The FishTank

Archive for June, 2009

Caroline Flint’s departure from the Cabinet seems to have started a spate of discussions about the glass ceiling. Some say there is still a conspiracy to keep women out of the top jobs; others that the biological imperative remains the true bar to progress. But is there another, subtler reason? Why, four decades after the pill, do we still not appear to have equal employment?
It’s certainly not education. Reports over the last years have suggested that girls are regularly outperforming boys in school. The reasons for this are manifold and poorly misrepresented as ‘girls are smarter than boys’ but the fact remains that, with the current mix of subjects and teaching methods, girls are scooping more of the prizes. Shouldn’t this translate into better career prospects?
In fact, evidence suggests that it does. Statistics suggest that, amongst the 18-30 category, women are – on average – paid more than men. This isn’t a like-for-like comparison, scoring women in a given role against men in the same role, but then neither are the statistics that say there is a pay gap: Harriet Harman’s claims of a 23% pay gap are largely predicated on the fact that more women work part time than men – and no sensible person would suggest that a woman working a few hours a week in a bar or a supermarket should be paid the same in total as a man who works forty hours as a teacher.
A detailed analysis may be inconvenient to Ms Harman’s gender-centric agenda, but it’s actually vitally important. Understanding where women are working may help to explain why they aren’t working in the – apparently much desired – boardroom jobs on which the whole glass ceiling concept is predicated. For example, if many women under thirty are actually working in small businesses, they have little prospect of being promoted onto the board of a completely different company. No more prospect, in fact, than the men who work in other smaller businesses.
So far so hypothetical, but given that some 80% of Britain’s GDP comes from small businesses, the raw statistics would suggest that there’s where those better paid young women are likely to be. The attractions are obvious: control of your own hours and destiny are vital to someone who doesn’t want to sacrifice their every waking moment for a pittance granted by a dictator who thinks there is nothing outside of their business that matters. Because, let’s be totally honest, that’s what it takes to rise to the top of a large company: you have to get yourself noticed as a ‘team-player’ and that invariably means demonstrating a willingness to put aside personal life in favour of personal ambition.
There are some women who do this. There are women in the top ranks of some FTSE companies. Not many, it’s true, but that doesn’t demonstrate that women can’t do it, simply that most don’t. Conventional wisdom dictates that this is because women want children, that somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties their biological clock takes precedence over the one on the boardroom wall. There’s something in that, of course, but what of those women who don’t have children? Why aren’t they in the boardrooms? Or what of those who somehow manage to have both? Where do they fit in?
It’s easy, living in our complex modern society, to believe human beings have gone beyond their animal origins. Animals don’t commute, they don’t clockwatch and they don’t have careers. But, scratch away at the designer labels of the business suits and every human being is still an animal underneath. Even if we don’t realise it, our animal traits still inform our thinking. Feminists tend to miss this point when they derisively ascribe the success of men in high-intensity industries to testosterone, but fail to recognise that maternal instincts prevent many women from putting aside family in favour of career. Underneath it all, genetics still matter.
And when you think about the societal groupings of mammals carefully, a lot begins to make sense. All mammal species have certain common traits. They tend to form tight family groups with two parents. One, usually the mother, takes the role of nurturing and defending the young. This makes them empathic, but aggressive when under fire. The other, usually male, parent is left to provide, requiring tenacity and a degree of aggression in acquiring prey. Natural selection favours those who excel in their given role and thus pre-programs one sex to act in a particular way and the other to be attracted to those who do it best.
Applying that to our modern world, you will see that women favour men who aspire, who are prepared to dominate in order to provide. This is as true in the boardroom as it once was in the hunting-ground, making rich or powerful men attractive despite what might be seen as physical deficiencies. It also means that men are more likely to aspire to be rich or powerful, putting themselves through a great deal of physical or psychological stress in order to make the grade and maximize their attractiveness.
Conversely, men tend not to be attracted to women in power. It’s not that men are afraid of powerful women, simply that a woman who usurps the bread-winning role is one who is more likely to put personal gain above the needs of her young. This means that natural selection tends to favour women who do not take risks to aspire to positions of authority.
All this might seem like stereotyping, but that’s precisely what natural selection is. Male greenfinches are green not because it’s fashionable, but because in their evolutionary niche female greenfinches will tend to avoid the ones who are less green. Many of the advances that have allowed women to avoid the roles in hearth and home have taken place relatively recently: the bicycle, the vaccuum cleaner and the pill are all products of a single hundred year period – a mere nanosecond in evolutionary time. People have changed as a result, but as the selection pressures fade it will take many generations before mutation produces a significant number of women with more interest in aspiration than family, and if they choose not to have family their genes will never become common.
So what does this mean in terms of policy? It means that the glass ceiling is largely self-imposed. Not entirely, of course – there is still some discrimination – but positive discrimination will not persuade women who lack aspiration to put themselves forward, merely allow forward those whose ability discriminates against them. You can’t force women with potential, to put themselves through the mill when they have no interest in it, so there’s no short-term fix for the problem. In the long-term, if we feel we want a society in which more women take top jobs, the right policies will be those which enable women to balance their time better, to have their children later and to have a decent work-life balance. There will also need to be policies that enable men to spend more time with their children without sacrificing their careers. This might mean society makes sacrifices – fewer hours worked – but if it leads to a happier, more balanced society, then it may actually boost productivity.
And where does all this leave Caroline Flint, minister with transparent portfolio, and what the Press call her L’Oreal promotion? Well, I don’t know the honourable member well enough to assess her abilities thoroughly, but I would say that the hopeless manner in which she has managed a succession of cabinet roles suggests not a woman who is being held back, but one who has been pushed too far forward. There are capable female politicians out there, but she’s not one of them and I think, if her promotions have been the result of positive discrimination, our current equal opportunities policy may need something of a rethink.

With political reform at least on the agenda for discussion at the moment (I remain unconvinced we’ll actually see any) now seems like a good time to start a series of pieces looking at what is wrong with our politics and, more importantly, what we can do to fix it. We start with one of the core problems of the last ten years – manifesto pledges.
Two accusations you will frequently have heard levelled at New Labour over the last ten years are that manifesto pledges have been broken or, conversely, that the Government has introduced a policy that, had it been in their manifesto, would have lost them votes. Sometimes these accusations are independent of each other, as with the fox hunting ban that took so long to enact, or the reform of the House of Lords that is still being promised now; sometimes the two are inately linked as with the imposition of student top-up fees – a policy in direct contravention of a specific manifesto pledge, or the rise in National Insurance that was used as a way of side-stepping a specific promise not to raise income tax. What is little understood is that the latter of these two accusations is not always true. Manifestos are huge bulging documents, deliberately designed to be too dense to read, allowing governments to claim a mandate for enacting policies that most voters will not have realised they have tacity endorsed.
In the real world, of course, politicians cannot restrict themselves to legislating only what they have promised. Had Iraq genuinely been on the verge of attacking us in 2003 it still would have required a parliamentary decision to take military action and it would have been wholly impractical to be forced to a general election or a referendum first. There is something to be said for true democracy being political impotence.
But there is also much to be said for politicians’ inability to distinguish between representing the electorate and ruling them. The deliberate obfuscation of policy promises is used, not because politicians are bound by their manifesto commitments, but because they want to claim a semblance of legitimacy for policies they are determined to enact regardless of public opinion. To the Browns and Blairs of this world it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether voters are opposed to a given policy – if the Labour Party could get them through the Commons soon enough after an election, the hope is that they will have become lost in spin before people had a chance to vote their endorsers out of office. The failure of the protest marches to prevent the Iraq war demonstrates just how little public opinion matters in the shaping of government policy.
So why make such chubby manifestos? The obvious answer is to deal with the real enemy – the enemy within. For political parties like Labour, the danger comes not from the public – or even the opposition benches, but from their own backbenches. Whilst many MPs are content to pass the time rubber-stamping whatever policy comes their way, never bothering to listen to – much less consult – their constituents, there are some who have that rarest of attributes – a political conscience. These are people who will stand with the opposition when they feel their government is doing the wrong thing. And it doesn’t matter how much the media smear them as rebels, they are actually doing what they are employed to do.
The trouble, of course, is that most MPs don’t read their own manifestos. When they go round canvassing for your vote, what an MP is technically doing is promoting the vision set out in their manifesto. Vote for me, they say, and this is what you get. Which means that if an MP is returned at a general election they are tacitly committing themselves to support anything their party leadership cares to put in the manifesto document – even if they haven’t read it. This is, in most cases, enough to deter rebellions.
It isn’t, however, enough to protect the public from bad policy. Parliament’s role is supposed to be to scruitinise and debate legislation. When a government floods the house with dense legislation, often smuggling extra details through in appendices which don’t even get debated; when they restrict the time in which MPs are allowed to argue the points; that’s when they strip away our liberties. A piece of legislation going through the house at the moment, for example, gives the police the power to confiscate personal property prior to a charge being brought, thus effectively allowing the police to commit smash and grab raids without so much as suspicion of guilt. Earlier legislation has allowed baliffs automatic access to property with much the same effect. This kind of politics, fundamentally, is the cause of the gradual decay of our civil liberties in recent years. We need constitutional measures to prevent it.
How do we do this?
Firslty, we need smaller manifestoes. A manifesto should be a statement of a party’s direction in broad terms the public can understand. It can make specific pledges, but these should be in language that is clear, simple and not subject to misinterpretation. MPs should be able to view the manifesto before deciding whether or not they are prepared to stand on the basis of what it contains, and be able to make the choice to leave their party if agreement cannot be reached.
Once an election has been fought and won, the next important element is that backbench MPs should be given proper time to consult and debate. Acts of Parliament should be presented to the house in their entirety – not with supplements sidestepping the debating chamber – and MPs should be allowed to send back legislation on which they cannot achieve clear agreement – without the threat of the whips. If something was clearly in the manifesto, then there needs to be a clear reason why an MP who endorsed it should vote against it, but there should be allowance made for fresh information or changes of circumstance.
Finally, all legislation should have the chance of recall. If, after going into the field a piece of legislation is found to be ineffective or open to abuse, backbench MPs should be free to table motions to repeal them. Such debates would have to take their turn, but if a government isn’t filling time with pointless legislation this should be perfectly possible.
Finally, we need to change our thinking about government. It is not good government to pass laws every day of the week, to create thousands of new criminal offences that are impossible to police. Scott Adams makes a good point in his Dilbert books when he says that if a company is running well there should not be much management to be done. The same is true of a country. We need a shift in our perception to realise that if a government is legislating endlessly it probably means it doesn’t know what it is doing. Good government is lite government and we should be wary of MPs with too many promises.

After a lengthy sabbatical, the FishTank is back, attempting to go beyond other blogs by daring to be constructive about as well as critical of our society. Since the political landscape of the last few weeks has been somewhat littered with the corpses of Westminster’s cosy assumptions, it’s a little hard to know which particular beast to bury first. Should I assault the duck houses and lay siege to the moated manors of the Conservatives, flip my lid about Labour’s taxpayer-funded attempts to profit from the property market or run with Vince Cable’s hunt as he calls for the head of Alistair Darling? Perhaps that’s too easy. I start today, therefore, with a look at Nick Clegg’s new old idea – proportional representation. Is it, as some believe, a panacea for all our political ills, or is it just a cynical ploy by a party who see it as their only way into power?

One thing it certainly isn’t is an obvious way out of the expenses fiasco. It’s hard to see how the representative balance of Wesminster could influence the venality of its incumbents. So why bring it up now? It’s clear that in shifting the debate, Nick Clegg has displayed an opportunism of which – let’s be honest – none of us believed him capable. And he has led the reform agenda: Cameron was quick to follow with his own initiatives, Brown slowly followed with his vague aphorisms about commitees to investigate possible future reform; everybody has taken the chance to leap onto the passing bandwagon in the hope it might bear them out from the dangerous country in which they find themselves.

Of course it won’t do that either. Wesminster may be blind to the fact, but the nature and intensity of public anger over the expenses is a new and dangerous thing. People who never even batted an eyelid over the Iraq war, who may not have even bothered to vote in 1997; these people are talking politics as never before. And they aren’t happy.

Yes, most people already suspected MPs of being dodgy, but to have it confirmed – and on such a scale – is like having suspicions about your daughter’s sex-life confirmed by finding her blue movie debut in the local Blockbuster. And whilst even if an MP did admit fault, apologise and give the money back it might not quiet the clamour, the insistences of MPs that everything was ‘within the rules’ serves only to intensify it. People are livid. And these are people who, whilst hardly political sophisticates, nonetheless fail to see any connection between how their MPs are elected and how deeply their snouts are in the trough.

But that’s not to say it’s a bad time to look at the issue. Certain ideas, such as the right of recall, do have a certain attraction at a time when people are desperate to wreak revenge on people who see political office as little more than an expense account. Redressing the balance of power between the Prime Minister and Westminster, as David Cameron suggests, also sounds positive in the light of the presidential Blair and Brown tenures.

Proportional Representation is not quite so obvious. For those who don’t know the system, it works something like this: people cast their votes at election not for a person, but a party. On the surface this doesn’t seem much different to what happens now: most people have little engagement with their local MP and vote based on what they see or read about the more prominent party members – usually the leadership. Where PR differs is that, when the votes are counted, it is not the local MP who benefits. Instead, parties operate lists either regionally or nationally, and MPs are selected from these lists to serve in accordance with the proportion of votes cast. If voters are allowed to cast more than one preference, their second and third choices may also have some impact on the numbers elected.

And this is why it’s attractive to Nick Clegg. In election after election, the Lib Dems have come second in seats up and down the country, whether because people want to protest at the sitting member, or because they genuinely want the Lib Dems to win. On paper, PR would increase the number of Lib Dem MPs significantly, possibly even creating a semi-permanent Lib Dem majority.

On paper. Because voting intentions are a bit more complicated than that. Like particles in quantum physics, people alter their actions based on how those actions are observed. Someone who might vote Lib Dem in protest might reconsider if they thought it could actually make a difference. In all likelihood the Lib Dems would see significant gains in their first election under PR; it’s what they did with that advantage determines whether the advantage would remain.

But even that would, we are told, be an improvement. Under ‘First Past the Post’ we have had nothing but Conservative and Labour governments, after all. This can’t be representative of the will of the people. People living in safe seats do nothing to alter the stability of the government, whilst those few in marginals have all the say.

Only that’s not strictly true, of course. The reason we appear to have a two-party system is simply that the debate of the age is generally fairly one-dimensional, whether it is Protestant against Catholic, as in the Seventeenth Century, landed gentry against mercantile interests as in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth or the working masses against oppressive industry as in the early to mid-twentieth. In all of these cases the era’s politics have been very much them and us. Even in the last few years, the debate has been mostly framed in terms of upholding public services against reducing the tax burden. In such a system any third party would struggle to find an unique voice.

Which is why it took the Labour Party so long to achieve government. The collapse of the Liberal Party – Nick Clegg’s forebears – in the 1920’s created a climate in which the political axis could be blown over. Suddenly, the opposition were the Labour Party with an empowerment agenda for the working class. The Tories were forced to change their own approach to deal with it or risk appearing irrelevant. When Labour went into the wildnerness in 1979, a Lib Dem party who managed to frame a relevant debate could have been the party to take office in 1997 instead of Tony Blair’s rebranded New Labour juggernaut. Even four years ago, when the Conservatives had just lost another election and were being treated as irrelevant; if, then, the Lib Dems had gone on the offensive over civil liberties and political reform, they could have caught the public mood and, by now, be on course for number 10.

So would things be better under PR? Probably not. If you have a government of factions and interest groups what tends to happen is that the issue lacks narrative. Shifting coalitions based on internal politicking lead not to constructive policy based on a central idea, but to a weather-vane following whichever way the political wind seems to be blowing. Europe, where PR is a more potent force, has attempted to address this by finding bigger issues that can seize the narrative voice by the jugular (one of the reasons for climate change politics in the EU), but even this has failed to override the various conflicting interests and what little consensus there was has fallen apart under the bigger issue of global recession.

Nick Clegg probably knows all this. PR is, for him, a means to an end and, if Labour do follow the polls into third place after the next general election, you can guarantee the subject will slowly die away. Cynical? Perhaps. But consider this: the right of recall is another Clegg attempt to steal headlines. It sounds great: if five percent of an MPs constituents are unhappy they can demand a bye-election. Now consider this: if we have PR and MPs are chosen from shortlists by party leadership based on votes across the country, which five percent of the people need to vote to get which MP out? The Lib Dems are often criticised for their inconsistency, but this must be the first time they’ve tried to sell us a policy that is actually mutally contradictory.