agreed! We should be more actively and informationally (ie, blogging about it) supporting this campaign./=

Or, as the motives of the strikes are essentially identical (better pay and conditions for the strikers), are both strikes feminist?

Rob I think that as an individual you can decide for yourself whether you are going to care more about factual information or the way it is presented.

isn’t it illegal to only give 12 days holiday, anyway?

As there are 8 bank and public holidays in England, the practical effect is that if bank and public holidays are taken as days off work the legal entitlement to annual holiday can be regarded as being only 12 days. (This information is from http://www.emplaw.co.uk/)

We might certainly be inclined to support these key workers if you had given us more detail on the dispute itself.

The problem, basically, is this: I can just about see past the vocabulary of feminism to get at the underlying issues, but only just, and with some considerable effort on my part. And I’m probably more exposed than the average white male to political language of all kinds and therefore have something of a head start.

Fundamentally, I think feminism has failed to make a case for itself to the population at large, with the end result being that those who identify strongly with feminism and use its vocabulary to address social issues are basically speaking a language that the rest of us don’t readily understand. Yes, I do know what you mean by ‘patriarchy’, and I can join the dots and see how this relates to the fairly considerable number of sexist men that I know to exist, and further to a set of social assumptions which reinforce and promote that behaviour,

But not half as inconvenienced as we’ll all be if we allow the Old Firm to kick workers’ rights and women’s rights to the bottom of the agenda.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite true. I probably won’t be terribly inconvenienced at all, which makes this a weak argument. For my sins, I work in a job where to be treated in the way that you describe is utterly unthinkable, though I’ve probably spent longer working at minimum wage and making ends meet with housing benefit than some people too. Appealing to my sense of fear (if we don’t do something, you’ll be next!) isn’t going to work. In some people, it probably provokes an entirely negative response, as veiled threat-making often does. Better would be to appeal to my sense of justice and fairness, which does seem to be very much on the side of those who are being mis-treated.