A victory for the PC brigade?

Girls tend to do better than boys at school (they mature earlier) but after puberty it apparently goes the other way which is perhaps understandable when you consider brain size. Of course there could be lots of other reasons ... hormones and preparation for motherhood compared to the hunter like instincts of men for example. However there will always be aspects where girls are naturally more gifted, not least the ability to remain undistracted. Whether that's a good thing probably depends on their chosen careers and even individual tasks within it.

For politicians I imagine it's not so important but we live in a mans world and like it or not we are the stronger sex.

 

How would I know what your specific research field is unless you've articulated it to me before? Which you haven't.

Anyway, I found the evidence in the programme I referrred to far more persuasive on the nature rather than nurture side. There was a particularly pertinent sequence with Barbary Apes where all the males came down from the trees and grabbed fire-engine and tractor toys and all the females grabbed dolls. What's Sasha Baron Cohen got to do with it? Why are your colleagues cooking the scientific books? Just to get published? Have you outed them? Would you deny that Pinker's and others broad evidential work points firmly in the direction of nature versus nurture re. criminality etc? How about work with identical twins?

The argument in your last full para is lost on me.

What does any of this really have to do with my proposal anyway? Why would it matter if your adult male or female MP had arrived at adulthood with nurture having played a more significant part in forming them than nature or vice versa? They are what they are by that stage. Different.

 

The logical conclusion to equal voting rights is equal representation. End of.

The important parameter here is not about individual representation. It's about where collective equal representation would lead.

You would have both a male and a female MP. You can take your problem to whichever one you prefer.

Women's issues are women's issues. Doesn't particularly bother me what they are. Yeah, with 50:50 representation there'd be better creche facilities in parliament though.

Women are making progress but only by swimming against the tide. I propose slack water.

Your last P.S. sentence makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But see below ...

 

HOW IT WOULD WORK

As posters seem to be unclear ...

ZZT lives in Nottingham. For the sake of argument, let's say he lives in the parliamentary constituency of Nottingham West. There is also a constituency called Nottingham East. Under my proposal they are amalgamated into the new constituency of Nottingham. At the next election in the new constituency of Nottingham ZZT gets either ...

OPTION A. One vote for a party of his choice who are fielding a pair of candidates, one male and one female. His one vote is for both of them as a pair and he gets two MPs - one male and one female. Or ...

OPTION B. There are two lists, one of males and one of females. ZZT gets two votes, one from each list. Under this proposal he still gets two MPs, one of each sex, but there's a reasonable chance that they will be from different parties and consequently might find it harder to work together. For that reason, I'd prefer OPTION A.

 

Quota.

 

Errr, sounds good in principle...

So, if Option A, what happens if there is a vote in parliament, for example, on extra childcare facilities provision?

How do they vote? Can they vote with their conscience if they differ in opinion, in which case there will be someone voting against the party line or whip, or do they vote with the whip, in which case why have two MP's? Or maybe there will be no party whip?

With Option A, what happens if the female disagrees with the male MP on a local issue? Who goes and asks the question in parliament, for example.

Notwithstanding the answers to the above, by having these two options of a male of female I think you are widening the distance between the sexes, and potentially causing many inter gender disputes. Why should I have to try and gauge which MP will deal with my issue more sympathetically. Are we not going to be influenced by stereotypes when trying to make that judgement? If I want a new sports field, do I go to the man, and if I want a new nursery school, do I go to the women. I thought the idea was to bring us all together.

Personally, I think men are increasingly becoming far more aware of female issues, and vice versa. Why create a divide - it is a backward step.

I am sure your motives are honourable, but I think it is an artificial and daft idea.

PS, I dont agree with your assumption that equal voting rights must mean equal representation. Why just gender? I have equal voting rights with everyone else, but up here I have one right of centre party to vote for, and about 4 left of centre parties. Should we insist on an equal number? The whole thing is just daft, in my view. So long as there are no rules or laws preventing equal representation, that is good enough for me.

 

Because they are ugly and short.

 

Semantic. This is not a quota to deal with minority representation. It's simply a recognition of a fundamental division which is planet wide. I refer you to the question I have asked ZZT at the end of #149 below. And that's quite enough from me in response to pedantry.

 

Any MP can choose to follow a party whip or vote with their conscience against it just as they can now. There would be no need to have a collective constituency response on behalf of the two MPs. If they intended to vote differently then they might argue about it. So what? There's no requirement to agree on everything. But under option A they'd tend to agree. Under option B, quite often they'd be from different parties and would agree on very little which would make life difficult not least in dealing with constituency business. I doubt the specific issue you have referred to would be whipped anyway. It would probably receive broad support across party lines.

Any MP can ask any question they like. There is nothing to stop them both asking a question from different angles. It's a lottery which questions get answered on the floor of the house in PMQs for example. There is a ballot. Usually about 40 get listed and something under 20 get heard. Well that's the way Scottish questions, which is broadly similar, used to work. There might be a bit of resentment if the two MPs differed and only one got heard. But hey - as above - there is no requirement to agree on everything. All this is the stuff of detail anyway. Think big!

The two MPs can divvy up constituency business as they see fit. They could do it by subject matter (which may follow gender stereotyping - but would undoubtedly surprise on occasion) or geographically as long as they're happy with the split and their individual workloads. Personally, I think doing it geographically would be regressive. That would trend back towards the pairing of constituencies which has already been tried (well certainly in Scotland).

It's up to you which MP you approach with your concern. You may choose to follow gender stereotyping lines, deliberately go against them, pick the MP who lives closest to you or the one who happens to be in your area that week. It doesn't matter. If the MP you approach thinks the subject matter is for their colleague they will tell you so, take notes and pass them to their colleague who will provide you with a written response. Or you might choose to make a second approach to the other MP. All of this could be avoided by phoning the constituency office and asking who's your MP with local responsibility for subject X in the first place. If you do receive a letter/e-mail from the MP that you didn't approach directly then it will start along the lines of - You raised concerns regarding subject X with my colleague Mr A/Ms B. They have asked me to respond ... There really is no difficulty here.

Question. Nobody seems to disagree that more female representation in parliament would be a good thing. But everyone on here, other than me, seems to think that chipping away at the issue is sufficient. So at what point would you, or do you think others including the women's movement might say - job done? We have sufficient representation now. Would there be any logic at all attached to any figure less than 50% representation?

 

Called it :drinking:

 

More women in Westminster, is only a good thing if they are better MPs than the ones they replace. If they are worse it's a bad thing.

 

Of course it's all bo11ocks because since when did ability ever matter? ... US voters put Ronald Reagan in the Whitehouse FFS!

 

It's a victory for 'common sense' and masturbation.

 

When I asked the questions, Kelso, I wasn't really asking about the practicalities of it all. I understand about the likely procedures, I was more interested as to why it would help. You have admitted that it may even require people to consider racial stereotypes before they went to their MP, where they wouldn't have done previously. If the MP's split their business, how do they do that? If the female gets either child care and the man gets sport they will be accused of stereotyping, if they want to avoid that accusation, then the best people may not be covering those issues.

What good does that do? Pointless, I feel.

Your last paragraph doesn't really acknowledge the fact that we may just reach a natural figure and that should be accepted. Feminists may say that they want 50% (for equality reasons), but that may not actually fit in with what women want. I don't think that I am being outrageously sexist when I say that if all other things being equal, women are more inclined to want to spend time at home with their children than men. They may also enjoy less, the confrontational nature of politics. I just don't know for sure. Isn't that the hunter/gatherer syndrome we are all aware of? MP's necessarily have to travel a lot, and work long, unsocial hours. They also have to confront and argue a lot, and maybe, just maybe, there is not an equal desire amongst women to become MP's. Is that a bad thing? Why create a threshold that is artificial?

As long as we carry on reducing barriers in the way, a natural balance will happen eventually. That is good enough for me.

Then I get to the fundamental bit in my mind, which is the interference from "busybodies" (and you). I am unclear why a 50/50 split is even wanted by the majority. A quick straw poll in my office yesterday ( women outnumbered men by 2 to 1 yesterday). I asked if anybody would feel better represented by an MP of a particular sex. Not one, said yes. They aren't bothered. As far as they are concerned it is the politics and ability of the MP that matter, not the gender.

As far as I can see, it is you being (a well-intentioned) sexist, not them!

 

So Page 3 is back.

The end is nigh!

But until the world does end, women (and some men), who don't want to be thought of as "objects" will continue to spend 30 minutes putting on their make-up before they go to work, or out socialising, or to the gym, or to walk the dog, or in fact, go out the door.

 

Better on whose terms? As two groups of 325 they would be equally good!

 

I often claim that PC gone mad is a bit of an illusion, and that it is usually portrayed by the Mail researching a single extreme example.

But this one seems so harmless, it annoyed me.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-30913291

A traffic warden and another guy had a joke about a bin being on a double yellow. The traffic warden put a parking ticket sleeve on it for a laugh. Now he is being investigated.

Utter madness.

 

I don't get the link between seemingly authoritarian officials being killjoys and the notion of (left wing or progressive) political correctness? Are we to assume that all acts of stupidity are inherently 'politically correct'?

Maybe this is mad officious bosses, maybe the warden had his **** out or broke some other conduct rule. It's all highly unenlightening.

 

Firstly, this is not about individual representation. It's about an equality of collective representation both in parliament and, by definition, government too. What is it about that that you (and others) consistently fail to get? I suggest that under my scheme:

1. Issues that are of particular importance to women would receive a higher profile than currently. They would be on a par with issues of particular concern to men.

2. There would be a change in the tone of the way we do things. More talking less fighting. More effort put into seeking concensus. This would be very welcome in terms of international disputes where starting a scrap would be seen only as a measure of very last resort rather than a default position to be pursued far earlier.

There would be no NEED for any elector to consider sexual (I presume you mean sexual rather than racial) stereotyping and I never suggested there would be. The best thing to be done if you didn't know who does what would be to phone up and ask! You may get the answer you expect. You might not. But to suggest that the two MPs would deliberately cook the books to avoid accusations of stereotyping is bizarre. I am assuming that they'd both be of sufficient 'quality' to avoid doing anything as stupid as that! Generally I'd suspect that the female would be more likely to cover child care because she'd be more likely to have a stronger interest in it for obvious reasons. That's not a stereotype. It's just one of those issues that women are generally more affected by than men. As for sport, well either could cover that equally well. Or are you suggesting otherwise? Now that would be sexist!

Your next main para. is excellent! I have absolutely no inclination to argue against it at all. Like you, I just don't know. All I would say is that the 'trend' is currently in the direction of more representation for women. Would a natural threshold be reached prior to parity? Maybe. That would be fine as long as those issues of particular interest to women aren't perennially ignored. But my argument is based on 'all things being equal'. Maybe they're not.

If you're going to do straw-polls and quote your data at me then please do ask the right question!! As said above, this is not about individual representation. It's about the collective. So the correct question is:

Would it be a good thing if half of MPs were women? Answer Yes, No, Not bothered. So go on - ask 'em again!

Incidentally, I would anticipate a fairly indifferent response. There don't seem to be many like our little group who are especially engaged by politics at all. All I have done here is chuck an idea into the ring. And not a ring where I'm likely to get a favourable response! I have chucked it into other rings though but that's another story. And, I'll freely admit that any policy along the lines I've suggested would only have any legs if it was supported by women generally with some particularly feisty ones in the lead. Some old geezer like me will be nowhere!

Right, I'm off to buy a copy of the Sun. That'll be a first then! I'll hide it inside the Guardian. Cunning eh? I shall report on the 'Scottish model' and we can compare notes especially if she's different. What fun!

 

What makes that policitcal correctness rather than just a really stupid boss?

 

Right. In today's Scottish Sun we have Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth exhibiting her upper body strength on page 3 under the banner Clarifications and Corrections which suggests the whole thing might have been a p.ss take in the first place. I presume you have the same. Anyway, imho she's rather poorly upholstered and from effing Bournemouth. So as far as I'm concerned she can eff off and stick her Cherry where the Sun don't shine! End of!

 

I agree, not really a PC issue.

 

Bornmuff is better than Scot'land' IMO

 

Not much time at mo for full response. Ok, I get what you are saying, but we will have to just disagree. I think an MP of any gender should be able to handle any issue just as well as the other.

Having said that, of course, it would be great if the natural balance of MP's came out 50/50. But only if we still had the best person for the job and quota's are not the way to achieve that. Your system, in my opinion, hardens the gap between genders, not narrows it.

I'm in Spain today, so I'll do another poll in the office tomorrow if I remember, but of course they will just agree that it would be better if the balance was 50/50 (it is the obvious answer), but I am not sure that they think that there would be any real benefits. I thought my question was the better question, not yours.

In the meantime, enjoy Nicole.

 

Kind of enlightening about the 'Anti PC Brigade' Brigade though.

Time for Stewart Lee's Nan again.

[video=youtube;bmsV1TuESrc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmsV1TuESrc[/video]

 

Absolutely not! I intend to ignore Nicole like the plague!

 

Others have suggested you change your handle. I agree. How about 'Stuck in a Groove' or 'Not Very Bright'?

 

Stuart Lee is not funny