A couple of shorts:

Some Tory councillor in Kent wants to sterilise benefits recipients. You know the people that write frothingly awful rightwing-as-fuck comments below any blogpost about the welfare state? Well, one of them actually got elected! Christ. You know how, whenever our government has a new idea, someone somewhere says sanctimoniously “This is Britain, we don’t do things like that here”? For once, I feel a chorus coming on (all together now): “This is BRITAIN. GREAT Britain…” It’s never that good an argument, really, but then this one doesn’t really need a good argument, does it?

It would appear that the National Union of Teachers, my mother’s union, have decided to basketweave (it’s a technical term, related to the tendency of (usually student) unions to waste time on irrelevancies). Quite why they think every half-hour on News 24 is a good place to broadcast that their members are worried about the promotion of imperialism (one speaker really did use that word) in schools caused by the armed forces attending school careers events, I don’t know.

This made me laugh: a Conservative envoy to the union movement. Note how the virulent anti-union rightwinger gets hushed up in the comments by the nodding heads.

Onto serious matters. Over here, Alive and Kicking have an American-style database of MPs (literally American-style, with crosses and ticks; next they’ll be saying “Sarah Bloggs MP scores 3%, an extreme pro-death voting record”, just like the Yanks). One MP I spoke to has received more than 100 letters from the other side, arguing for reducing the time limit for abortions (often leavened with interesting views on other aspects of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, such as a spot of homophobia about the removal of the requirement that there be a father involved in IVF.). In contrast, he’s had just one pro-choice letter. And it’s not cos pro-choice people don’t care; I just don’t think we’ve appreciated the scale of the challenge to rights to abortion provision. So take a moment to write a letter - there’s a handy template here.

Some really good news. Several years ago (how can it be that long?) I wrote about the severe underfunding of Rape Crisis services. And last week, Harriet Harman announced a million pounds to help fund Rape Crisis services, working in the immediate aftermath and longterm with women who have been raped and abused. Hurrah! Now the government needs to do that every year, and local authorities need to realise that Rape Crisis centres aren’t an optional add-on, a nice-to-have, but absolutely vital for women year-in, year-out.

Hopi Sen on privacy and politicians is worth a read. Mind you, I could say that about all of his posts:

So perhaps the challenge for the next generation of politicians is to break that wall that divides the public life from the personal life. To put their lives up for inspection as a whole, while pointing out that just like a friend’s past or a colleague’s divorce, it doesn’t really matter all that much

Tom Freeman supplies the detail of why David Cameron’s plans to topslice SureStart are so wrong, and ends with this pithy observation:

If “money is tight and we’ve got to make choices”, why not choose to forsake some of that inheritance tax cut?

Finally, Miss Bimbo. Sigh. An online game with thousands of young users aged 9-16, in which they enter beauty contests, take diet pills, get boob jobs and compete to win over a billionare boyfriend. And what’s missing from all this coverage? The fact that we’re not talking about young people, we’re talking about young women - girls, even. We’re talking about reinforcing regressive stereotypes about what it means to be a woman and what achievement looks like if you’re female. We’re talking about a game in which the ultimate happiness is getting your guy and letting him pay for your next bout of surgery. ‘Scuse me while I go a bit old school feminist crazy.