Made in Dagenham
Last week I went to see Made in Dagenham – a film that had a special significance for me since I was the MP for Dagenham for eleven years. I thoroughly enjoyed its uplifting account of a successful struggle for women’s rights at work.
Sadly, of course, one’s pleasure at such moments does not survive long the harsh reality of today’s news headlines. Discrimination in its many forms is still alive and well right across the globe. And discrimination against women, even in New Zealand, is still a daily reality.
The horrific death of a young woman who was burnt alive is – thankfully – something we do not expect to see in our country. But, lest we dismiss it too readily, let us recognise our shamefully high incidence of domestic violence, the majority of whose victims are women.The statistics record only those cases that are reported. They take no account of those women who suffer in silence, resigned to their fate. Nor do they recognise those many women who are abused psychologically rather than physically or sexually.
The New Zealand legislation on domestic violence was amended in 1995 to include psychological abuse (or what is now referred to in the literature as “coercive control”), but New Zealand judges, lawyers, counsellors and psychologists have made little attempt to acknowledge that psychological abuse exists, let alone provide a remedy.
Discrimination against women, of course, takes many forms, not all of which necessarily involve violence. In recent days, for example, two UK Sky sports reporters have been dismissed after their sexist and demeaning comments about women (as well as their casual and laughably mistaken assumption that a female lineswoman could not understand football’s offside rule) were mistakenly broadcast live.
The Sky journalists made the kind of comments that can be heard in any pub or club in both New Zealand and the UK. Their mistake was to have them broadcast. But the dismissive assumption that this was merely “laddish” behaviour and that no harm was done – a view apparently shared by some of our own sports journalists if Martin Devlin’s comments are anything to go by – entirely misses the point. It is doubtful if those who treat the matter so lightly have any idea of how damaging such discrimination is to the self-esteem of women or of how much it owes to a deeply entrenched prejudice that has been deliberately used to enslave and devalue women over many centuries and in virtually all societies.
My thirteen year-old granddaughter, who is intensely interested in issues of discrimination, recently asked me what I thought was the most damaging and pervasive kind of such behaviour. She was a little surprised when, after a moment’s reflection, I replied that, in my view, discrimination against women was the most significant. All forms of discrimination are of course deeply offensive and damaging to their victims. So why – given the wounding treatment of minorities on racial, religious, sexual orientation or disability grounds – do I think that discrimination against women is the most serious?
In purely numerical terms of course, discrimination against women, affecting as it does over half the world’s population, must take pride of place, not just for its impact on those billions of individuals but also on the societies in which they live. But it is not merely the numbers that count.
What distinguishes discrimination against women from other forms of such reprehensible behaviour is that it is an integral, deliberate, and entrenched element in cultures and religions around the world and from time immemorial. It is to be found as the foundation stone of most social orders. Men in all societies and cultures have used their physical strength and their freedom from the burdens of child-bearing and child-rearing to ensure that women are subjugated and enslaved.
How is it that boys who love their mothers, are brought up with their sisters and eventually dote on their daughters can grow up to be party to such systematic abuse? How can they not only tolerate but enforce codes that allow them – indeed, require them – to stone women to death, mutilate them physically and sexually, treat them as chattels, and deny them education and the freedom to choose?
In today’s Western societies, it is true, these extreme behaviours are no longer tolerated. But the efforts are still made to keep women in their place, as the women of Dagenham and the English lineswoman found.
The explanation is not that the strong male cannot help but assert his superiority, but that the weak and frightened male needs to hide his fear by burying it deep in centuries-old religious, moral and social codes that ensure that women are kept under control. And what is it that men are frightened of?
The answer is that it is the power of women’s sexuality that frightens men. From Eve in the Garden of Eden to the present day, men have found it necessary to counter that fear by destroying, restricting, commodifying and demeaning that sexuality, and by identifying it as the origin of sin and of many of society’s ills. The rules that male-dominated societies – and that means most societies – have put in place and that are supposedly justified by religious belief or the need for social order are in the end no more than an attempt to limit the power that women should legitimately claim and exercise to everyone’s advantage.
Bryan Gould
30 January 2011
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 7 February 2011
Hambledon
Like most New Zealanders, I have at times found the television pictures of Christchurch’s earthquake disaster too much to bear. I find that I need to take a break, in a way that those directly involved cannot, from the scenes of personal tragedy and total devastation.
But, as for others no doubt, there is from time to time a report that has a particular resonance and significance for me. Such a moment came at lunchtime on Saturday when it was reported that a historic mansion on Bealey Avenue had been demolished.
No one can doubt, as Mayor Bob Parker has said, that the primary focus in the immediate aftermath of the disaster must be the people caught up in the tragedy – the loss of life, the rescue of those who were trapped and injured, and the suffering of families who have lost loved ones.
But, in the fullness of time, we will have time to reflect on the loss of heritage as well – of so much that was part of Christchurch’s history, so much of its very heart and soul. We can already see the scale of that loss in the damage suffered by the Cathedral and other iconic buildings. The now demolished mansion in Bealey Avenue was one such.
In 1850, my great great grandfather, George Gould, sailed to New Zealand with his young bride, Hannah. They arrived in Wellington on the 5th of November. The young couple spent a few weeks in the North Island before sailing again, this time for Christchurch, where they disembarked on the 11th of February 1851.
While in the North Island, George Gould had built with his own hands the framework of the house he intended to erect. He had taken the “pre-fab” on board the “Camilla”, and – on disembarking at Lyttleton – he then had to transport the structure via Sumner and the Avon river to Christchurch.
The house eventually reached its destination near the south-east corner of Armagh and Colombo streets and was erected before the month was out. It was the first completed wooden house in the Christchurch city area.
The building became not only a home but was also the first site of a store and farming services and trading enterprise – what eventually developed into Pyne Gould Guinness and which gave its name to the Pyne Gould building in which so many died when the earthquake struck. The business prospered, and George Gould became one of the most successful and prominent of Christchurch citizens.
By 1856, he had amassed enough money to move from the “pre-fab” to a house he had built on a 100-acre site he had purchased on the west side of Springfield Road. The new dwelling was best described as a Victorian gentleman’s residence, though built in the colonial style. It boasted, in addition to spacious living quarters and a large number of bedrooms, many other features ranging from a large butler’s pantry adjacent to the kitchen to a panelled ballroom. The house looked out onto extensive grounds, which included a large, formal garden.
George Gould had been born and brought up in Hambleden, a small English village on the banks of the River Thames. His grandfather, Caleb Gould, had been a famous lock-keeper at Hambleden; visitors to the lock to this day will see displayed many references to Caleb Gould and an account of his exploits is to be found in most histories of the Thames. George Gould decided to name his splendid new house after the place of his birth.
With his new house established as the family home, George than arranged for his parents, Joseph and Susan, to come out to New Zealand to join them. Joseph and Susan lived in a small house that George built for them in the grounds of Hambleden.
When I returned to New Zealand from Britain in the mid-1990s, my sister, Ngaire, and I spent some time on a visit to Christchurch looking for the old family home. It was feared that it had been demolished. We could find nothing in Bealey Avenue that looked like the photographs of the original house. It took us some time to realise that the photographs were all taken from the front garden of the house, across the extensive grounds which had long since been filled in with small houses, and that what could be seen from Bealey Avenue was in fact the unphotographed back of the house.
We discovered that the mansion had become the residence of the Bishop of Christchurch in the later part of the 19th century, and had eventually spent part of its more recent history as a private hotel – also known as “Hambleden”. I had the pleasure of staying there overnight on one of my visits to the city.
The demolition of “Hambleden”, and the sad and unfortunate link through the Gould family to the fate of another building that – with its occupants – has been a tragic victim of the earthquake, means the loss of another small part of Christchurch’s history. In bringing it to the attention of a wider readership, I discharge an obligation I feel to the memory of George Gould.
Bryan Gould
26 January 2011
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 1 March.
Labour Bounces Back
Eight months after the general election defeat, Labour is in surprisingly good shape – and, paradoxically it may seem, that perception is strengthened rather than reversed by the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle forced by Alan Johnson’s resignation.
The improvement in Labour’s fortunes is not just a matter of the encouraging bounce back in the polls or the Oldham by-election victory. It is not even the choppy water already encountered by the briefly popular coalition government or the prospect of the much stormier seas yet to come. Labour, it seems, has started to feel good about itself again.
This is partly because it is now becoming clear – assuming that it wasn’t on the day after the election – that, as Ed Miliband said in his Guardian article last week, Labour may have lost the election but the Tories failed to win it. That failure was more than a statistical fluke; it was a reflection of the fact that progressive opinion in Britain is in the majority. Labour lost because it failed to represent that opinion. It now sees the need and the opportunity that remedying that failure represents.
But Labour’s improved morale is also the consequence of the canny strategy being pursued by its new leader. Ed Miliband has been criticised, in media accustomed to a diet of constantly manufactured headlines, for a lack of action. But what he has done has been well directed.
He has understood the need to distance himself and the party from New Labour. Newness is of course and by definition a wasting asset, but Miliband recognises that “New” Labour was a victim not just of the passage of time but of its own hubris.He has accordingly done what is needed to acknowledge the most egregious of New Labour errors – the invasion of Iraq, the obeisance to the City, the tolerance of widening inequality, the “intense relaxation” about the “filthy rich”, the genuflection to market forces, the subservience to President Bush; the list must be ended for reasons of space rather than because it has run out of items.
The one significant area where the new leader has seemed reluctant to start afresh has been the economy. The uncertain response to the government’s deficit inherited from the Brown government has left the coalition government free to re-write history and to invent a new narrative which lays the deficit at Labour’s door.Miliband has seemed content to allow unfolding events to conduct the argument for him. Fortunately for him, Alan Johnson (whose appointment as Shadow Chancellor was in any case a puzzle) has forced his hand. Ed Balls seems certain to carry the argument to the Tories, and to expose the supposedly inevitable cuts as an ideologically driven attack on public spending in principle and as precisely the wrong response in economic terms – a response which guarantees a longer recession and tougher times.
But Labour’s bounce back is more than merely the renunciation of particular items on the agenda of the new leader’s predecessors. Miliband has begun the task of re-building the values and principles on which a modern progressive party must operate.In doing so, he has of course half an eye on disappointed and disaffected Lib Dems. This is partly a matter of electoral calculation and none the worse for that. But the attempt he makes to re-position what, in today’s Britain, should constitute the progressive force in British politics, while of obvious interest to many Lib Dems, is also critical to Labour’s future.
His starting point seems to be that New Labour’s fundamental mistake was to abandon Labour’s historic mission by aligning itself with the big battalions. Those big battalions included most notably the rich and powerful who had most to gain from the unfettered operation of market forces. If the market was not to be challenged, was to be regarded as virtually infallible, (and this was the sometimes explicit basis of New Labour policy), the ability of a supposedly progressive government to intervene in the search for social justice and – crucially – economic efficiency as well was severely curtailed.
But the powerful forces with which New Labour aligned itself were not limited to those who were dominant in the market. To many of those ordinary people who expected the support of a progressive government against those big battalions, the government itself was one of the oppressors. Ed Miliband is clear that New Labour’s betrayal of its natural supporters was a double let-down; they not only left many defenceless against the economically powerful but they used the power of government to reinforce that sense of powerlessness by failing to listen to what ordinary people wanted.
In arguing that Labour must now correct those mistakes, the new Labour leader seems to adopt a view of progressive politics with which I strongly agree. I have long argued that the fundamental issue in politics is the response that must be made to what – if left uncorrected – will be the inevitable concentration of power in a few hands. Dominance of an unfettered market is one obvious form of that concentration. A government that is unresponsive to the people is another. The role of progressive politicians should be consciously to counteract those concentrations of power, and to ensure that power is as widely diffused as possible throughout society. The goal of progressive politics must be that people should have the greatest possible degree of control over their own lives.
This kind of thinking is not new. It gains increasing expression in the many voluntary and community-based activities and initiatives that are springing up around the country. The task for progressive politicians is to show that government is an essential ally, and not an obstacle, to this kind of people- and community-based politics. People who are active in politics will be more effective if the government is on their side. That, after all, is what Labour came into being to achieve.
Bryan Gould
22 January 2011
The General Election Judgment
A three-year electoral cycle may have its detractors – and, many would say, with good reason – but it is usually popular with first-term governments. The record shows that three years is not really long enough for voters to reach a definitive view that a recently elected government has failed, and the benefit of the doubt will usually mean a second term.
Add to that a Prime Minister with an unusually acute instinct for the popular gesture and the 2011 election might reasonably be thought to be a shoo-in. There is, however, one possible fly in the ointment.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” might not be such an obvious determining factor as it was claimed to be in Bill Clinton’s run for the presidency, but the way Kiwis feel about their economic situation on election day will clearly have a bearing on how they vote. And on that issue, the government’s record may not bear too much close scrutiny.
The government inherited an economy which had already been in recession for most of a year, and which had then been assailed by the global financial crisis. Dealing with that recession and building an economy which would – as we emerged on the other side – reverse our decades-long comparative decline, was surely the most pressing task facing the new government.
How, after three years in office, will the government be judged to have done?
They have, after all, had their fair share of good luck. Record commodity prices have underpinned the economy and helped the balance of trade. Our banking sector has remained, by world standards, remarkably stable – though the same can’t be said of our finance companies. Our major export markets – Australia and China – have been beacons of light in the recessionary global gloom.
Yet – our unemployment remains stubbornly high, the retail trade is flat on its back, the housing market has stalled, business confidence is low and business investment equally so, the protections that the vulnerable depend on in tough times have been reduced, and the talk is all of further cuts.
The early flush of energy and enthusiasm – remember the “jobs summit”? – seem to have evaporated. The recession has lingered on well beyond what the forecasters predicted. There is precious little to show that the government has done more than hold the ring. We look in vain to see where the lift in demand and employment is to come from.
And, most seriously, if and when we do recover, there is no evidence that anything will have changed. The problems that have dogged us for decades will remain unresolved.
That, after all, was the central point made by Standard and Poor’s before Christmas. When they warned of a credit downgrade and placed us on negative watch, they pointed the finger specifically at the prognosis that, as we eventually do emerge from a protracted recession, all of our entrenched problems will also re-surface.
They predicted that we would return to our bad old ways of failing to save and invest and wondering why our productivity does not improve faster, of bingeing on artificially cheap imports and expecting to be able to borrow overseas to fund our excessive consumption, of wringing our hands while our counter-inflationary policies force up interest rates and an already over-valued exchange rate.
It was the prospect of the resultant deficit – the country’s rather than the government’s – and our reliance on overseas borrowing, that caused them real concern. Unusually, a credit-rating agency seems to be taking a longer-term view than that of our own government. Their message seems to be that, unless we grapple with those long-term problems, our credit rating is at risk.
If all of this remains true on election day, if the remnants of recession still linger on and we are poised to resume the unsustainable rake’s progress that has held us back for so long, how will the voters mark the government’s report card? It has to be said that, as the outcome of three years in office, it would not look good.
The government would surely not want to face the voters with a record that shows that nothing had really changed. Changes to the tax system, a renewed and welcome emphasis on research, and largely administrative fiddling with the delivery of education and health services may have their proponents but are hardly the stuff of fundamental economic reform.
The Prime Minister is nothing if not a pragmatist. As he approaches the election, he will figure that he has most bases covered. He would be uncomfortable, therefore, with any vulnerability on his government’s economic record. Can we expect that he will understand the need – however belatedly – for an “agonising re-appraisal” when something isn’t working and to strike out in a new direction?
Bryan Gould
18 January
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 24 January.
The Death Spiral
There are times when one can’t help feeling sorry for the government. After two years of framing economic policy to please the credit rating agencies – last year’s budget was virtually dictated by Standard and Poor’s – their reward has been a warning last month that our credit rating is on negative watch.
That blow has been followed by the revelation that the government’s deficit has blown out by $2 billion more than forecast. This intrusion of economic reality may not be welcome but it has been salutary.
The government’s response so far to these twin developments has been to maintain a stiff upper lip, and to continue to target a return to surplus by 2016. Others have not been so restrained. The air is thick with urgings – from the Reserve Bank, the Treasury, the Business Roundtable, and not least the Herald’s own leader-writers and columnists – that the government’s deficit must be cut and cut faster.
It is hard to see these warnings as anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to what people think they heard, or wanted to hear. They see or purport to see a substantial connection between the threatened downgrading of our credit rating and the size of the government’s deficit.
A careful reading of Standard and Poor’s statement, however, reveals that the government’s deficit (which remains perfectly manageable by international standards) played only a minor part in their expression of concern about our credit rating. Their focus was on the country’s external deficit – our propensity to finance an inflated consumption by borrowing from overseas.
It is true that the government’s deficit is an element in the country’s overall deficit but it is not the element that is of particular concern to S&P. What worries them – and they are quite explicit about this – is that, if and when a substantial recovery finally materialises, our appetite for imported consumer goods will re-emerge with a vengeance and we will be back to our bad old habits of borrowing to finance a persistent trade deficit.
The real import of their warning is that they see nothing in our current policy settings to suggest that we will avoid this all too familiar outcome. They fear that any revival in economic activity will see the application of the decades-old “remedy” of high interest rates leading to a yet higher dollar, with consequent damage to savings and exports while we binge on artificially cheap imports. Sooner or later, they warn, the willingness of overseas lenders to fund this rake’s progress may be exhausted.
But, say the deficit hawks, the external deficit, our poor savings record, and the narrow base of our export sector – all of which are fingered by S&P as causes for their concern – are problems for the future. Surely – whether S&P say it or not – the one thing the government can do to help is to get its own deficit down faster than planned, even if that means painful cuts that might impact the most vulnerable?
Let us be clear. All other things being equal, it would clearly be beneficial for the government to eliminate its deficit as soon as possible. And the government is quite right to seek savings in respect of public spending that may be wasteful or poorly directed.
But if cutting the deficit is the first and over-riding priority, we need to be sure that it would produce, in today’s context, the desired outcomes – and it is a pity that this realisation did not dawn before the government’s finances were further weakened by tax cuts that mainly benefited the better off.
But there is no evidence that simply taking the axe to government spending would help matters. The main reason for the government’s increased deficit is that tax revenue – already depressed by the recession – is much lower than forecast, and that in turn is a direct consequence of the slowness of our economic recovery. To cut government expenditure, thereby further depressing demand and eventually tax revenue, is not the most obvious solution to this problem.
The paradox is that, as many of us warned at the onset of the recession, the greater the priority and urgency given to cutting the deficit, the more persistent it is likely to be. The most effective course for a government worried about its deficit is – while maintaining proper controls over potentially wasteful spending – to play its part in ensuring that the level of economic activity rises.
As it is, we are in danger of getting caught in a downward spiral. Our export income is being depressed by the high dollar. The consumer is facing higher fuel and energy prices and the threat of continuing job losses, and uses any margin of spending power to pay down debt. The business sector is struggling with inadequate demand and therefore keeping tight tabs on employment and investment plans. If the government, too, cuts its spending further, where is recovery to come from? And how do we ensure that recovery, when it comes, does not take us straight back – as S&P warn that it will – to the problems that have dogged us for decades?
Bryan Gould
15 December 2010