Yep, apparently we could all learn from the Taliban:

Peter Davies, who has made it his personal mission to rid Doncaster of political correctness, said that under the Taliban, Afghanistan had an “ordered system of family life”. By contrast he said social policies which disregarded the importance of the traditional family had “created mayhem” in Britain.

Under the Taliban, women were banned from working outside the home, studying in schools or universities, from talking to men who were not family members, and from wearing cosmetics, high heels, or clothes made in “sexually attracting colours”.

They were stoned to death if caught having sex outside marriage, and whipped for not covering their ankles in public or being unaccompanied by a suitable male relative in public. Despite these shortcomings – which Amnesty International concluded “virtually confined women to the home” – Mr Davies said the Taliban’s rule did have some advantages.

WTF, it is like saying the trains ran on time under the Nazi’s, so lets not worry about concentration camps. Sometimes a regime is so oppressive that nothing can be added to the equation as an ‘advantage.’
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Fay Weldon is plugging her latest book. Shock horror in the Mail and Telegraph, this ‘feminist ‘ is saying women should just accept men need looking after and don’t challenge them too much.

Well its not really a shock, she has been coming out with this crap for a while now. As the interview in The Guardian points out:

She was vilified for her assertion in an interview in 1998 that being raped wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a woman, and a few years ago she complained that feminism had undermined men too much. In her book What Makes Women Happy she advised faking orgasms. Did she feel part of the feminist movement?

“Inevitably, but I never wrote propaganda because it all seemed so evident. It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.” Her contemporaries, she says, “usually come round to my way of thinking in the end. I’m probably the one, the only feminist there is and the others are all out of step.”

Well arrogance aside that she is the only real feminist, it seems that by most criteria she seems pretty out of step.
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Yeah I know its the News of The World, but they have done an undercover expose of the real nature of the ‘family’ Red White and Blue festival.

Demos against the BNP event are good, but the numbers won’t match those that voted for them . What is needed is to take apart their arguments, policies and expose what they really stand for and seems like the NOTW has done a good job of that last element.

It’s not enough to shout racist, we need to argue why they are wrong to blame immigrants for a lack of decent social housing and jobs if we are to counter their hate filled message.

Although I’m saying its good the NOTW has exposed this, I’m in not in anyway saying the Murdoch press are on our side, but lets use what they have discovered in our arguments and campaigns.
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Senior City bankers are demanding pay rises of up to 10 per cent this year to make up for the clampdown on the bonus culture, a senior City head-hunter has told The Independent.

So when they fuck up and can’t get ‘performance related’ bonuses they then want more on their salary? So what happened to all the free market arguments about competition, rewarding ability etc etc.

Seems they want to get paid well regardless of how well they perform. Now what would they say of that was the public sector?

Pamela Izevbekhai and her two daughters are under threat of deportation by the Irish government. They fled Nigeria after another daughter died following female genital mutilation and Pamela’s husband’s family planned to forcibly mutilate her remaining two girls. The husband remains in Nigeria but supports his wife and does not want his daughters cut.

Check out ‘Let them stay‘ for how you can support this family .

Below is a you tube telling the families story. Pamela explains the process of FGM and how she tried to get help for her daughter who bled to death after being butchered, all in the name of controlling women’s sexuality.
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New Humanist Blog report :

Just as it looked like Sarah Palin was going to walk away with the Bad Faith Awards, Christian ‘lone’ Voice Stephen Green makes a late bid for the prize, by forcing the Waterstones in Cardiff to cancel a book signing. Patrick Jones was due to sign copies of his new poetry collection Darkness is Where the Stars Are but Waterstones cancelled at the last moment citing concerns about disruption. Apparently our friend Stephen had mobilised a few believers, aggrieved at what they consider Jones’ blasphemy, who sent emails and called the store. What’s the deal! Are we allowed to pressure bookstores to cancel events featuring people we don’t like… if so there’s a few I’d like to start with.

I phoned the manager of the Cardiff Store, who wouldn’t comment but referred me to John Howells in their central press office. He said the event was cancelled because of concerns about safety in the light of a high volume of complaints received yesterday (he wouldn’t say how many or what proportion were emails or phone calls).

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Below are some details of the conference on the 12th : Women in Struggle! Left Women’s Network Conference

The Left Women’s Network (LeftWN) is the women’s section of The Labour Representation Committee, an open democratic organisation committed to the development of a radical policy agenda for the Labour Party, the trade unions and the wider labour movement. Since 2007 we have been successful in bringing women together from within The Labour Party, trade union movement, campaigning organisations and the wider labour movement.

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After much serious thought on the subject I have come up with the answer to all the squabbles on the left.

I considered serious political theoretical and strategic discussion but decided to cut to the chase, yep all the old bitter battles as to who did what in 1981 or more recent spats with the SWP could be settled by a cage fight.

Apparently :
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I despair sometimes, why can’t god bothers stop worrying about what others do in bed. Pink News reports:

The wife of the First Minister of Northern Ireland has caused controversy with her born-again Christian outlook on life. Iris Robinson is MP for Strangford and chairs the Northern Ireland Assembly’s health committee.

Reacting to news that a man was viciously attacked because he is gay, she suggested that he should consider therapy to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster today she condemned the attack on Stephen Smith but added: “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals trying to turn away from what they are engaged in. And I have met people who have turned around to become heterosexual.”

This pisses me off in so many ways.
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Abortion, and of course the wider issue of reproductive rights, still seems to be an area that the left need to be pushed on.

Yeah they will often make the right noises, but they will make excuses for anti abortion men such as Galloway, and yet I can’t see them being quite so tolerant if someone was, ooh let’s say pro-war. But abortion is a women’s issue isn’t it, it’s not quite up there with the serious male leftie men and their real politics about war and arguing the toss over the finer obscure theoretical points of Marxism or who did what when to whom in 1983.

That’s not to say the majority of the left aren’t pro choice and I’m not going to bang on about Galloway as it’s pointless. Back to the subject, the left and pro choice, why should they get their finger out on this?

Much has been said on this, so I will try to focus on what I see as specific issues for the left, starting with the fact that working class women are those who lose out the most when abortion rights are restricted. Money has always helped procure such services from discreet private doctors.

Working class women, pre 1967, had to make do with the back street abortionists and the resultant risks to health, potentially fatal.
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