kettle

sitting at home listening to yes (an english prog band of immense skill, but only listened to by a few) and skimming through the newspapers.
it’s an exciting life i lead.
in the evening standard tim lott has his weekly column. bloggers are very much like newspaper columnists, the difference being more people read the newspapers. anyway there is tim lott having a say about patricia hewitt’s recent proposals about the possibility of improving maternity leave (potentially increasing maternity leave from 6 months up to 12 months, and also improving the situation for fathers as well).
say hewitt "i have no doubt at all that a centrepiece of the manifesto will be a package of support for hard-working families, and we will be campaigning on that as a big part of the election." (quote taken from the guardian .
now the proposal has caused a few hackles to rise, especially with my old pals the cbi, and they make some valid points.
but what is tim so irked about ?
well he has two points to make. there is the economic one – that additional "breeding" (to quote lott) is not necessarily going to improve gdp, and besides because we are in a global economy we can just bring in the workers we need. even better we haven’t paid for their education so we are quids in (i am sure their homelands won’t mind this sacrifice for our wellbeing), a further benefit although tim doesn’t mention this is that we could always send them back once we didn’t need them.
his second point is that of course when hewitt is talking about this she is hoping that the only people who are going to be taking it up are people like her, she doesn’t want ethnic or working class types breeding" but she wants people who are good blairites like her.
now i have searched the internet to see if i can track down anything about this and aside from the story about the maternity leave increase i am not sure how lott gets from that to his outrageous statement about "breeding" (feel free to point me in the right direction). so on the face of what i have read hewitt is saying that new mums should be entitled to even more maternity leave than they are now. a good thing you would think.
mind you when he bills patricia hewitt as the minister for women, when she is in fact the minister for trade and industry you have to wonder about his research and well the reliability of anything else he has to say.
maybe a further clue is given in his reference to politicians as saddos that we the public tolerate as a necessary nuisance. and because we regard them as such we are going to ignore hewitt’s call to "breed" (even though she hasn’t actually asked for that…). but, lott argues, politicians don’t see themselves as saddos but as role models that can speak out and influence people in the way he claims hewitt is trying to do.
if it wasn’t bad enough lott seems to have intentionally misrepresented what was said he then goes on to make the point that not only is hewitt asking for people like her (presumably white, middle class labour supporters to "breed" but she is saying that they should stick them in nurseries and get back to work straight away. except she hasn’t she has said let’s extend maternity leave.
confused?
me too.
perhaps what it comes down to is lott is upset because for all his describing politicians as saddos, there are occasions when they are doing the right thing for the right reasons. but what we should do is pay attention to the unelected hack who can’t get his facts right and misrepresents what was said.
to you tim lott i say what you wanted us to say to patricia hewitt – fuck off.

(tim lott’s piece is in the london evening standard september 23rd, i can’t find a link for it.)

(by the time i had finished this i was listening to rush (a canadian prog band).