2012, I wrote to my MP – I was living in Airdrie at the time, so that was Pamela Nash, the Labour party careerist. Aside from working as the assistant/advisor to the previous incumbents, she had no real experience.

Still, I had contacted her a couple of times, with reasonable results – until I wrote to her about ACTA. I heard nothing, so after a period, I called her out on Twitter about not responding.

She DM’ed me, asking me to e-mail her the details of my letter.

I sent this;

Hi Pamela,

I wrote to you with a quite narrow problem about ACTA (and the fact that it seems to be slipping into the UK legislative arena without any scrutiny) – although more recent events at the Home Office have eclipsed things a little.

Let me explain – I have been writing to parliament for many years, usually on the same subject: civil liberties. It’s an absolute bright line for me, and something that I feel is the mark of a civilised and free country. For most of my life, I was a labour supporter – I attended Strathclyde University along with Jim Murphy and grew up under Thatcher.

I stopped supporting Labour when labour started implementing one draconian policy after another. I wrote to Helen Liddell expressing my horror about The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (RIPA), and how it could be abused. I worked in the NHS (blood transfusion service at law hospital) and saw a lot of abuse of medical records first hand (people looking up celebrities or family members).

In the end, RIPA has been used exactly as I feared it would – by councils spying on people letting their dogs crap in gardens, or to see if people are in the right catchment area for schools.

Labour mishandled the DNA database in England and Wales, keeping the DNA of innocent people forever (which I wrote to John Reid about), and implemented the Section 44 powers which have been used to terrorise people for taking photos of famous buildings.

I’m a socialist at heart, but I can’t trust Labour. The tendency to want to control, snoop and manipulate seems to just be too strong. For what it’s worth, one of my reasons for supporting the SNP and independence is that I want to see us break way from the mindset of spying and centralised control that exists in Whitehall. Holyrood has so far handled things like Privacy and DNA retention in a more liberal and free minded way.

Anyways – the letter.

I then included my original letter. You might think it was nasty or aggressive, or party political… you can judge;

Dear Pamela,

You are on the Science and Tech committee, so I assume you know about ACTA? If not, I would ask you to have a quick look here:

http://www.edri.org/ACTA_Week

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/issues/acta

ACTA was negotiated in secret between the US, EU and other interested parties – the EU Rapporteur was so disgusted by the lack of democratic process that he resigned rather than sign this: but the UK has blithely signed it (but not enacted it in UK law – yet).

We are coming out the back of just how bad it is to have overpowering media influence on the political arena with Levenson and the like, but ACTA is ten times worse – this will quite literally hand the investigative powers of SOCA and the intelligence services to media interests and copyright owners to be used for something as frivolous as policing copyright.

We will mandate the interception of everyone’s emails, web traffic and the like, for the sake of protecting copyright. We will be outlawing the encryption technologies that have allowed the Arab spring to happen, and building an interception and surveillance apparatus that would make even the most hardened “nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide” brigade raise an eyebrow.

Throw in the Home Office’s latest attempts to carry out the Intercept Modernisation programme and snoop on all our internet traffic for “serious crime” reasons (the exact same reasons for RIPA, which has been abused enormously) and this is looking pretty bleak.

If you can have a look at this, and see if it’s something you can get behind, I would very much appreciate it.

And for what it’s worth – thanks for the DM on Twitter. Clearly, there’s an election on, so there can be a bit of showboating and the like, but I’m a fair minded person, and I’ll acknowledge that you contacted me directly to get this sorted.

Ian.

How did my MP respond? She blocked me on Twitter, and didn’t ever reply to me again, either by e-mail or letter.

 

 

Humanism, Independence, Politics

All Women Shortlists

It’s over a year since my last blog post, but I have been jarred from my slumber once more. A lot has changed in the intervening period – the Independence Referendum has been fought, and lost… and then it has started to look like we didn’t lose after all.

The various vibrant and energised  groups which emerged during the referendum, turning it from a one party platform into a real pan-Scottish movement, have gone on to form a part of the national consciousness – Radical Indy, Women for Independence, Business for Scotland – all contributed in their own way during the campaign, and each has recognised that the job is not done, and refused to go back into the shadows.

The SNP has exploded in size – from an already-larger-than-labour 25,000 to the heady heights of 100,000 members; bringing an incredible level of engagement, and something that the old guard of the party has struggled to accommodate – these new members have not turned up with a desire to see things stay as they are. They want change, and invariably, they want it right now.

As the party has explored what that change looks like, voices have called for a fundamental change to how the party chooses it’s candidates, and the subject of All Women Shortlists has come to the fore… and is causing the same internal friction for the SNP that it has previously caused for Labour.

There is undeniably a problem – there are far too few female candidates, and it is clearly not a problem of talent; two of the most high profile and energised campaigns in the country are Natalie McGarry’s effort to unseat Margaret Curran, and Michelle Thomson’s push to replace Mike Crockart in Edinburgh West.

The talent is there, but something is preventing it from being fully utilised.

Nicola Sturgeon has taken swift action in the cabinet – implementing gender balance for the first time in a UK legislature. This has to be applauded – in the same way that the progress of Women on Boards towards a 40-40-20 model is driving progressive, positive change in the management of FTSE traded companies.

So, what is the problem with All Women Shortlists? why not recognise this as a useful mechanism to implement a large change of direction, rapidly? to right a historical wrong, and ensure that our political representation more closely matches the 52% of the population that Women represent?

I was prompted to blog again by an article by Kezia Kinder – written in response to what she perceives as a defence of meritocracy; the assertion by some that All Women Shortlists will see an influx to parliament of poor candidates, chosen simply on the basis of gender.

Kezia makes some valid points.

In particular, she highlights the despicable questioning of women candidates about how they will cope with balancing the duties of being an MP with care for children – in contrast, male candidates are never asked how they will balance their duties with the role of fatherhood.

Cosmonaut Yelena Serova, preparing for the greatest achivement of her life, having been selected as one of the tiny handful of people qualified and capable of flying into space was asked demeaning questions about how she would cope with hair and make-up – whilst her male colleagues were asked about the technical aspects of the mission.

There often appears to be no triumph available to women that cannot be cheapened by everyday, casual and ingrained sexism, but falling into a worldview rich with the tropes of patriarchy and women’s oppression can mean that everything is then seen through this lens of a struggle between men and women, ever in opposition and against each other, when in truth, a great many men and women seek to work together to improve the lot of all.

Kezia’s article gives the impression of a battle hardened veteran who has come to see everything in terms of the conflict, and does not recognise how entrenched their position has become.

She asks the question “When was the last time anyone challenged the qualifications of a male parliamentarian?” but clearly, the qualifications of male parliamentarians are challenged all the time – and the more senior a position they hold, the greater that challenge becomes;  take as an example the recent comparisons between Greece’s highly qualified and capable Yanis Varoufakis and the UK’s rather less qualified and significantly less capable Osborne. Osborne’s education, previous employment, family background – all are fair game, and rightly so. When you aspire to the highest offices in the country, you will be subjected to an intense level of partisan and often unpleasant scrutiny.

However, the most compelling objection to All Women Shortlists is not, in fact, the meritocracy argument which Kezia confronts in her article – rather it is the very nature of how these lists would operate.

When people are subjected to selection and rejection on the basis of gender or sexuality, it is not a group that is oppressed; it is an individual.

In the eyes of the racist, an individual person is reduced to nothing more than their skin colour or ethnic background. In the eyes of the misogynist, the individual person with hopes, dreams, capabilities and personality is reduced to simply their gender.

When someone is abused for the colour of their skin, they ask “why me? why does this person hate me?” it’s personal, directed, felt as an assault on them.

The abuser does not see a person – they see the individual only as a representative of the group they hate.

This is, at heart, the problem with all forms of “positive” discrimination, which includes all women shortlists. It is not merely a conceptual thing, a policy that operates in a vacuum. in order to provide positive benefit to one group, it is necessary to reject the others.

If you happen to be the person, the individual human being, who falls on the wrong side of a policy, then it does not matter whether it is a well intentioned policy such as all women shortlists, or an odious, backwards policy such as men only golf clubs.

At the point of implementation, the policy takes a fully formed person, reduces them to a gender label, and excludes them because of it.

The sad thing is that there is no need for this policy Women on Boards has sought to increase the representation of women on the boards of major corporations from a truly abysmal 11% in 2011 to an initial target of 25%.

They have rejected the notion that “it just takes time” and instead insisted on real, meaningful change – the 25% target will be met this year, and the focus of the campaign has now moved to proper equality; but rather than adopting a slavish 50:50 model, where the complaints of meritocracy and simply making up the numbers would come into play, they are promoting the 40:40:20 Model – 40% of the board should be constituted from women, 40% from men, but the remaining 20% are met from whichever candidate makes most sense.

It is not difficult to see how this model, that has proven so successful in the boards of major companies worldwide, could be adopted within a parliamentary party context; insisting that each constituency puts up 5 candidates, that 2 should be men, 2 should be women, and the last can be either would provide gender balance, whilst not excluding anyone purely on the basis of gender.

Gender quotas which strive to remain fair to the individual, which continue to recognise that the very best person for the job may be a woman, but could also be a man, will enrich our national politics.

Lists which discriminate against someone, which turn them into merely a gender label – these should have no place in our public life.