Bollocks.

Update: it’s always worth reading Abortion Clinic Days, about the experiences of two women that work in an abortion clinic in the US. Their perspective and commitment to the work is always, ultimately, uplifting.

Update: this article, from yesterday’s New York Times, has an interesting overview of the upcoming controversies that the court will have to deal with.

(just in case there was any doubt about that from any quarters) …but I hate their dreadful additional member list voting system for the Assembly.

“If list members are in any doubt about what their role should be, they have only to consult Leanne Wood’s magic memo, or the additional list Members’ bible, as it is known. She set out with great clarity her golden rules on how list Members should abuse the system: avoid casework at all costs; misuse the staffing allowance to benefit the party; locate the office not for the needs of the people, but in the interests of the party; and, of course, attend events only if it is in the interests of the party - if in doubt, send a pro forma letter of rejection. There is a problem in with the system. List Members of any party - even Labour list Members, if there were any - would be drawn to that approach because the system allows and even encourages them to behave in such a manner. The system is wrong and should be changed”

Mark Tami MP, during the Government of Wales Bill debate. (via Lee)

To think some people actually want that roving member-at-large system across the whole of the UK…

In a startling display of Antonia being up-to-date, I’ve noticed that lots of people are upset that Radio 4 are getting rid of the UK theme (listen here). There’s even a protest website here. And whilst I’m rarely up at that time, as I’m not a freak, a farmer or a postal worker, the UK theme does have fond election day memories of those 6am musters. Feet stamping, hurry up and get these out, see you for a fry-up in a couple of hours. Won’t be the same without it.

Talking of pro-choice Guardian columnists, today’s Zoe Williams piece is a corker:

People who use time limits to push an anti-abortion agenda are fixing on the most vulnerable, traumatised people they could possibly find, and trying to legislate against them. I cannot conceive of a more cowardly position.

PS: she also has a go at our friend Evan too - well, you wouldn’t expect me not to post it, would you?!

In July last year, Evan Harris, health spokesman for the Lib Dems, called for a committee on foetal viability. He’s more sensible than Laurence Robertson, Tory MP for Tewkesbury, who in May 2005 called for a ban on abortion altogether. Harris was also more sensible than Liam Fox, who very briefly flirted in the Tory leadership election with the idea of reducing time limits to 12 weeks. The Liberal Democrat was more sensible than Michael Howard, for that matter, who, prior to the general election, let it be known (via Cosmopolitan magazine), that he’d like to see the limit reduced to 20 weeks. This was underpinned by no new information on foetal viability at all. He just scratched around for a number that conveyed distaste for the business of abortion, without being so bold as to lose any pro-choice votes over it.

Still, for all the people Evan Harris was more sensible than, this is still not a sensible proposition.

I loved living in Gwaelod-y-Garth in south Wales, but one of the things I don’t miss is the all-round crapness of the Welsh media. So it’s no surprise the Western Mail is happy to print bilge like this:

Personally, I have to say that I don’t think gay men make good party leaders or Prime Ministers. This has nothing to do with what they do in bed but everything to do with their lives in general. [...]
Their lifestyles are too divorced from the norm. They are not better or worse, but they are different.
Gay men face challenges of their own, but they do not face those associated with having children which is the way most of us live. I have gay friends whose biggest headache is whether to have a black sofa or a cream one. If they have a child it is a dog.
My gay friends have not sat in accident and emergency with a small child. They have not had to make the decision over whether to give them MMR. They have not struggled to get their child statemented or gone through the schools’ appeals process.
Without these experiences at the sharp end of our public services, they do not know how they function. This makes them completely out of their depth in administering them. In the same way that career politicians, those who have never had a real job but climbed the greasy pole by way of think-tanks and speech writing, are not equipped to make laws for the rest of us, so I think gay men are ill-suited to representing the interests of the population in general. However much I love my gay friends, I don’t want them running the country.

Who’s saying this? Step forward Lowri Turner, star columnist for that provincial rag and national telly regular. (via Rob)

Is anyone surprised that The Observer can run a poll and find that “47 per cent of women believe the legal limit for an abortion should be cut from its present 24 weeks”?

On the anti-choice side are several major national newspapers, plus the Evening Standard which has a habit of putting “dancing foetuses” on their front page; the clergy and hierarchy of several major religions; a plethora of anti-choice networks, who dress up their agenda under a veil of caring for women and regularly go into schools to hand out badges representing the feet of foetuses to impressionable young women.

On the pro-choice side, there’s a couple of underfunded pressure groups, such as Education for Choice and Abortion Rights; the odd columnist for the Guardian; an arthouse movie about the bad old days; a couple of student and trade union women’s officers; and some women MPs.

Have you ever read a true life story about a woman who had an abortion, found that was the right choice for her, and carried on her life? No; the media insist every abortion is a trauma, and a secret shameful one at that. One of the best ways we could mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act next year would be by persuading the Guardian to publish a list of women who had had abortions, and were willing to say publicly: that was the right choice for me.

Tom and Philobiblon also have great posts on this subject.

I don’t like Simon Hughes. Not at all. I mean, he’s a Lib Dem who gained his seat through dubious means and at the very least profited from homophobia. I also know someone who would be a much better MP for North Southwark and Bermondsey.

If you think I’m about to say, “but today I feel sorry for him”, then this really isn’t going where you think. Cos today, I’m even less impressed than ever. Thanks for demeaning my relationship and my life and those of my friends, Simon, by your insistent denials of your “homosexuality” or your dalliances with men or whatever it was. Thanks for insisting on your - and by extension, our - right to privacy, as if being gay were something to be ashamed of. As if I get a right not to have the heterosexuality of my colleagues, their partners and baby photos in my face all day. (I wouldn’t want to live in that world, my colleagues are lovely etc etc, but you get my point.)

Of course, his bad behaviour doesn’t excuse the hideousness of the reaction of our press, which has been virulent this week. And to think I thought we’d moved on, judging by the reception given to civil partnerships in December. Oh well. Two steps forward, one step back.

Anyone see this piece of nonsense in the Guardian earlier in the week?

Gay men earn £10k more than national average
The true power of the pink pound was revealed today with the publication of a survey of gay men and women’s earnings suggesting they outstrip the straight salary by up to £10,000 a year. [...]
Gay men in full-time jobs earn on average £34,200 a year, compared with the national average for men of £24,800. Lesbians earn £6,000 more than the national average for women, take two more holidays a year and spend £400 a month on credit cards, according to the survey of 1,118 readers of Diva and Gay Times by the marketing consultancy Out Now.

Thankfully the Guardian has put up a correction to say that the data refers to readers of the magazines rather than the L and G population as a whole. What I don’t get is that no-one on the paper thought that the opportunity to read an expensive (and shite, but that’s beside the point) lesbian magazine every month and to live an out-lesbian lifestyle, are opportunities not always available to less well-off people, and that this might skew their figures.

A few months ago, Polly said:

So, 30 years on, where is the women’s campaign? Where is the ancient music of mothers clattering their saucepan lids down Whitehall for their rights?

In today’s Guardian, Natasha Walters is talking about how women are making the links between the multiple experiences of discrimination they each have dealt with, but that women’s organisations aren’t:

They [women at an event at the ICA] also wanted to hear about how to change this underlying reality. Wolf - far more political on the platform than in her new book - pushed the audience to think of ways to make this happen, challenging one audience member, Kate Bellamy from the Fawcett Society, to think about whether that organisation could create a new mass women’s lobby. When I spoke to Bellamy a few days later, she agreed that she did feel there was unassuaged hunger for change among young women and a desire to hear this hunger spoken about more clearly in public arenas.

I stood to be a trustee of Fawcett because I felt strongly that the UK needed a women’s movement of the strength and the influence of organisations like NOW in the US, and because only Fawcett, with its breadth of work, could become that. The joining form is here.

The West Wing is to end after the current seventh season. The final episode will be aired in the US on 14th May. Well, it’s not really as if it could carry on after the death of John Spencer; and ending with the ending of Bartlett’s term seems right to me.