why so few women in politics?

"Where were all the women?" asked a Guardian article on the lack of women standing for Parliamentary seats. There was a stinging attack from Julie Etchingham, the ITN news presenter who anchored the election coverage. During it, she said she had "despaired of this male political club" which was testosterone fuelled. It surprised even me, an old-time feminist from Simone de Beauvoir days, who had spent years pointing out to "post feminists" that the big decisions of the world were being taken by small groups of men in suits or traditional robes. "Just turn on the TV and watch the news, and you will see them," I used to say. At last, at this election, women have begun to notice.
So why are there so few women in British political life? At least some other countries, notably Germany and the USA, have them, with successful Merkel and Clinton. The answer in this country has to be that there are few women in politics because few women want to be there. Politics, like the City, like journalism, like other fields, is highly competitive. No one is going to hand Parliamentary seats to women on a plate. They will have seriously to want them, like the male candidates. Men are stronger than women - but only physically. Hand to hand fights for the seats are not required, but enthusiasm is. Apparently, women are too little turned on by the prospect of long and boring hours in Parliament to put up a struggle, and content themselves with whining that men are not handing them power. The story of how Margaret Thatcher stood unsuccessfully for one seat after another is a tale of unremitting endurance. Few would want to emulate her record, but it is a lesson in the determination that is needed.
Twenty years ago, after much research, I wrote a full-page feature for the Guardian which shocked some of my colleagues, who were nearly all men. It recorded how hugely men overtook women in the statistics for alcoholism, crime and prison sentences and psychotic disorders. They still do. There are no reasons for women to feel inferior. They don't actually have to pay a fortune for handbags and makeup or wear totteringly high heels to prove their worth. It's already proved. A woman has won the round the world yacht race. A young Australian teenager has defied authority to win another dangerous world yachting race, A North Korean woman is the first to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world. They can compete and win on the biggest physical hurdles. And they can, also, on the intellectual ones. Girl pupils are coming out with the best school exam results in this country, giving rise to alarm that the boys are doing comparatively badly.
It is not so very long ago that the 11-plus results were weighted to give a better chance to boys, on the grounds that girls matured earlier ( a decision no doubt taken by men). That influence is still around, though it is also true that men are often the main encouragers to women having a go at the biggest challenges. These are the best men.
I remember working in the 'fifties as a reporter. You were sacked automatically if you were pregnant and from some newspapers (mine) if you married. If you drove a car, it was routine to be shouted at constantly as "a bloody woman driver" just for being on the road. It took me years to start being helpful to male drivers in
letting them turn or block the road, as I took revenge for the past. In those days a woman had to prove herself twice as good at a job as a man to be recognised. In journalism, that was simple and quite enjoyable - you could "scoop" them and land on the front page ahead of them.
Women in this country now are in the top league - in the City, in journalism, with the first national newspaper editors making their mark, in the highest realms of international political writing, with Naomi Klein shaking the market establishment and Lucy Prebble disclosing financial corruption in her revelatory City play "Enron", and women in the highest legal and medical establishments. There are women delivering the post, driving the trains, on building sites and in the Army and Air Force and Naval front lines. There is no doubt of their equality now. In many fields they are emerging as superior.
They have won maternity leave, costly settlements after legal claims of gender bias in the top jobs, care for young children provided while they are at work. Harriet Harman, if she chose to, could give the best account of why there are so few women in politics, as well as why she does not want to stand as leader of the Labour Party (too many years working close to Gordon Brown perhaps being the reason.)
In the Congo, and throughout Africa and numberless countries in the world, women are disempowered, raped, controlled, killed, regarded as no higher than animals in male reckoning. But this is a matter of physical superiority only. A man can always overpower a woman, unless she is specifically trained in martial arts. It will still be up to the African women, however much they are helped from outside, to rise up and take their rightful place.
Too much prominence is given here, in discussions about political life, about women being in politics to facilitate "women's issues" in fields of health and education. These are not women's issues, but issues for all the population. Women minimise their standing by concentrating only on matters which they regard as affecting them directly. Imagine a man seeking to get into Parliament because he wanted a higher emphasis on "men's issues."
As the international campaigner for equality, Lesley Abdela, has long spelt out, women are half the world's population and should therefore have a 50% share of the international decisions taken over war and peace and the struggle between economic stability and chaos. But they will have to want that share, and be prepared to put it first in their lives.



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Can coalition bring freedom?

Journalists held a rally during the election campaign protesting at the number of arrests while they were working, and carrying Press passes. The National Union of Journalists has set up a new branch for photographers because so many of them have been arrested. Writing journalists who have also been hammered by Labour's misuse of the anti-terrorist laws (so misused that they were even used against the Icelandic banks during the financial crisis.)
One of the founders of the new branch told how she had been arrested while taking pictures of police action against demonstrators, hauled off to the station, strip-searched and held in a cell.
"Hands up anyone who has been arrested under section 44?" she asked, and it looked as though half the audience of several hundred were putting up their hands. Mine also went up.
But it hadn't been an arrest under anti-terrorist law. It was at Greenham Common, back in the early 'eighties. A small group of women were preparing to climb through the perimeter fencing to protest inside the base, planned as the home for American Cruise nuclear missiles. One of them had an arm in plaster, broken during a similar protest in Italy. The police spotted the group and started to rough them up and drag them away. One got hold of the broken arm and started
pulling and hitting it. I was watching from about 30 yards and took a picture on my small hand camera. Two policemen raced up the hill, grabbed the camera, and arrested me and I was marched off with the demonstrators to a holding centre inside the base. Once you are arrested, there is not much you can do. The Greenham women laughed at what they thought was a police error. I didn't. I stood at the door and shouted until someone came and I demanded to be let out because I was a journalist carrying the official identity card. In the end, I was freed. I got my camera back, but not the film.
These days, presumably I would have been taken down to the police station and strip-searched.
In Moscow around this time, the KGB had attempted to haul me off a train and take me away to an unknown fate because I had been interviewing a Russian dissident author's wife while he was in prison. I was actually in the middle of covering a Scandinavian women's peace march across Russia, which President Brezhnev had said would be given freedom to travel (as long as they carried the right banners.) The Norwegians, though not the Swedes, made such a fuss about this that the KGB gave up and let me stay on, though they tried again later. It's not quite as bad as the Soviet Union here - yet.
Henry Porter, the writer who spoke at the NUJ rally, has given the most dramatic and powerful space in the Observer to what he describes as a Britain "less free, less equal, less private and less just."
The destruction of our civil liberties during the New Labour government has been a prime reason for voters saying they will desert that party. Yet how much time has been given to civil liberties by the leaders in the election campaign? It's pensions and taxes, nearly always, appeals to the pocket and to revenge on bankers' bonuses, not to ID cards or, the expensive renewal of Trident nuclear warheads, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of housing and any serious attempt to increase it (compared with the huge building programmes of the 'sixties.)
The rally gave us a series of statistics about the way we have lost our freedom and these were given by Henry Porter in his article - 15,000 people wrongly identified as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau; stop and search measures up by 182% last year; a rise of 66% in the use of the Section 44 terror law, weird use of Asbos for preventing eccentric behaviour. Over 3000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour and the prison population is the largest in Europe, bigger than it has ever been in living memory.
The cameras are watching us everywhere, our medical records are about to go on a public data base, and there are, as often in the past, plans to cut down on trial by jury, our greatest right through the ages. The cameras are watching you in the street.
The designer Vivienne Westwood was right when as a protest a few years ago she designed that T-shirt with its inscription "I'm not a terrorist, so please don't arrest me." I bought one as soon as they came out. But the truth is, I've never dared wear it.

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