Why voting in the EU election is a feminist issue

Yes, in French, for added exotic allure..

I have finally fulfilled a lifelong ambition (well, okay, a six month long ambition) to get something published in the Feminist Times, the would-be Spare Rib de nous jours.  

My piece is about voting in the EU election being a feminist issue. A bit  like fat, if you like, but without the comfort-eating of delicious cakes.

You can read the whole piece in full here but this is the gist of my argument:

Don’t let our apathetic media, and the silence of our timid mainstream politicians, fool you into thinking the EU Election on May 22 does not matter. 

Don't let yourself be hypnotised into thinking that a UKIP triumph is inevitable: the UK is not Crimea; your vote counts (if you bother to cast it) and nothing at all is inevitable till the votes have been counted.

And please don't be seduced by the narrative that a UKIP triumph would actually be a desirable outcome, to shake things up or send some sort of message to complacent Westminster elites. 

A decisive UKIP win would do nothing to help the UK lead on reforms in Europe but would spell disaster for the cause of gender equality at UK and EU level.

The European Union has been promoting equality between men and women since its inception, enshrining the goal of equal pay for men and women in the 1957 Treaty of Rome. A Directive on Equal Pay was finally passed in 1975 to be followed by dozens of other pieces of EU legislation - against discrimination at work or in accessing services, combating violence, sexual harassment and people trafficking, establishing maternity rights and parental leave.

The EU funds national campaigns against gender-based violence and in the last 7 years has spent some €3.2 bn in Structural Funds to provide childcare and promote women’s participation in the labour market in Europe’s most economically depressed areas. The EU further promotes gender equality all over the wold with its humanitarian actions and through its trade agreements.

Now contrast this with UKIP’s view of women and their programme.

Their attitude towards women is often described as reminiscent of the 1950s, although my conservative grandfather would have been horrified by their language and sentiments.  Women are sluts, who should be seen (cleaning) and not heard; mothers are worthless to employers. 

And these are not just retired colonels, old fashioned fogeys – the Twitter trolls who tried to silence Women Against UKIP all last week are the party’s tech-savvy young guns, UKIP’s bullish, bullying future.

But worse than that their attitudes is their programme, insofar as they can articulate one. Make no mistake: the biggest advantage Nigel Farage sees in the UK withdrawing from Europe is that it would be able to return to the 1950s not just culturally but also in the law: no maternity leave or labour protection of any kind for the most vulnerable workers, who are often women; a bonfire of health and safety and anti-harassment legislations. This might resonate with chain-smoking pub landlords, (freedom of smoking is championed, by the way, freedom of movement less so), but it sure scares the hell out of me.

Last week we finally saw UKIP’s leader drop the genial ‘chap down the pub’ act when being questioned about his use of EU expenses. Chummy Nigel turned into Snarling Nigel, railing against the media that so far has idolised him for having the cheek of asking him to account for his actions, like any other politician.

Farage’s confusion about EU money not being, somehow, taxpayers’ money tells a bigger story about what you get when you vote for a UKIP candidate to represent you in Europe. Their goal is to destroy Europe not reform it or make it work in Britain’s favour.

In practice this means that after May 22, unless we feminists use our vote, even more UKIP MEPs will be flocking to the European Parliament to get their nose in every possible money trough, whilst disrupting sessions with their cheap stunts and insulting speeches, clogging committees, (including the Gender Equality Committee where so much of the above legislation is dealt with), not voting, not amending, not doing anything at all, and all at our expense, for the next five years.

To exercise your right to vote you need to be on the Electoral Register. The deadline to register to vote in the 22 May European and local elections is May 6. You can do so here.

The stuff of nightmares

So, I'm taking part in a sitting of the Geneva Convention (?), which is in session in a hall inside a shopping mall (??). 

I'm with my team from the pro-EU org I now work for, and our job is to debate persuasively against UKIP's Nigel Farage, who is sitting not far away with his team. We have several papers with killer arguments to present, although there is some confusion as to which will be debated in the hall (???).

All along the horse-shoe table at which we delegates sit there are little dishes of nibbles: nuts, olives and so on. I'm nervous so, true to type, I'm absent-mindedly stuffing my face. At one point Nigel Farage leans over and asks me to pass him some food. Disaster! I've hoovered everything within reach! Farage looks upset and like he's about to make a huge fuss. 

I scramble to my feet and offer to go and get something for him but there are no more nibbles anywhere I search in the hall. Soon I'm scouring the rest of the shopping mall for a bag of cheese puffs, pork scratchings, anything, like a woman possessed , while my colleagues ping me increasingly frantically on the mobile to say that our paper is up for discussion next, and where am I, and what are they to do? 

I return to the Convention Hall empty-handed to find out that we have missed the chance to present our paper and the UKIP team, which we were there to expose, have turned me into the story. 

So to recap: I've disgraced myself, let down my team and become the focus of attention at the Geneva Convention (the Geneva Convention, people!) for nibbling on Nigel Farage's nuts.

And then I wake up. 

It's a gloriously sunny morning (!) of the Easter bank holiday week-end (!!) and Mild mannered Intellectual Husband is snoring gently by my side (!!!). I have not screwed up and I am not disgraced. 

But I am giving up bar snacks forever, just in case.

My new fuorescent yellow running shoes

My new fluerescent yellow running shoes have been startling a few squirrels in the park, let me tell you. Pigeons have scattered in alarm. Old ladies have been seen clutching their frail husbands' arm a little tighter, eyes wide open in alarm. Toddlers have stopped mid-wail, snot and saliva still dripping from their beetroot-red faces, and stared in utter fascination.

I'm a little embarassed by all the attention, to say the least. As I came home from my first run in them this afternoon I was so flustered I assumed the presence of two fire engines and an ambulance in the middle of my square was somewhat connected with the shoes. It was quite a relief, in the circumstances, to be told about the ammonia leak at n28. 

You see, I'm not the sort of runner who delights in the feel of the wind in her hair, while she zips past the rest of humanity, her high-tech brightly coloured gear ablaze against the pale blur of the world. I'm the other kind, the fat and middle aged kind, forever re-building her strenght, breath and resistence after yet another epidode of back pain or knee trouble, hungover and lassitude pemitting. The weight I was hoping to lose I now just lug around, philosophically. I take the weight for a run as it were - and it enjoys it, mind - but it leaves me breathless, sore and half dead.The last thing I need is people, and small woodland creatures, pointing and staring.

My ideal running clothes would be black, sleek, spandexed and unassuming. The same goes for the shoes. The problem is, I am forever unwilling to spend money on sleek black running gear until I lose the weight, and the shoes, well, they do not come in black, ever.  Today in the shop my only choice (among the models that would accommodate my bulky orthotics insoles) were a pair featuring the colour and design of something Barbie might have vomited after an amphetamine overdose, and the flurescent pair I ended up buying.

Running shoes for non-clowning adults belong to the ever expanding category of goods for which, pace the rules of capitalism 101, a gap in the market persists despite the robust and often desperate demand:

Edible gluten-free bread;

Edible gluten-free anything;

Night clothes suitable for environments other than a Playboy shoot or a nursery;

Nice shoes of any kind with a bit of a heel in which it's actually possible to walk;

News analisys programmes on TV (not just made-for-radio discos made up of bloated right-wing journalists interviewing each other)....

I've run out of thoughts for now. What's on your list?

Europe: pub landlords and a desperate dearth of carrots

Can you make people love Europe? The question immediately generates two more: Which people? What Europe? There are many answers and therefore no real, safe, surefire, mathematical solution to this riddle. 

But if your aim is for people to develop an intense dislike for it, coupled with episodes of catatonic ennui about the whole matter, then congratulations to both the pro and anti-EU camps for collaborating so effectively towards this goal. 

Two pieces I read recently,  about the somewhat mirroring challenges of the EU and Scottish independence referendums, highlight the dilemmas at play. 

Ruth Wishart argues, in my view very persuasively, in The Observer that the faltering Better Together campaign needs to find some carrots to go with the sticks. Threatening people with the uncertainty of some unspecified horrific apocalypse if they ever leave only works so far and is never as attractive as showing them that it is really in their interest to stay because the future can be bright and exciting inside the Union. As one person commented on the thread below the piece :"A campaign slogan of 'you're too wee, too poor and too stupid to cope' never had much going for it in the empathy stake."

Which gets me to Chris Huhne's Guardian piece,  full of interesting polling data but so strident in tone it made my teeth hurt. I share Huhne's premise, summed up in the title: Ukip are the party 'of a better yesterday', of undeliverable promises based on a rose tinted narrative of a past that will never return and was actually not so great in the first place. But sneering at 'insecurity and nostalgia' won't do the second part of the trick: offer a vision of a better tomorrow inside the EU for the people who feel left behind.

To get through to potential UKIP voters I think it is essential to turn a common saying upside down.  Play the man by all means: Nigel Farage is a big boy, he can take and is well overdue some ribbing, some not-so-gentle reminding of the intellectual dishonesty of his party and its elected representatives. Just think of their rhetorical despairing of the EU budget while drinking deeply from its trough, their colour-by-number manifestos, their purporting to stand up for everyday folks against big business provided they are not women and/or low paid workers or in fact anyone who doesn't run a pub whilst chain-smoking, basically. Play the man, as I say, but never, ever kick his potential electorate like a ball - too poor and dumb and uneducated to know what's good for them. This is not just horribly patronising but self-defeating too.

Sticks only work so far, particularly with the safety and familiarity of the idea of the nation state pulling the other way, the comforting illusion that your leaders can get back to being 'in charge' as if the world and all its challenges and structures weren't  global anyway. You need the carrot of a vision of Europe that is worth partaking in. It's tricky because there are many different, often contrasting reasons why Europe has created real value for businesses, more freedom and a better quality of life for its citizens and - at times, though not so much recently - a sense of purpose.

Here, for what it is worth, is why I grew to love Europe, warts and all, idiotic bureaucracy and some disastrous decisions notwithstanding. It starts with my father.

As a small boy, who had to flee the industrial town of Leghorn at the height of the war to seek refuge in the Sienna countryside, my father saw the dusty tanks of the defeated German troops file past his village one way and jubilant (and often marauding) Allies contingents come up the other way. The need to stop European countries ever going to war with each other is as ingrained in him as the love of sweets, which American soldiers apparently lavished on him on accounts of his unbelievably cuteness.

When I left Genoa University in 1989 to finish my studies in Edinburgh, safe in the knowledge that by 1992 my degree would be recognised throughout the then EEC, I didn't need complex graphs and charts to explain to me why a single market of goods, people, capitals and services, work in progress though it was and- incredibly - still is, was a good idea.

And after a few short years of undrinkable coffee and dodgy salad cream I noticed with relish that Italy had followed me up there: not in the shape of hordes of unwashed immigrant zombies but in the ready availability of every conceivable culinary ingredient, brand of clothing, and even the odd, wildly optimistic given the as yet un-integrated weather, Vespa scooter. Brits, not just the posh, well travelled ones, could have a little taste of the Mediterranean life.

In those first few years if I was ever nostalgic for  'home' I really had to conjure it up, Proustian style, at the bottom of a coffee cup. Flights were punishingly expensive and I could barely afford to fly back once or twice a year - casual mini-breaks in Rome or Madrid really would have seemed the stuff of science fiction. But they didn't come up with better planes, you see, just a better market for the industry to evolve in through genuine competition.

I am proud of the fact that we Europeans, a collection of peoples who have exchanged ideas and  knowledge, created art and beaten the shit out of each other for millennia can calmly establish, through the rules of access to the Single Market, and with not a cannon in sight, that we want our products safe, of a high standard and not made through slave labour or at the expense of ecological disaster.

Later on in life I, and any of my British neighbors who may wish to, will be free (as things stand) to retire back in Italy, safe in the knowledge that the local health service will look after me, despite my not ever having paid a penny towards it.

Finally, as a woman, I can think of fewer worse fates than having Farage and his braying chums in charge or able to influence any policies at all, at home or internationally, as my chances of becoming a chain-smoking pub landlord, unconcerned with maternity leave, anti-trafficking laws and all that - what do they call it? - red tape, are vanishingly small.

Npower, I salute you....

From the desk of Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband

Letter to Gareth Pickles, Customer Services Director, Npower
 

Dear Goreth Packles,

Thank you for you illoterate litter of 15^th March, shown on the left, in which you congratulate yourself for having learned how to spell my wife’s name.  
 
It’s really, really impressive it only took her 20 minutes on the phone to teach one of your staff to do to this.

However, the effect is somewhat spoiled by the fact that in the same letter you manage to misspell my name, twice, in entertainingly inconsistent ways.

Evidently Npower has decided it’s no longer enough to fleece its customers.  Now it’s essential to actively troll them in their own homes for that extra special personal touch.

  

Gireth, I salute you.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Tom Runnacles (that’s RUNNACLES)

Great news: I love you!

Dear Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband, 

it has come to my attention that, as of tomorrow, we will have been blissfully and legally happy for 6 years.

To reward your loyalty to our joint enterprise I'm sending you a 'My hot wife loves me' coupon, for you to redeem in a variety of male conversations about hot chicks.

I trust you'll enjoy your coupon and will keep loving me for many long years to come.

Your Hot Wife

PS:  Before you start, no the picture *does not* make you look like a giant green slug.

And anyway, it's a good picture of me, which is the whole point of the voucher.

Happiness: daffodils and fire engines.

I wanted to share this sudden insight I had last night about the human condition, before: 

1) I realise how meaningless it possibly is or,

2) that it only applies to my human condition or worse,

3) before some confused, elderly Ukip reader stumbles upon this blog by mistake and unmasks me as not 'proper human, just Italian'.

I came back home from a long, complex, unresolved kind of a day, deep in thought about how unable I have been for some time to see my way through whatever the next stage if my life is.

On my doorstep I found this:

I immediately recognised it as a gift from my next door neighbour, for whom I had done a minuscule favour but at a time of slight crisis. The drawing is by her son, whose repertoire of fire engines is truly inexhaustible.

My heart opened up, totally involuntarily, like a mouth in a yawn, and I though: the ability to feel happiness - give or take dramatic events such wars and family deaths- must be part optimism, part the ability to accept consolation.

That's all I wanted to say. I warned you it was probably silly.


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