The ‘progressive left’ puts its misogyny on show
Just as the General Synod seemed to be talking some sense on the issues of women, gay clergy and science, along comes Revd Mark Oden to spoil things. The curate at St Nicholas Church, Sevenoaks used last Sunday’s sermon to call on wives to be quiet and demure, and blamed modern women for the breakdown of some marriages, saying.
“We know marriage is not working. Wives; submit to your own husbands.”
I thought that we’d moved on from wives deferring to their husbands. Certainly it’s unusual now to canvass a woman who invites her woman to the door to answer for her. Both my husband and I are local councillors and we sometimes disagree – occasionally in public. Thankfully we are both LibDems, but as we were brought together by the party’s Federal executive, that’s to be expected.
Currently the country’s most famous politically split couple is the Bercows: he a Conservative MP and Speaker of the House and she a left-wing Labour procepctive councillor and probably soon to be parliamentary andidate. Those members of the Conservative Party who hate Mr Bercow have kept harping on about this ‘mixed marriage’, seemingly believing that Sally B shouldn’t hold her own views and if she does, should demurely keep silent. The leading protagonist in this vacuous vendetta has been the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries, who has the political standing of Sarah Palin.
But it seems that the Left can put on just as good a display of misogyny as the Right. Over at today’s Left Foot Forward is a condemnation of a front page story by Daily Express journalist Sarah O’Grady, which picks up on crass and insensitive remarks made yesterday by Housing Minister John Healey. I don’t suppose the Daily Express ever has a front page headline that the ‘progressive left’ can sign up to. But LFF makes no attempt to address the issue, instead resorting to justifying Healey’s remarks with a comparison to 1992 levels of repossession and by suggesting that the article is biased, because the author’s husband is a Conservative MP.
Left Foot Forward states that it is a ‘non-partisan’. ‘political blog for progressives’, providing ‘evidence-based analysis on British politics, news and policy developments’. You could have fooled me. This is a defensive, partisan, regressive posting, where almost the only ‘evidence’ is the political affiliation of the author’s husband. Maybe we could all agree that John Healey said something rather foolish and regrettable and that a woman should be able to think independently of her husband. Or does all sign of progressive politics fly out of the window when there’s an election on the way?
Related posts:
- The Daily Mail – where misogyny sells
- Misogyny and sexism: alive and well and living next door to the Home Secretary
- Vote Clegg: get Maggie’s support?
Comments
14 February 2010, 2:15 pm
Hi Sara,
Let me address your concerns, let us look at the evidence.
1. She has a go at Healey’s expenses. Would she have written article criticising her husbands expense claims?
Let me just re-iterate what they were:
- £2,545 in solicitors’ fees
- a £2,412 initial mortgage charge
- £1,836 in mortgage broker fees
- £1,430 for the installation of security gates at the house
- carpentry bills
- repairs to his television aerial
- £1,145.63 solicitors’ conveyancing costs
- £1,336 in mortgage fees
- £775 for plumbing work in his “summer room”
- £705 for a survey
- £600 to his building society
- £435 for insurance
- more than £1,300 for “household expenditure” from John Lewis
- bedding
- kitchenware
- lightbulbs
- £200 for a new refrigerator
- £3,000 for a “100 per cent wool berber carpet” for the house
- £741 for a king-size bed
Would she have written an article about this? I suspect not, seeing as how she’s benefitted greatly from most, if not all, of the above.
2. In the event of the Tories winning the election and her husband becoming a Minister, would she write an article about the Tory housing renewal minister (her husband) as full of inaccuracies and dripping with rage as she her post about the Labour housing minister (Healey)?
3. The facts about repossessions. Let me just repeat what I said in my article:
• In 1991, 75,500 properties were repossessed (0.77% of all mortgages) – in 2009, 46,000 properties were repossessed (0.43%)
• In 1992, 350,000 househoulds were in arrears (3.6% of mortgages) – in 2009, 188,330 househoulds were in arrears (2.5%)
We’ve got more on how the Express and O’Grady operate to come.