Harriet Harman is of course one of the foremost practitioners of the "do as I say, not as I do" approach to politics, and this week has been no exception.
She is a highly vocal supporter of the disaster that has been All Women Shortlists, and as a result Labour's usual policy is to use such a scheme any time a safe seat is vacated. Thanks to the on going expenses scandal some of the most recently vacated seats have been in the Wanstead and Leyton constituency and more recently in Birmingham Erdington.
Strangely enough, neither of these seats are required to use to usual all women shortlists whilst at the very same time it has emerged Harman's husband Jack Dromey was rather keen on becoming the candidate. In fact, Harman even went as far as missing the Labour National Executive Committee meeting to ensure she didn't have to vote on policies for the Birmingham seat.
The good news is that the local Labour party in Wanstead and Leyton have decide that they don't much like the look of Mr Dromey and certainly don't like being told what to do, hence the decision in allowing men to stand for Parliament in Birmingham too. I suppose having constituency after constiuency repeatedly rejecting Mr Harman is one way of doing away with sexist shortlists (albeit very slowly), though it would surely be preferable to just restore democracy and have candidates selected on merit instead of the arrangement of their genitalia.
What we need in Parliament is more normal people there on merit who want to represent every single one of their constituents. The country doesn't need out of touch privileged gender feminists in government, nor do we want powerful Trade unionist getting into Parliament by virtue of their organisation possibly buying them the seat.
Anyway, perhaps I'm doing Harman a disservice and she merely missed the meeting because she's realsied the error of her ways when it comes to being sexist against men and she now no longer opposes democracy. Either way I'm sure we'll find out soon.
Corruption is endemic in politics and Harriet's is just the feminist turd in the bed. Unfortunately it is by far and away the smelliest.
Posted by: amfortas | Wednesday, 10 February 2010 at 08:35