"Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff has conceded that Labour failed to properly prepare for power in the run-up to its landslide general election win."
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
When I was a kid, many journalists were worried about "zip guns". Which, in the US at that time, were often constructed from toy cap guns. Which demonstrates just how difficult it is to control guns, given how poor most of the gang bangers of the time were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm#Zip_guns
(For the record: I think discussing "gun violence" is a way of avoiding difficult issues. It would be better, though much harder, to discuss "fatherless violence".)
Good Morning one and all. Late today, as I had an early hospital appointment.
All sorted now, for four months, thankfully.
On topic, I don't quite understand the personal hostility to Ed M; somewhat odd-looking, rather geeky appearing admittedly but on his podcast he comes across as quite a reasonable, indeed sensible chap.
I don't think even Tommy Robinson would have posted that tweet about the Mayor of Bristol, which tells us how radicalised and racist Matt Goodwin has become. He should be in Restore rather than Reform, if not in some far-right British patriotic splinter group.
I wonder what roles he thinks suitable for his colleague, the refugee Nadhim Zahawi?
I appreciate some people here doubt the reality of the Russian threat. And, certainly, I don't think the Red Army is very likely to be rolling over the plains of Central Europe all the way to the channel any time soon. But this is disturbing, no?
"The Kremlin orchestrated a concerted surveillance campaign using drones launched from shadow fleet vessels over an 18-month period which targeted nuclear sites in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, researchers have said.
"Analysis by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) of 144 incidents in more than a dozen countries beginning in late 2024 concluded Russian intelligence had operated with “substantial impunity”, leaving authorities across Europe flat-footed and confused.
"Drones were repeatedly spotted over airbases and airports, yet none were captured or shot down by western militaries, exposing a strategic failure in Nato air defences that the thinktank said had been quietly acknowledged across Europe."
We shouldn't be able to buy drones on amazon. At a minimum they should be licensed and registered to the same level as cars, personally I'd restrict them much further and treat them like planes.
How?
That just means that the bad actors move to kits - the basic bits and pieces can’t be banned. “Possession if an electric motor”?
Incidentally, the next piece of fun that technology will give us, is the collapse of gun control.
At the moment, 3D printing and CNC milling hasn’t done this - because barrels and ammunition are hard to make.
What is coming is coil guns. Electromagnets firing projectiles.
There are no explosives required - the design at the moment use high end power tool batteries. All the parts can be 3D printed or made from metal rod etc bought from a DIY store. The coils can be hand wound. You’d need a 3D printer, some hand tools and soldering iron.
Fully automatic weapon, silent, no rifling marks on the projectile and no propellant gas residue for forensics.
The current designs are a bit lore powerful than air guns - might well be lethal now, but their power is growing year by year.
My drone is registered and has an operator ID stuck to it.
A few drone operators are a bit concerned about this because anyone wanting to harass them (even if they are operating perfectly legally) will know where they are.
Fortunately I'm usually operating as UK0 which means I can avoid that until 2028, although if I haven't crashed it by then the device to enable remote ID will put it over the class weight.
As for stopping them - I have one from 2013 I made from a few motors and an arduino which can lift a lot more than a tiny DJI. There are no parts that are drone specific. I'm thinking of re-purposing it to bomb habitats with seeds rather than grenades.
Came here 20 years ago from Somalia, did voluntary work, got a degree, worked in the public sector, became a councillor and seems like he’s done a good job.
… in reply to…
Would Goodwin be saying the same about a refugee from Ukraine?
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Alfred Dubs. A retrospective Reform party act is needed to chuck them all out.
Are Poppers good ?
I don't know. How would this hypothesis is falsified?
Came here 20 years ago from Somalia, did voluntary work, got a degree, worked in the public sector, became a councillor and seems like he’s done a good job.
… in reply to…
Also: the Lord Mayor isn't really 'running' the city, is he? He's a figurehead - he gets to wear the mayoral regalia. He's like a municipal constitutional monarch.
I'm right up the immigration-sceptic end of the spectrum, but I can't get exercised about this at all. He looks to me very much like he's integrating. This is what we want, surely?
Same here
I think it’s nice to see a positive story of Somali migration and integration and actual economic participation for a change
In fact, this post crystallises one of my problems with Reform. I have so many complaints about immigration. The sheer numbers of undesirable immigrants crossing in boats. The criminal elements it introduces. The refusal to deal with the criminal elements robustly. The bending-over-backwards to put the needs and in some cases wants of (some) immigrants before the needs of our own people. The sheer amount of money we’re spending on immigrants (while, simultaneously, and puzzlingly, making it very hard and expensive for immigrants from places like Canada). The sheer squalor of places like Cheetham Hill. The depression of wages. But that very much isn’t to say I have an aversion to all immigrants or all immigration. I recognise the benefits. What I want is for immigrants to buy into Britishness. This is what most of the immigrants I know do. My daughter’s football and cricket clubs are peppered with immigrants and their families. For immigrants – like this guy in Britsol, willing to don silly British clothes – who want to buy into Britishness: this is absolutely brilliant. I love it. It’s not only great for Britain, but great that Britishness is something that people like this want to adopt. I think my views on this are perfectly mainstream.
A perfectly good case could have been made opposing ‘bad’ immigration while welcoming ‘good’. I’d say it would have been popular. Once again, Reform had an electoral open goal which they’ve judiciously aimed a good 45 degrees right of.
I agree, but I think what you miss is that Reform don’t want what we want. We see an integrated immigrant becoming Lord Mayor and think, "great, more of the same please".
For at least part of Reform’s coalition, the objection isn’t just illegal immigration or failed integration. It’s demographic and cultural change itself. From that perspective, Goodwin’s post isn’t a blunder at all. It’s entirely consistent.
To want to nudge the future in a particular direction is politics. To address what has already happened WRT who is lawfully living here by attacking its foundations and opposing assimilation, and wanting to demonise and reverse it is a starting point for the genuine fascist.
Yes, exactly. Opposing future policy is one thing. Looking at someone lawfully here, visibly assimilated, civically engaged, and then objecting anyway is quite another.
At that point the issue clearly isn’t failed integration. It’s that integration has succeeded, and some people still don’t like the result. - If successful assimilation still counts as a problem, then assimilation was never really the test.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
Came here 20 years ago from Somalia, did voluntary work, got a degree, worked in the public sector, became a councillor and seems like he’s done a good job.
… in reply to…
Would Goodwin be saying the same about a refugee from Ukraine?
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Alfred Dubs. A retrospective Reform party act is needed to chuck them all out.
Are Poppers good ?
An excellent remedy for all those wanting an answer to the Humean problem of induction, an introduction to the history of closed minds and why they are bad for you and an outline of how critical realism may be a better answer to the problem of 'what we can know' than critical idealism. Apart from that, of no good at all.
Is the proposition that Poppers are good a falsifiable one ?
Our nuclear subs are now also dependent on the Dutch.
URENCO is going to enrich uranium as fuel on behalf of the UK MoD, Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister writes to their Parliament.
Although details are scarce, this implies progress in the plans to set up nuclear fuel production (HEU) at Capehurst.
The DiP has a 1.7 billion funding allocation to plans connected with the production of nuclear fuel. Projects to onshore nuclear fuel production have been in the works for a while but the MoD has been deliberately vague about it.
Even the DiP document only says "to explore options for reestablishing a nuclear fuel cycle for defence reactor fuel".
I appreciate some people here doubt the reality of the Russian threat. And, certainly, I don't think the Red Army is very likely to be rolling over the plains of Central Europe all the way to the channel any time soon. But this is disturbing, no?
"The Kremlin orchestrated a concerted surveillance campaign using drones launched from shadow fleet vessels over an 18-month period which targeted nuclear sites in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, researchers have said.
"Analysis by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) of 144 incidents in more than a dozen countries beginning in late 2024 concluded Russian intelligence had operated with “substantial impunity”, leaving authorities across Europe flat-footed and confused.
"Drones were repeatedly spotted over airbases and airports, yet none were captured or shot down by western militaries, exposing a strategic failure in Nato air defences that the thinktank said had been quietly acknowledged across Europe."
We shouldn't be able to buy drones on amazon. At a minimum they should be licensed and registered to the same level as cars, personally I'd restrict them much further and treat them like planes.
How?
That just means that the bad actors move to kits - the basic bits and pieces can’t be banned. “Possession if an electric motor”?
Incidentally, the next piece of fun that technology will give us, is the collapse of gun control.
At the moment, 3D printing and CNC milling hasn’t done this - because barrels and ammunition are hard to make.
What is coming is coil guns. Electromagnets firing projectiles.
There are no explosives required - the design at the moment use high end power tool batteries. All the parts can be 3D printed or made from metal rod etc bought from a DIY store. The coils can be hand wound. You’d need a 3D printer, some hand tools and soldering iron.
Fully automatic weapon, silent, no rifling marks on the projectile and no propellant gas residue for forensics.
The current designs are a bit lore powerful than air guns - might well be lethal now, but their power is growing year by year.
My drone is registered and has an operator ID stuck to it.
A few drone operators are a bit concerned about this because anyone wanting to harass them (even if they are operating perfectly legally) will know where they are.
Fortunately I'm usually operating as UK0 which means I can avoid that until 2028, although if I haven't crashed it by then the device to enable remote ID will put it over the class weight.
As for stopping them - I have one from 2013 I made from a few motors and an arduino which can lift a lot more than a tiny DJI. There are no parts that are drone specific. I'm thinking of re-purposing it to bomb habitats with seeds rather than grenades.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
"Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff has conceded that Labour failed to properly prepare for power in the run-up to its landslide general election win."
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
You can only apply a statistic test if you define the thing you’re testing against? “Party A is not sexist” is different to “Party A is less sexist than Party B”.
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
I think this applies to the leadership stats too. I actually think the bigger issue for Labour is the talent doesn't seem to be female. Whatever one might think about Thatcher, May and Badenoch (let's leave the other one to one side...), they were very much decent options for the party. Who has there been for Labour? Beckett and Cooper possibly? But that's about it.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
You can only apply a statistic test if you define the thing you’re testing against? “Party A is not sexist” is different to “Party A is less sexist than Party B”.
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
Hah. I forgot Badenoch, although the ambiguity in my text might give me wiggle room.
So /four/ out of eleven Conservative leaders have been female, whilst Labour has appointed zero out of ten.
You’re going to struggle to convince me that this isn’t evidence that the Labour Party has a problem appointing women to the leadership role.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
You can only apply a statistic test if you define the thing you’re testing against? “Party A is not sexist” is different to “Party A is less sexist than Party B”.
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
On those numbers, ignoring the acting leaders, you get a Fisher exact p of 0.21, not significant. That's testing are Parties A and B equally sexist... but those numbers forgot Badenoch! If we remember to add her in, then p = 0.0038, which is statistically significant.
If we're testing is Party A sexist... well, the numbers are still tiny. For the Conservative Party, 4/11 leaders gives an estimated proportion of female leaders = 36%, with a 95% confidence interval of 11-69%. We would naively expect 50% if the party is not sexist, so there's insufficient evidence here to claim the party is sexist.
Do that for Labour and 0/10 leaders and the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0% obviously, but with a 95% confidence interval of 0-31%. That is different from 50%, so perhaps that is evidence the party is sexist. However, I would argue that we know there was sexism in the past. Labour only got near to equal gender representation in the Parliamentary party in 2015 (and the Tories never have). Since then, we've had 4 Labour leaders (inc. Burnham), so again the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0%, but with a 95% confidence interval now of 0-60%. So there isn't evidence that the party is recently sexist in leader choice.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
I think this applies to the leadership stats too. I actually think the bigger issue for Labour is the talent doesn't seem to be female. Whatever one might think about Thatcher, May and Badenoch (let's leave the other one to one side...), they were very much decent options for the party. Who has there been for Labour? Beckett and Cooper possibly? But that's about it.
Cooper has (I believe) ruled herself out for health reasons sadly.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
You can only apply a statistic test if you define the thing you’re testing against? “Party A is not sexist” is different to “Party A is less sexist than Party B”.
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
On those numbers, ignoring the acting leaders, you get a Fisher exact p of 0.21, not significant. That's testing are Parties A and B equally sexist.
If we're testing is Party A sexist... well, the numbers are still tiny. For the Conservative Party, 3/11 leaders gives an estimated proportion of female leaders = 27%, with a 95% confidence interval of 6-61%. We would naively expect 50% if the party is not sexist, so there's insufficient evidence here to claim the party is sexist.
Do that for Labour and 0/10 leaders and the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0% obviously, but with a 95% confidence interval of 0-31%. That is different from 50%, so perhaps that is evidence the party is sexist. However, I would argue that we know there was sexism in the past. Labour only got near to equal gender representation in the Parliamentary party in 2015 (and the Tories never have). Since then, we've had 4 Labour leaders (inc. Burnham), so again the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0%, but with a 95% confidence interval now of 0-60%. So there isn't evidence that the party is recently sexist in leader choice.
You can keep moving the statistical goal-posts as often as you like but the Conservatives have elected four female leaders & Labour have elected none. It’s a bad look.
NB. If you redo the Fisher test with the actual number including Badenoch then you’ll fine the p-value is 0.09 for equal sexism between the parties. Getting a bit ... unlikely now isn’t it?
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
You can only apply a statistic test if you define the thing you’re testing against? “Party A is not sexist” is different to “Party A is less sexist than Party B”.
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
On those numbers, ignoring the acting leaders, you get a Fisher exact p of 0.21, not significant. That's testing are Parties A and B equally sexist.
If we're testing is Party A sexist... well, the numbers are still tiny. For the Conservative Party, 3/11 leaders gives an estimated proportion of female leaders = 27%, with a 95% confidence interval of 6-61%. We would naively expect 50% if the party is not sexist, so there's insufficient evidence here to claim the party is sexist.
Do that for Labour and 0/10 leaders and the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0% obviously, but with a 95% confidence interval of 0-31%. That is different from 50%, so perhaps that is evidence the party is sexist. However, I would argue that we know there was sexism in the past. Labour only got near to equal gender representation in the Parliamentary party in 2015 (and the Tories never have). Since then, we've had 4 Labour leaders (inc. Burnham), so again the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0%, but with a 95% confidence interval now of 0-60%. So there isn't evidence that the party is recently sexist in leader choice.
You can keep moving the statistical goal-posts as often as you like but the Conservatives have elected four female leaders & Labour have elected none. It’s a bad look.
Well, I've now corrected those numbers: see edit above.
I agree the optics are bad, whatever the stats say. The stats can't say much because the numbers are small.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
I think this applies to the leadership stats too. I actually think the bigger issue for Labour is the talent doesn't seem to be female. Whatever one might think about Thatcher, May and Badenoch (let's leave the other one to one side...), they were very much decent options for the party. Who has there been for Labour? Beckett and Cooper possibly? But that's about it.
Cooper has (I believe) ruled herself out for health reasons sadly.
Yes, I was thinking more about 2015 for an example of when there was a realistic option for a female leader.
"“You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs. That kind of thing matters”.
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
I have often thought that Labour’s women problem is somehow emblematic of the problems with the left’s approach to solving problems in general - i.e. that it focuses on fixing outcomes rather than causes because doing so is easier than addressing said causes. Because, in turn, those causes often have cultural roots that require answering difficult personal or political questions.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
We're dealing with a very small sample size. It might be that the Tories and Labour have an equal propensity to having a female PM, but it's just chance that the Tories are on 3 and Labour on 0.
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
I think this applies to the leadership stats too. I actually think the bigger issue for Labour is the talent doesn't seem to be female. Whatever one might think about Thatcher, May and Badenoch (let's leave the other one to one side...), they were very much decent options for the party. Who has there been for Labour? Beckett and Cooper possibly? But that's about it.
Odd thing is that radical feminist Mrs Thatcher, sfaict from this handy Wikipedia list of her ministers, appointed only two women to her Cabinets in her eleven years as Prime Minister, and both of those in the House of Lords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ministers_under_Margaret_Thatcher
On MP numbers, Labour are currently on 46% female with the Tories on 24%. This is also statistically significantly different, p = 0.000017. The Tories have the lowest proportion of female MPs in Parliament of any mainland party* except Restore.
Comments
"Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff has conceded that Labour failed to properly prepare for power in the run-up to its landslide general election win."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8j2e38zzgo
I am not re-entering this market, but given Labour’s longstanding women problem I think Andy Burnham might end up appointing a woman as Chancellor although I can understand why people might want to lump on Pat McFadden."
When you think about the fact that there are over 400 Labour MPs on the Government benches right now, what does it say about the current state of the Westminster Labour party when it decided it needed a former MP to be parachuted into Parliament via a by-election to make their current leader and PM to resign while they then sit back and allow him to crowned their new party leader and PM without even a contest? And then to even be considering parachuting another former Labour MP into the House of Lords to become the new Foreign Secretary?!
And lets not even get into Labour's long standing woman problem whereby over the last few decades they seem to have become a token equality PR exercise on the back benches and in the Cabinet while heaven forbid that one of them might finally be seen to be talented enough to be not only be considered but then elected as a Labour leader or PM. At this rate we might finally see a female US President before we see the Labour party elect a woman to lead their party.
And while the Labour party continue to go through the motions of performative activisim when it comes to claiming to be a progressive party they continue to be anything but while they keep selecting mediocre place men to the party leadership and token women to the Cabinet and backbenches. Say what you like about the Conservative party, but they designed a leadership frame work that awards achievement while ruthlessly making it far easier to oust failure while the Labour leadership framework achieves the exact opposite.
What ever you think of Margaret Thatcher, she will always remain an icon to me simple because as a teenager I watched her break the biggest political glass ceiling in UK politics to become leader of the Conservative party. But also back then if you had told me that nearly fifty years on the Labour party had still not managed to ever elect a female leader I would have been genuinely surprised, but now not so much....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm#Zip_guns
(For the record: I think discussing "gun violence" is a way of avoiding difficult issues. It would be better, though much harder, to discuss "fatherless violence".)
More recent ones are required to broadcast an ID which can be picked up by anyone with a phone.
https://www.caa.co.uk/drones/open-category/moving-on-to-more-advanced-flying/remote-id-rid/
A few drone operators are a bit concerned about this because anyone wanting to harass them (even if they are operating perfectly legally) will know where they are.
Fortunately I'm usually operating as UK0 which means I can avoid that until 2028, although if I haven't crashed it by then the device to enable remote ID will put it over the class weight.
As for stopping them - I have one from 2013 I made from a few motors and an arduino which can lift a lot more than a tiny DJI. There are no parts that are drone specific. I'm thinking of re-purposing it to bomb habitats with seeds rather than grenades.
A case where the need for deterrence overrides the need for rehabilitation.
Matt Goodwin
@GoodwinMJ
·
Jun 29
A citizenship that belongs to everybody belongs to no one.
If anybody can become British, or English, then Britishness & Englishness no longer exist.
If the only thing that defines a people is that they welcome others then they no longer exist, either.
The Conservatives have at this point had /three/ female prime ministers. (Yes, one of them was slightly batshit, but that’s even better evidence for their lack of sexism!) Labour? None.
Power is taken, not given: if you rely on someone else to grant you power then you don’t really have that power at all; it’s on loan & can be taken away from you at any time by the grantor. So it is with politicians & positions of power: they go to those who have the political power to take them. If Labour has been unable to appoint female politicians to high office, you can’t solve that problem by mandating appointments from amongst the few female politicians who do make it - all you are really doing is announcing that these people have no real power within the system & are dependent on others ceding power to them. If you decide to appoint them they will turn out to be toothless & ineffective because they have no actual power base to draw upon.
The interesting question is: why have no female politicians within the Labour party been able to take and hold (OK, 2 out 3) power in the way that Thatcher, May or Truss did? It’s entirely plausible that sexism is the answer, but it’s not the kind of sexism that the Party wants to acknowledge - it’s the sexism of a membership who don’t respect female politicians which in turn means that those female politicians cannot create a power base within the party which allows them to take power for themselves.
You cannot solve this with post-hoc thumb on the scales of political appointments because doing so ignores the real underlying power dynamics which exist whoever gets appointed.
(This analysis would probably make me persona non grata within the Party, which is why I would be a terrible politician.)
URENCO is going to enrich uranium as fuel on behalf of the UK MoD, Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister writes to their Parliament.
Although details are scarce, this implies progress in the plans to set up nuclear fuel production (HEU) at Capehurst.
The DiP has a 1.7 billion funding allocation to plans connected with the production of nuclear fuel. Projects to onshore nuclear fuel production have been in the works for a while but the MoD has been deliberately vague about it.
Even the DiP document only says "to explore options for reestablishing a nuclear fuel cycle for defence reactor fuel".
It's annoying that it takes a Dutch Minister writing to the dutch Parliament to have a clearer idea.
https://x.com/Gabriel64869839/status/2072655328827556078
If we take Thatcher as breaking the glass ceiling and consider PMs since her...
Conservative: 4M, 3F
Labour: 4M (shortly), 0F
That's not statistically significant (Fisher exact text, p = 0.26).
Someone more aligned to AB ie raising taxes on the rich will
Wasn't Morgan McSweeney part of the A team?
Since Thatcher there have been eleven appointed leaders of the Conservative party, of which 3 have been women. Over the same period, if we regard Burnham’s elevation as inevitable, there have been ten appointed leaders of the Labour party, none of whom have been women. (Two women have taken over the post as acting leader when the leader died or stepped down.)
Maybe I should ask my statistician offspring for some statistical tests to apply to these numbers
(It might be interesting to run the same analyses for cabinet post appointees.)
So /four/ out of eleven Conservative leaders have been female, whilst Labour has appointed zero out of ten.
You’re going to struggle to convince me that this isn’t evidence that the Labour Party has a problem appointing women to the leadership role.
If we're testing is Party A sexist... well, the numbers are still tiny. For the Conservative Party, 4/11 leaders gives an estimated proportion of female leaders = 36%, with a 95% confidence interval of 11-69%. We would naively expect 50% if the party is not sexist, so there's insufficient evidence here to claim the party is sexist.
Do that for Labour and 0/10 leaders and the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0% obviously, but with a 95% confidence interval of 0-31%. That is different from 50%, so perhaps that is evidence the party is sexist. However, I would argue that we know there was sexism in the past. Labour only got near to equal gender representation in the Parliamentary party in 2015 (and the Tories never have). Since then, we've had 4 Labour leaders (inc. Burnham), so again the estimated proportion of female leaders = 0%, but with a 95% confidence interval now of 0-60%. So there isn't evidence that the party is recently sexist in leader choice.
NB. If you redo the Fisher test with the actual number including Badenoch then you’ll fine the p-value is 0.09 for equal sexism between the parties. Getting a bit ... unlikely now isn’t it?
I agree the optics are bad, whatever the stats say. The stats can't say much because the numbers are small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ministers_under_Margaret_Thatcher
* DUP, TUV and UUP are lower.