This page includes additional material from the Politics Academy for your interest. The Academy exists to promote discussion and interest beyond the curriculum. Below are two contributions from former students. Sophie's article won her a day in Parliament with Lorely Burt MP.
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Politics Academy lectures by Dr Pete Kerr and Dr Emma Foster at the University of Birmingham
Why there should be more women in Parliament
By Sophie McHale
Once again, feminism is on the rise, and this time it will not be defeated by criticisms of misandry or powerlessness. Across Europe, musicians like Pussy Riot, activists like Femen and politicians are uniting in their quest for gender equality. The UK’s political structure should reflect this struggle by making parliament’s gender balance equal for the following reasons.
Firstly, women are more likely to represent female interests, whereas a chamber dominated by men will see key issues like the glass ceiling, rape laws, abortion laws, childcare, female genital mutilation and page 3 swept under the rug.
Secondly, women govern in a different way. Perhaps a stereotype, but politicians like Harriet Harman are far less likely to engage in “Punch and Judy” politics, and are more likely to co-operate and negotiate rather than throwing aggressive slurs across the despatch box. This does not make women weak; this makes them more efficient in their job, and would change the disposition of parliament for the better.
Thirdly, women have made great progress in parliament. They have stood in forceful positions like Prime Minister and Speaker of the House of Commons. Women can be powerful in parliament and make substantial changes, but they must hold more than 25% of the seats in order to make a real difference to the lives of women in the UK.
Having a minority of women in Parliament weakens our stance as a gender, and undermines our problems, which are equal to those of men. We no longer live in a Victorian, misogynistic society and the presence of women in politics must reflect this and honour those who have fought for our equality throughout history
A Magna Carta for 2015
By Jack Tracey
As I write, a small gaggle of lawyers are preparing to take Chris Grayling MP to court. In breaking the lance with this former Lord Chancellor, these men and women are using Magna Carta in order to oppose his reforms to Legal Aid, arguing that they, in essence, do away with the concept of equality before the law, instead allowing for the sale of justice to the highest bidder. It is really rather beautiful, rather wonderful, that something 800 years old can still carry such resonance and such power today.
At first sight, however, Magna Carta is by no means a remarkable artefact. It is not a particularly glamourous document; it is not adorned with illustrations or fine calligraphy. Its dense Latin text is squeezed onto a singular piece of parchment not much bigger than a sheet of A4. (Isn’t it strange how everything that is good and magnificent in the world is slightly smaller than you expect. I have no idea why you are laughing…). But even if what we find isn’t quite what we think of, it is what we think of that matters most. Magna Carta represents some sense of freedom and equality, of justice and of harmony. And even if a full legal examination of the text revealed that it doesn’t really deliver those things (which, in fact, it does more than most people think), the idea of Magna Carta remains incredibly important to the British mind, and to the minds of our friends overseas.
Today, the challenges we face are as great as those met by the 13th century freemen who forced Magna Carta on a reluctant King. Needless to say, such challenges as we face presently are markedly different in scale and complexity, and to some extent in their nature and causality too. Wouldn’t it be interesting, then, to amend the Magna Carta for the contemporary world? What changes would we make? What rights and liberties would be enshrine? For what it’s worth (in an admittedly astonishing display of self-importance), I have settled on a couple of suggestions in order to tackle two of the most difficile issues of modern times.
In 2014, Oxfam published a report entitled “For the Few” in which it was revealed that the 85 richest people on the planet possessed the same wealth as the poorest half of the population – 3.5 billion people. By this year, that number had fallen; it now stands at 80. Wealth is increasingly accruing to the few. In the 5 minutes or so it takes to read this short piece, the wealth of those 80 people will increase by over £2 million (maybe the answer is for me to write less). But this is a far cry from the values that inspired Magna Carta and the pantheon of social reformers that came subsequently –Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Emmeline Pankhurst, William Blake; they took a very different perspective. The leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, gave voice to this view in The New Law of Righteousness (1649) in which he asked:
Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
Here, the UK fairs particularly poorly. The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world with 5 families sharing the total wealth of the poorest 13 million. And this at a time when real wages are falling, job security is low, and over a million people are forced to turn to food banks up and down the country every single day (all of which shows no sign of abating any time soon). This is not only inhumane, it’s inefficient. Take the great architect of modern capitalism Adam Smith, who asserted in The Wealth of Nations that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable”. As a nation, we are wasting our human potential, stifling our progress towards a general and lasting prosperity.
Do not make the mistake, however, of believing this inequity pertains only to financial matters. Extreme disparities in material wellbeing breed health inequality, educational inequality, legal inequality, and political inequality. Right-wingers, Tories, and die-hard monetarists – those sections of society with some essential part of their soul missing – like to imagine the nation as one, tremendous harbour; the wealth of the few being the tide that raises all ships to opulence. The problem here is that if you seek only maintain the super-yachts (as has been the case since the Thatcher/ Reagan epoch) you may well find that the working-boats have fallen into disrepair and are sinking.
A more holistic approach is needed; one that recognises that one person’s prosperity does not require another’s poverty. Go back to the time of Magna Carta, and you will find that the word ‘wealth’ was synonymous with ‘wellbeing’. We need now to restore that kind of philosophy, where a nation’s wealth and wellbeing are one and the same. I would then, today, urge a new Magna Carta commitment to a more equal society, one that does now allow for extremes of wealth and increasing inequality to undermine the opportunities of the many. Here, we need a fairer tax system, both domestically and internationally, and we need the power to enforce it. We need public services for the benefit of the people who need them, and not for the profiteers who seek their dismantling for personal gain. We need a ‘living wage’, not just a legal minimum that condemns so many households to the afflictions of in-work poverty. We need to understand that every disparity I have thus far spoken about is all the more severe for women and girls. And, crucially, we need to innovate how we govern ourselves.
Here, Magna Carta, it seems to me, had nothing to say for women. The rights and liberties granted by Magna Carta were the sole preserve of men. Women did not even warrant a secondary consideration. It is, of course, not alone in this regard. Think about, for a moment, the American Constitution (I know, as if you were thinking about it already). It is often said that it was founded on the Mayflower Compact – a document from 1620 carried aboard the Mayflower as it sailed from Plymouth to Cape Cod. Upon their arrival, the Pilgrim Fathers (or Saints as they humbly referred to themselves as) decided they were going to govern in a completely new way; ‘New Plymouth’ was going to be run democratically. There were 102 people on board that ship, yet only 41 signed the compact. Now who do you suppose was left off this document? Who voices were quelled in this new ‘democratic’ world? The women (2 of whom gave birth during the voyage and quite frankly, to my mind, should’ve been put in charge for having endured such a trial).
Since then (and woe betide the soul that dare accuse me of inflating the issue) we have not improved much. Women make up only 22% of parliamentarians globally. Not one women, not one has ever been Secretary-General of the United Nations or President of the United States. In Britain, women hold less than 16% of directorships in the 100 largest listed-companies. In countries across the Middle East – including Brunei, the UEA, and Saudi Arabia – women are even barred from the right vote. And perhaps most shocking of all, in war, until 1945 85% of all casualties were soldiers; that statistic is now true for women and girls.
There is a lot that right about to the world, to be sure; there also happens to be a lot that is wrong – this is plain to anyone with even the meanest concern for human society. The oppression of the fairer sex would certainly count amongst the latter. But how do we change this? The answer, for me, a simple one: we must move for equal representation amongst the sexes, both in Parliament and in the boardroom. This is not a call for the mass purging on men from public and private office, but a simple, common sense acknowledgment that the time for women to take their seat at the top table is long overdue (about 800 years overdue as it happens). We think about things in different ways; we approach problems in different ways. We can ill-afford to be blinded by the chauvinism that has plagued out development for centuries. The innovation we desperately require in government and in business will only come if we tap into the thus far neglected talents and energies of women around the world. Why do I think this? Well, there is a really rather good example from Iceland and a company called Audur Capital that goes some way to explaining. A financial services company established in 2007 by two women – Halla Tomasdottir and Kristin Petursdottir – they decided they were going to ‘do business’ rather differently to the accepted practices of the time. Firstly, they said they wouldn’t invest in anything they didn’t understand (so simple isn’t is). They did not invest in the sub-prime mortgages market; could you find a male CEO would could explain it once it had collapsed? No, of course you couldn’t. They also said they were going to tell their customers about the negatives as well as the positives regarding a particular market or investment; they were not going to simply spin a rose-tinted yarn in order to earn a quick buck. And, importantly, they said they were going to measure their investments in a new way. Ardur Capital does not measure the value of its investments solely by the balance-sheet; they search not just for economic profit but for sustainability and the social profit. This very basic philosophy has, of course, had its male proponents. In 1968 when Robert Kennedy was standing for President, he said that we must stop measuring the world by its gross national product – it measure neither out wit, nor courage, nor the health of our children. To the male dominated spheres of business and politics, this concept has become somewhat of an anathema, forgotten and replaced in the name of ‘economic credibility’. And yet, in the 21st century, we find two female pioneers of the financial world bringing the ideas of Kennedy, Paine, and others to a modern audience, successfully marrying the notion of economic credibility with social sustainability in what seems to me a fresh and wholly admirable way. (I should mention here, too, that when the banks collapsed in 2008, Audur Capital were the only company in Iceland that didn’t lose their clients’ money; the only company).
If we are to confront the challenges we face as a society, we must call upon all the resources at our disposal. This demands the equal representation of women. I would then, today, urge support for a second Magna Carta commitment, requiring that the houses of parliament and the boardrooms of the city will cease to be the echo chambers of the male elites, instead throwing their doors open to the voices of women and girls, who, by their energies and talents, will together with a sprinkling of good men innovate for a better and more just future for all.
To return to the dreams of one of our ancestors and founders of the American Republic, Thomas Paine:
When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want … When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government.
A more equal society and the representation of women – a Magna Carta for 2015.
By Jack Tracey
As I write, a small gaggle of lawyers are preparing to take Chris Grayling MP to court. In breaking the lance with this former Lord Chancellor, these men and women are using Magna Carta in order to oppose his reforms to Legal Aid, arguing that they, in essence, do away with the concept of equality before the law, instead allowing for the sale of justice to the highest bidder. It is really rather beautiful, rather wonderful, that something 800 years old can still carry such resonance and such power today.
At first sight, however, Magna Carta is by no means a remarkable artefact. It is not a particularly glamourous document; it is not adorned with illustrations or fine calligraphy. Its dense Latin text is squeezed onto a singular piece of parchment not much bigger than a sheet of A4. (Isn’t it strange how everything that is good and magnificent in the world is slightly smaller than you expect. I have no idea why you are laughing…). But even if what we find isn’t quite what we think of, it is what we think of that matters most. Magna Carta represents some sense of freedom and equality, of justice and of harmony. And even if a full legal examination of the text revealed that it doesn’t really deliver those things (which, in fact, it does more than most people think), the idea of Magna Carta remains incredibly important to the British mind, and to the minds of our friends overseas.
Today, the challenges we face are as great as those met by the 13th century freemen who forced Magna Carta on a reluctant King. Needless to say, such challenges as we face presently are markedly different in scale and complexity, and to some extent in their nature and causality too. Wouldn’t it be interesting, then, to amend the Magna Carta for the contemporary world? What changes would we make? What rights and liberties would be enshrine? For what it’s worth (in an admittedly astonishing display of self-importance), I have settled on a couple of suggestions in order to tackle two of the most difficile issues of modern times.
In 2014, Oxfam published a report entitled “For the Few” in which it was revealed that the 85 richest people on the planet possessed the same wealth as the poorest half of the population – 3.5 billion people. By this year, that number had fallen; it now stands at 80. Wealth is increasingly accruing to the few. In the 5 minutes or so it takes to read this short piece, the wealth of those 80 people will increase by over £2 million (maybe the answer is for me to write less). But this is a far cry from the values that inspired Magna Carta and the pantheon of social reformers that came subsequently –Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Emmeline Pankhurst, William Blake; they took a very different perspective. The leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, gave voice to this view in The New Law of Righteousness (1649) in which he asked:
Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
Here, the UK fairs particularly poorly. The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world with 5 families sharing the total wealth of the poorest 13 million. And this at a time when real wages are falling, job security is low, and over a million people are forced to turn to food banks up and down the country every single day (all of which shows no sign of abating any time soon). This is not only inhumane, it’s inefficient. Take the great architect of modern capitalism Adam Smith, who asserted in The Wealth of Nations that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable”. As a nation, we are wasting our human potential, stifling our progress towards a general and lasting prosperity.
Do not make the mistake, however, of believing this inequity pertains only to financial matters. Extreme disparities in material wellbeing breed health inequality, educational inequality, legal inequality, and political inequality. Right-wingers, Tories, and die-hard monetarists – those sections of society with some essential part of their soul missing – like to imagine the nation as one, tremendous harbour; the wealth of the few being the tide that raises all ships to opulence. The problem here is that if you seek only maintain the super-yachts (as has been the case since the Thatcher/ Reagan epoch) you may well find that the working-boats have fallen into disrepair and are sinking.
A more holistic approach is needed; one that recognises that one person’s prosperity does not require another’s poverty. Go back to the time of Magna Carta, and you will find that the word ‘wealth’ was synonymous with ‘wellbeing’. We need now to restore that kind of philosophy, where a nation’s wealth and wellbeing are one and the same. I would then, today, urge a new Magna Carta commitment to a more equal society, one that does now allow for extremes of wealth and increasing inequality to undermine the opportunities of the many. Here, we need a fairer tax system, both domestically and internationally, and we need the power to enforce it. We need public services for the benefit of the people who need them, and not for the profiteers who seek their dismantling for personal gain. We need a ‘living wage’, not just a legal minimum that condemns so many households to the afflictions of in-work poverty. We need to understand that every disparity I have thus far spoken about is all the more severe for women and girls. And, crucially, we need to innovate how we govern ourselves.
Here, Magna Carta, it seems to me, had nothing to say for women. The rights and liberties granted by Magna Carta were the sole preserve of men. Women did not even warrant a secondary consideration. It is, of course, not alone in this regard. Think about, for a moment, the American Constitution (I know, as if you were thinking about it already). It is often said that it was founded on the Mayflower Compact – a document from 1620 carried aboard the Mayflower as it sailed from Plymouth to Cape Cod. Upon their arrival, the Pilgrim Fathers (or Saints as they humbly referred to themselves as) decided they were going to govern in a completely new way; ‘New Plymouth’ was going to be run democratically. There were 102 people on board that ship, yet only 41 signed the compact. Now who do you suppose was left off this document? Who voices were quelled in this new ‘democratic’ world? The women (2 of whom gave birth during the voyage and quite frankly, to my mind, should’ve been put in charge for having endured such a trial).
Since then (and woe betide the soul that dare accuse me of inflating the issue) we have not improved much. Women make up only 22% of parliamentarians globally. Not one women, not one has ever been Secretary-General of the United Nations or President of the United States. In Britain, women hold less than 16% of directorships in the 100 largest listed-companies. In countries across the Middle East – including Brunei, the UEA, and Saudi Arabia – women are even barred from the right vote. And perhaps most shocking of all, in war, until 1945 85% of all casualties were soldiers; that statistic is now true for women and girls.
There is a lot that right about to the world, to be sure; there also happens to be a lot that is wrong – this is plain to anyone with even the meanest concern for human society. The oppression of the fairer sex would certainly count amongst the latter. But how do we change this? The answer, for me, a simple one: we must move for equal representation amongst the sexes, both in Parliament and in the boardroom. This is not a call for the mass purging on men from public and private office, but a simple, common sense acknowledgment that the time for women to take their seat at the top table is long overdue (about 800 years overdue as it happens). We think about things in different ways; we approach problems in different ways. We can ill-afford to be blinded by the chauvinism that has plagued out development for centuries. The innovation we desperately require in government and in business will only come if we tap into the thus far neglected talents and energies of women around the world. Why do I think this? Well, there is a really rather good example from Iceland and a company called Audur Capital that goes some way to explaining. A financial services company established in 2007 by two women – Halla Tomasdottir and Kristin Petursdottir – they decided they were going to ‘do business’ rather differently to the accepted practices of the time. Firstly, they said they wouldn’t invest in anything they didn’t understand (so simple isn’t is). They did not invest in the sub-prime mortgages market; could you find a male CEO would could explain it once it had collapsed? No, of course you couldn’t. They also said they were going to tell their customers about the negatives as well as the positives regarding a particular market or investment; they were not going to simply spin a rose-tinted yarn in order to earn a quick buck. And, importantly, they said they were going to measure their investments in a new way. Ardur Capital does not measure the value of its investments solely by the balance-sheet; they search not just for economic profit but for sustainability and the social profit. This very basic philosophy has, of course, had its male proponents. In 1968 when Robert Kennedy was standing for President, he said that we must stop measuring the world by its gross national product – it measure neither out wit, nor courage, nor the health of our children. To the male dominated spheres of business and politics, this concept has become somewhat of an anathema, forgotten and replaced in the name of ‘economic credibility’. And yet, in the 21st century, we find two female pioneers of the financial world bringing the ideas of Kennedy, Paine, and others to a modern audience, successfully marrying the notion of economic credibility with social sustainability in what seems to me a fresh and wholly admirable way. (I should mention here, too, that when the banks collapsed in 2008, Audur Capital were the only company in Iceland that didn’t lose their clients’ money; the only company).
If we are to confront the challenges we face as a society, we must call upon all the resources at our disposal. This demands the equal representation of women. I would then, today, urge support for a second Magna Carta commitment, requiring that the houses of parliament and the boardrooms of the city will cease to be the echo chambers of the male elites, instead throwing their doors open to the voices of women and girls, who, by their energies and talents, will together with a sprinkling of good men innovate for a better and more just future for all.
To return to the dreams of one of our ancestors and founders of the American Republic, Thomas Paine:
When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want … When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government.
A more equal society and the representation of women – a Magna Carta for 2015.