BethMellor’s Weblog

With just over a month to go until the European elections on June 4^th, the Electoral Commission has launched a voter registration campaign which includes this advert, currently being shown on prime-time TV.

It’s a great start, and will hopefully raise awareness about the elections, which traditionally suffer from very low turnout (in 2004, turnout was less than 40 per cent). What the advert doesn’t make clear enough, however, is the danger of not voting. Low turnout means that fringe parties, including the BNP, are in with a real chance of winning seats in some regions and representing us in Europe.

The EU suffers from an ambivalent and, at times, hostile, press in Britain. Yet decisions made in Brussels have a very real impact on all of our lives – registering to vote and ensuring that it is credible politicians who are making these decisions is the least we can do.

Jo Swinson, Britain’s youngest MP, e-mails me back instantly when I contact her to arrange an interview. Either, I think, she must be incredibly efficient or she has too much time on her hands.

But by the time I meet her at the end of the week, the 29-year-old has already appeared on Question Time, led a debate in Parliament on tax credits, and seen the results of her hard work pay-off to force the Government to reverse its position on the publication of MP’s expenses. And this, it seems, is just a normal week’s work for Liberal Democrat Swinson, who is MP for East Dunbartonshire – the constituency where she grew up. In fact, I later find out, the Mail on Sunday reported in January that she was the ‘most active’ Scottish MP in Westminster during 2008, having spoken 58 times in debates and having submitted 220 written questions.

In her cramped office in the eaves of 1 Parliament Street, Swinson signs a stack of letters to new voters in her constituency as she talks about her achievements as the youngest MP in Westminster – a role colloquially known as the ‘Baby of the House.’

“You need to be determined to get into politics. It’s hard to get elected and it’s hard to stay elected,” she says. Indeed, although Swinson was only 25 when she was elected in 2005, she had already stood unsuccessfully twice – in Hull East in the 2001 General Election, where she gained a 6% swing from John Prescott, then-deputy leader of the Labour Party, and in Strathkelvin and Bearsden in the 2003 Scottish Parliamentery election, where she came third. Since being elected in 2005 she has acted as the Liberal Democrat’s Shadow Scotland Secretary and Shadow Spokeswoman for Women and Equality and, at the start of this year, she was appointed to the role of Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs.

But Swinson’s first forays into politics were as a student at the London School of Economics, as president of her halls of residence committee and a member of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students organisation (now Liberal Youth), where she played an instrumental role in campaigning to scrap tuition fees.

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 It is certainly a sign of the times when even BBC Radio Four presenters are talking about FaceBook and Twitter on the Today programme.

Yesterday, however, on the 5^th Birthday of the now-iconic site, which was set up by Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard, the programme discussed how social networking sites have so rapidly become a part of our everyday lives.

But in addition to the social aspect of these sites, they are also becoming increasingly important as a tool for political campaigning and protest.

Jo Swinson, Britain's youngest MP

Much has been made of the use that Barack Obama made of social networking sites during the election campaign. Some British politicians, however, are not far behind; Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson is a regular Tweeter, and she partially attributes the Government’s recent U-Turn on the publication of detailed breakdowns of MPs expenses, for which she tabled a Parliamentary motion, to the use of social networking sites. Over 7,000 people joined the FaceBook group and thousands who heard about this story through FaceBook and Twitter sent e-mails to MPs, forcing the Government to abolish its plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

Conservative blogger Iain Dale called it “the first real victory for an online political campaign in this country”, whilst the founder of campaign group mySociety, Tom Steinberg, said: “This is a huge victory not just for transparency; it’s a bellwether for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.”

Most dramatic is the speed at which the campaign gathered momentum. According to Peter Facey, director of Unlock Democracy, the campaign that was mounted in just a few hours would have taken weeks 10 years ago. There’s a great article on what happened by Mike Lowe here.

And internet-savvy Swinson is not stopping there. When I interviewed her yesterday she also said that she would like to make  clips of Parliament available on YouTube – with the dual purpose of getting more young people interested in politics and of making the political system more transparent and accessible. She may have a battle on her hands for this one though – even though some European Parliamentary debates are on YouTube, she suspects she will first need to explain to many of her older colleagues in Westminster what the site actually is… See below for YouTube video of Finnish MEP Alexander Stubbs arguing in the European Parliament for “equal treatment for Vodka”.

Coverage of the European Union in the British media is, quite frankly, awful. With the exception of Tony Barber’s excellent Brussels Blog for the FT and occasional articles in The Telegraph and The Times, reporting about the European Union is patchy at best and frequently completely negative about EU institutions and legislation.

In comparison, newspapers in other EU countries have dedicated daily pages to cover news from Brussels.

The reasons behind Britain’s haphazard and cynical coverage of the EU were debated at a journalism course I attended in Brussels this week. The first, and perhaps main reason, is that most newspapers do not even have a correspondent in Brussels. This makes it practically impossible for newspapers to understand the full story about developments in Brussels. Under this logistical pressure, it is easier for the journalist who has the task of writing an EU story from their desk in London to focus on the simple and quirky story, such as the recent coverage of the relaxation of EU legislation on the shape of fruit and vegetables.

The Sun campaign for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty

Secondly, MEP Richard Corbett told me he believes that media ownership is a factor: the main media moguls in Britain – Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay brothers – are all eurosceptics. In addition, Mr Corbett pointed out that it is easy for eurosceptic political parties to use a one-line soundbite to promote their views, whereas making a reasoned debate about the positive aspects of EU membership is not so media-friendly. The media is often guilty of using the quickest and most sensational line – such as The Sun’s 2007 campaign after Gordon Brown’s signing of the Lisbon Treaty “Never Have So Few Decided So Much For So Many” – without presenting the other side of the debate and, in this case, without explaining what the treaty actually means.

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Rosemary Hollis, former Head of Research at Chatham House, freely admits that it was “pure accident” that led her to become a world-authority on the Middle East.

As a student during the Vietnam War, she became fascinated with war and conflict. Later, inspired by her work as a researcher for a Lebanese academic, she decided to focus her studies on relations between Britain and the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But Ms Hollis, wearing a garishly bright pink top under her immaculately tailored suit, cuts an unusual figure in the foreign policy establishment.

 “Defence is a boys’ game”, she said, describing meetings at the Ministry of Defence where she has been the only woman present. “You have to speak the technical jargon of the military, and you have to be incredibly resilient. Sometimes it only hits me later that someone has made a sexist remark.”

But being a woman did give her certain advantages when she was working in Tel Aviv and East Jerusalem. “Arab men feel less challenged by me than by Western men,” she said.

And, she says, many women who succeed in politics use their sex to their advantage. “People used to joke that Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet respected her because she was a ‘strong nanny’ figure.”

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Barack Obama is “on track” to nominate Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the BBC reported this morning, prompting criticism from a number of commentators.

Times Chief Foreign Commentator Bronwen Maddox, whose work I usually greatly admire, argues in this article that Obama should not appoint Clinton as Secretary of State.

Ms. Maddox admits that Clinton’s experience – particularly her foreign policy experience – mean that she would do a good job as Secretary of State. Moreover, she says that the appointment of Clinton would appease both women and the white working-class voters who backed her, and goes as far as to say that Obama “will need those who wanted Mrs. Clinton.”

However, she believes that Clinton and Obama would not be able to work productively together. She writes: “She wouldn’t flatter him; she wouldn’t really defer to him; she might challenge him.”

But should it be the job of the Secretary of State merely to “flatter” and “defer” to the President?
The best political decisions are reached with the input of competent advisors who are not afraid to question and challenge, rather than from an administration full of yes men. Obama, to his credit, seems to recognize this.

Further criticism of Clinton comes from Gerard Baker in this article. Mr. Baker, like Ms. Maddox, concedes that Clinton is the best-qualified candidate for the job. But he criticizes Clinton for her “unrivalled knack for making politics into very personal theatre.”

This may be the case. But Mr. Baker should recognize that this is in part driven by the media: turning politics into theatre is exactly what his article achieves.

Interviewing Emily Thornberry (Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury) last week was an interesting insight into the problems faced by women in positions of power.

It is a common preconception that Britain is more open-minded about gender equality than other countries because we have had a female Prime Minister, but according to the World League of Women in Parliament, Britain lags behind many developing nations when it comes to equal representation in Parliament. Britain is ranked in a shocking 69^th place in this league, with only 19% of female MPs, and is beaten by Pakistan, Afghanistan and Rwanda, to name but a few.

To break this down further, of a total of 646 MPs in Britain, only 125 are women – 94 Labour, 17 Conservatives and nine Liberal Democrats.

Ms. Thornberry hinted that female MPs face more challenges because of the prevalence of a chauvinistic culture in Westminster. Female politicians, she said, are more likely to be judged based upon their life choices, their family lives and their appearance than male politicians.

Worryingly, a study by the Electoral Reform Society in June 2008 shows that women are still being passed over by local parties when they choose candidates for winnable seats. The report says: “If, as expected, the Conservatives increase their share of the vote at the next election, the number of women MPs will at best remain the same – and most likely fall.”

Lesley Abdela suggests in this article on the guardian website that a quota system may be the only way to increase the number of women in Parliament.

Some sort of quota may help, but it will do nothing to tackle the root of the problem: attitudes. We need to stop scrutinising the wardrobes of female politicians and questioning whether they are up to the job, and just let them get on with it. And, if they are competent, they should be able to run for winnable seats without facing the extra hurdle of Westminster’s misogynist mind-set.