Thanks to the lovely Steve Hanlon. Please do go back and comment on the past few days’ election posts here, here, here, here, here and here.

Update: unfortunately my links list now appears to be buggered. Oh well. Particular apologies to non-Labour bloggers listed as Labour, and Labour bloggers listed as non-Labour!

Comments appear to be buggered. Have looked up the answer on the Wordpress Forums, and it appears to be gibberish (that’s short-hand for “well beyond my technical understanding”). Are there any keen Wordpressers out there who can help me fix the problem? If so, please pretty please email me.

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.

Rather than this being my inabiity to think of things to post about, my webhosts have been having a week-long brain fart. Apologies and hello again.

I appear (oddly) to have been nominated for “best blog by a woman non-Liberal Democrat” in the Lib Dems’ women’s section’s blog awards. Many thanks to Mary Reid for the nomination, possibly for this post, but how strange… Especially as my expressed hope for this year is to kick out a failing Lib Dem administration running down our beautiful city.

I last blogged on 18 January - that’s several weeks with no posts, the longest I’ve gone in years. My blog is my home page (well, one of them; I use Firefox so have several homepages at once), and for weeks now my face has looked accusingly at me from the screen as I hastily click the tab closed and go elsewhere.

Partly, it’s lack of inspiration: I’m still interested in the same things I was ever interested in, but don’t really see the need to write another post on abortion, another on equal pay, another on rape convictions, another on why the fathers’ rights movement are mainly misogynists - I’ve written all those posts, many times. Partly it’s not really feeling that I have anything unique to say: what is there to say on Hillary v Obama, MPs’ expenses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and sharia law that hasn’t already been said? Partly it’s because many of the things I want to say are said well by others - don paskini most often makes me think “I wish I’d written that!”, but there are others too. It’s also because what I can say on this blog is a little self-censored, because of what I do for a job, because of the experience of being ridiculed in the local paper just once too often, and because I feel like blogging less about my life (as opposed to my opinions) than I used to. Perhaps that’s about Facebook’s impact on me: I love having access to a constantly-updated feed of one-liners from my friends, and using Facebook status in that way reduces the need to blog about life.

So, I’m seriously re-evaluating the role of the blog. I still don’t want to write a councillor-blog - though that’s not because there isn’t anything going on in Rose Hill and Iffley at the moment! There is: the building work on the 200-odd new houses has started and the re-development will bring £500k into our community for facilities and services; our primary school is about to be fresh-started, hopefully with new buildings; our secondary is about to become an academy (the last set of school results there showed a really disappointing 11% of children getting five good GCSEs); we’re in the middle of an unexpected move of fifteen elderly couples and single people from council bungalows which are deteriorating faster than expected; we’re fighting to keep our local leisure centre open in the teeth of Lib Dem plans to close it. Maybe I’m not blogging because, as a councillor, I’ve never been this busy before. And we’ve local elections in less than three months, so blogging is competing with increasing canvassing and leafletting (not that that ever really stops), my full-time job, councillor duties and trying to get to the gym - no wonder it loses sometimes.

In 2008 I’d like to see…

1. The Chancellor commit £4 billion to halve child poverty by 2010 in the Budget
2. Labour consistently up in the polls, Ken winning again in London, and the feelgood factor back as through a few bright new ideas, good policies, quietly dropping some duff ones, no clangers and discipline we remind the country why they’ve trusted us for a decade
3. An outright Labour majority on Oxford City Council when we go to bed early in the morning of Friday 2 May
4. The last residents living in Orlit houses on Rose Hill moving into the wonderful newly-built houses, as Taylor Wimpey get stuck in and start building; a new Fresh Start primary school on our estate; crime continuing to fall; and the youth club opening for longer hours
5. A Democrat about to take over at the White House, with a pledge to raise the federal rate of the minimum wage and finally get around to creating universal healthcare
6. A liberalisation of abortion law, to enable women to access abortion on demand; a significant narrowing of the gender pay gap; increased funding for rape crisis centres
7. Hundreds of new houses built in Oxford, hundreds of thousands nationally, and increased regulation to target profiteering and unscrupulous landlords
8. Finally, and more frivolously: for my family, Crystal Palace regaining their rightful place in the Premiership, and, for my adopted home town, Oxford United back in the Football League.

What would you like to see in 2008?

Well, it appears that this blog has been rated the 15th best Labour blog in the country this year, down from 5th last year. I’m pleased, as this year has not been a good one for blogging for me. Major changes in personal and professional life, plus the sheer workload of being a councillor hitting for real, means that blogging has fallen far far off the agenda. The reasonably tedious habit of the Oxford Mail’s Insider column of reproducing almost verbatim anything vaguely politically-frivolous I write, with associated spin, means that I’ve ended up being a bit cautious. I’d also say that the blog’s subject matter is becoming more limited, as my views on the majority of feminist issues (rape, abortion, fathers’ rights, sex education and teenage pregnancy, equal pay) haven’t changed much, but merely reproducing a new post on the same topic every time they’re in the news seems pointless. I also have to try hard not to post on the issues that I work on, as although there are many advantages to working on the issues you care most about, one of the disadvantages is the limiting effect on what you get to say in a personal capacity. Finally, I think I’ve moved a bit politically, and my allegiance to the party has hardened, meaning that I am both less likely to criticise the government’s actions (particularly since Brown took over) and more likely to self-censor when I want to shout about how wrong they are. Hey ho.

The one surprising omission from the Labour list, though, is, of course, the utterly wonderful Let’s be sensible. Spent a happy half-hour dissecting Gordon’s policy announcements and rhetorical style with Tom on the seafront this week, sharing our mutual disbelief that the word “maths” might pose a challenge to our glorious leader.

So, I’ve worked hard at two party conferences, and am enjoying a precious day at home frantically filling the washing machine in preparation for a third in the hideous Blackpool. I’m also trying to book a last minute break in the sun for a week; unfortunately it’s likely to be the week when Gordon goes for it, which may mess up my holiday plans slightly, as instead of strolling along a beach, I instead stroll gently around Rose Hill, asking people for their vote for Andrew and Gordon.

Hello all. Had some strange comments recently, all from 81.5.171.28, under the names of Mickey, Jules, Karyn, Nicola, Phoebe and Jane. I’m sticking this IP address in moderation until further notice.

Apologies to anyone that visited only to find the site was down over the past two days. I completely forgot to pay the annual webhosting bill, slightly embarassingly. Now all back up and ready to go. Just got to think of something to post about now…