The SNP's victory in numbers

Many thanks to DougtheDug on the previous thread for clearing up a point that had been bugging me for a few hours. I could distinctly recall that the SNP won fifteen more councillors than Labour in 2007 - this time the gap is thirty, and yet the BBC and others are reporting that Labour have made a slightly bigger net gain in seats than the Nationalists. The explanation for this discrepancy, of course, is that 2007 isn't being used as the baseline for the figures. Now, there's certainly a case to be made for taking into account seats that have changed hands in by-elections over the last five years, but to count as "Labour gains" seats won back from Glasgow First (ie. seats Labour "gained" from themselves) is without a doubt grossly misleading. To give a more meaningful idea of the direction of travel, here is the number of councillors won by each party yesterday, with changes from the 2007 position -

SNP 424 (+61)
Labour 394 (+46)
Conservatives 115 (-28)
Liberal Democrats 71 (-95)
Greens 14 (+6)
SSP 1 (-)
Others 201 (+8)

So not only did the SNP secure the most seats, they also enjoyed the biggest gains. Not a repeat of last year's landslide, but unambiguously a victory.

Not that you'd know it if you listened to Sarah Boyack. No, she would have you believe that Labour, unlike the SNP, weren't remotely interested in the overall number of seats they won in Scotland, but instead in "gaining the trust" of individual communities. That's the sort of sophistry that can easily make your head hurt, because uttered with conviction it can almost sound like a plausible distinction to draw - except of course that the best way of measuring which party has been most successful in gaining the trust of individual communities is to look at who won the most seats throughout the country. Evidently this is Labour's stock line for the occasion, though, because Duncan Hothersall tried a variation on it when I queried him on Twitter -

"There were 32 elections in Scotland yesterday. The idea that there is one national result is farcical."

Hmmm. I presume by the same token that Labour's victory throughout England and Wales is a mirage simply because the Tories held on in Harrogate.

* * *

In the mid-1990s, the perception was that the SNP had performed exceptionally well in local elections, in spite of finishing some 15-18 percentage points behind Labour in the popular vote. And until 2007, Labour used to regularly crow about the SNP having "lost every single election in its history". So this notion that Labour can be said to have performed well on Thursday in spite of being clearly defeated by the SNP is rather new and startling, and it demonstrates just how thoroughly the underlying assumptions of Scottish politics have been turned on their heads in a very short space of time.

* * *

Although the SNP's lead over Labour is gratifying, to my mind the much more important factor is the net gain in seats. I once read a suggestion that the reason Labour unexpectedly lost the 1970 election was that by shedding so many local councillors between 1967 and 1969, their local organisation had simply withered, and they could no longer compete with the Tories' national network of footsoldiers. Campaigning methods may have been transformed since then, but the number of councillors still correlates with strength on the ground, so an extra sixty in the bag can't be a bad thing in the run-up to the independence referendum - and nor can six more Greens, as it happens.

One thing is for sure - the overall number of seats won is far more significant in respect of the independence referendum than who controls Glasgow. It's been said a number of times that winning Glasgow would have been a crucial stepping-stone towards a Yes vote - but how, exactly? On the list of people whose voices are going to carry some weight in the referendum debate, the leader of Glasgow City Council ranks about 594th. Indeed, there are even circumstances in which taking control of a flagship council can ultimately prove an electoral millstone - we need look no further than the Glenrothes by-election for evidence of that.

* * *

There was an amusing period yesterday when the running tally on the BBC News homepage showed the SNP in third place throughout the whole of Great Britain, ahead of the Liberal Democrats. That didn't mean the party was in line to become the UK's third party of local government, because only seats up for grabs this time round were being taken into account. Nevertheless, for the SNP to come so close to beating the UK Lib Dems "on the day" was nothing short of astonishing. As I write this, the Lib Dems stand on 431 seats throughout Britain, and the SNP are on 424.

A year later than expected?

Just thought I'd jot down a few brief thoughts about the local elections while we're waiting for the last results to come through. In a way, this is the result we were expecting at the mid-point in the campaign for last year's Holyrood election, with both the SNP and Labour advancing at the expense of the Tories and especially the Liberal Democrats. As far as I can see, this is literally the SNP's best local election results in history, so how anyone will be able to spin that as a setback is a bit of a mystery, but certain London media folk will doubtless still try to do so, mainly because they seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Scotland consists entirely of a city called Glasgow.

I do still wonder if the decoupling of the elections from the Holyrood vote for the first time since 1995 has made a difference for Labour, because the campaign has been very low-key, and to some extent has melded into a wider UK 'referendum' on the Westminster coalition. That was what we feared might happen last year, but didn't as a result of the Scottish 'framing' of the campaign. What will really matter now in determining who wins the spin war will be the overall result in terms of seats and first preference votes across Scotland. Alex Salmond seemed confident a couple of hours ago that the SNP will come out on top in both, but we'll just have to wait and see because it looks quite tight. Incidentally, one of the frustrations of the 2007 local elections was the difficulty of tracking down the first preference percentages for the whole country, so I hope that's not the case this time.

Last but not least, whatever criticisms might be made of Allison Hunter, I'm not sure her Labour counterpart's qualities are anything to write home about. He holds the award for the most cringe-inducing interview of the day, describing a 2:2 split with the SNP in a Glasgow ward as a "fawntahhhh-stic" result for Scottish Labour, and dismissing the SNP's overall showing as "dehhhh-sperate, dehhhh-sperate".

Moments like that remind me why I'm a Nat. Roll on 2014.

Why you should seriously consider using all (or most) of your preferences when you vote today

After I mentioned the other day that I was planning to give the Labour candidate my sixth preference out of six in the local elections, Auld Acquaintance left this comment -

"I wouldn't even give that bunch of chancers my 6th preference, In fact I am not even using all my preferences."

That of course chimed with the sentiment uncovered by the poll I ran a few weeks ago, when most of you said that you weren't planning to rank the three London parties at all, and also with a comment that was left by an anonymous poster at the time -

"Surely the best way to not vote Labour up is to leave them off the ballot. Just select SNP and SSP and that's that?"

I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the latter comment did make me wonder slightly if there might be some confusion about the voting system. There seems to be a sense that only ranking the SNP candidates somehow makes for a more 'emphatic' vote against Labour (or Tory, or whichever party), or conversely that opting to rank the other candidates with your lower preferences would 'dilute' your vote for the SNP. Neither perception is accurate.

If your top preferences are for the SNP, your vote cannot possibly stray from the SNP column until all the Nationalist candidates in the ward are either elected or eliminated. So if an SNP candidate fails to be elected, you need have no fear that your lower preferences for unionist parties will have somehow contributed to that. But if you don't fill in those lower preferences, what you are effectively doing is abstaining on every question other than the fate of the SNP candidates - including, for example, whether you would rather see an independent or a Labour councillor elected. How many of us are truly neutral on that point, particularly if we live in a council area where the fight for control is between Labour and SNP? We wouldn't literally be "voting Labour up" by abstaining, but we'd sure as hell be missing a golden opportunity to vote them down.

In my own three-seat ward, there are two SNP candidates, one SSP, one Labour, one Tory and an independent. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the Labour candidate and both SNP candidates will be elected. But from what I've heard about him, the independent seems rather impressive (notwithstanding his sniping against the local SNP!), so it's perhaps not entirely inconceivable that he might just about find himself in the mix. Now, let's suppose the SNP candidates are the first two to be elected, and their excess votes are then proportionately redistributed to help decide whether Labour or the independent claims the third seat. It would seem absurd to have abstained in that stage of the voting, given that it would dilute the SNP's overall chances of dislodging Labour from power in the council. So here's how I'll be ranking the candidates -

1. SNP
2. SNP
3. SSP
4. Independent
5. Conservative
6. Labour

Only the sixth preference is superfluous here - not ranking Labour at all would have exactly the same effect, but all of the other five preferences are potentially significant. I would obviously prefer Labour to Tory in a Westminster contest, but given the state of play locally it makes sense from a tactical point of view to place the Tory fifth. I'm placing the SSP third solely on the basis that they are an explicitly pro-independence party - I've no idea where the independent candidate stands.

A message to the birds : what about MY rights?

We've got some swifts nesting in the loft at the moment, after a technologically-advanced drilling operation to gain access through a corner of the roof that seems to have been going on for several years. However, an internet search has revealed that it would be illegal to disturb the nest in any way, and we'll have to wait until winter at the earliest.

I dunno. These bloody immigrant birds - not content with stealing our women and our jobs, it seems they can just swan into our houses without so much as a by-your-leave, and the law tells us that's fine. They've got more rights than the decent, law-abiding, Labour-voting (sixth preference out of six), hard-working families of this country. We're not even allowed to shoot them.

Let's all move to Texas and napalm some geese.

Being Labour means that every election is the 2001 election

It's been a bumper day for local election leaflets at the Kelly residence, with both Labour and the SNP making their pitch. Labour haven't quite managed to scale the dizzying heights of last year's "Frank and Bernadine McKenna" epic, but there were one or two small points that managed to confuse me all the same. For example, the headline on the back cover reads "Being Labour means giving everyone a voice", but the text that follows fails to explain that rather cryptic claim, or indeed to have any discernible relevance to it at all. So I can only conclude that Labour's inspiring voice-enabling exercise essentially constitutes a feedback form further down the page, which gives the following tick-box options -

"Yes, I'll be voting Labour. Count me in!"

"Yes I'd like a poster."

"I'd like to help in Stevie's campaign!"

"Yes, keep me up to date. Sign me up as a supporter of Labour."

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should note that there was also a fifth option of asking to speak to the Labour candidate. Nevertheless, there does seem to be an expectation here that constant repetition of the words "Labour are fab!" will account for at least 80% of the use people make of the voice that Labour have generously given them.

Elsewhere in the leaflet, a young lady called "Gillian" earnestly informs us that -

"Stevie has been a great servant to this area and faced with SNP and Tory Led cuts I believe Labour's commitment and excellent record is the positive way forward."

Which begs a number of questions - a) does anyone in the known universe, with the possible exception of Anas Sarwar, actually speak like that?, b) how can a "record", however excellent, be the "way forward"?, and c) why is there a capital 'L' in 'led'? Is the subliminal suggestion supposed to be that the SNP and Tories are a married couple, and that Led is their surname?

Other blurbs in the leaflet were making me feel distinctly nostalgic, but I was struggling to put my finger on the reason why...

"Labour has achieved a lot in Cumbernauld...

There is much more to do..."

"During difficult times, Labour in North Lanarkshire has delivered...yet we know there are continuing challenges...

We have achieved a lot, but there is more to do."

And then it suddenly came to me in a blinding flash - North Lanarkshire Labour seem to think they're fighting the 2001 general election. Well, as I firmly intend to give Stevie and Labour my vote on Thursday (sixth preference out of six), I'm now looking forward to at last finding out what it would have been like to have the starring role in that excruciating Labour PEB eleven years ago. I expect nothing less than hordes of suspiciously attractive and wholesome-looking teachers, firefighters and nurses to applaud me out of the polling station, ecstatically chanting the Blessed Mantra - "a lot done, James...but a lot still to do!"

All the same, Labour had only been in power for four years in 2001. They've continuously been in power at local level in Cumbernauld since 1980, so if they think they've still got "a lot left to do" here, heaven only knows how many more decades it's going to take them to actually get round to doing it.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I've been planning to write a post with that title (a quote from Walt Whitman) for a good few weeks, by way of an admission that I jumped the gun in saying that Engelbert Humperdinck's UK Eurovision entry was bound to have only a niche appeal, before I'd even heard it. But I winced when Alex Massie gave the quote a spin in the Scotsman recently, because now it's bound to look like that's where I stole the idea from. Cheers, Alex.

Anyway, having totally immersed myself in the Eurovision national final season for a few weeks, I drifted away again, and I thought it was high time I caught up with the latest standings in the betting and fan polls. I wasn't really expecting any surprises - but I was wrong. Italy second in the betting, Russia third. What is going on? I was so uninspired by Italy's entry that my first listen to it a few weeks ago was also my last until today. It's grown on me a bit, and I suppose it has a quirky side to it, but unless they do something absolutely astonishing with the staging, it's not a winner. I presume Russia are only so high because British bookies/punters think that 'barking mad' always wins votes at the Eurovision. Well, they're half right - we could easily see it finishing in the top half of the table come the night of the final (particularly with the assistance of the pro-Russian bloc vote), but it has virtually no chance of winning.

One thing that isn't a surprise is to see Sweden leading the betting - it's been the fan favourite from the word go. But again, I'm not at all convinced. Dance tracks have a uniformly atrocious record at the contest, including one or two that were tipped to win - the superb Je t'adore by Kate Ryan famously failed to even qualify for the final in 2006. So at this stage, I'll go out on a limb and more or less exclude Sweden's chances of outright victory.

So who does that leave? Next highest in the betting are Serbia, the UK and Denmark, in that order. I think the UK have every right to go in with as much confidence as they did under Andrew Lloyd-Webber's direction three years ago - when they (or "we" as I must force myself to say) finished fifth. So I think that's the sort of placing we're probably looking at again. We're not going to win, because a new law of physics was discovered circa 1999 stating that the UK can't win Eurovision anymore. As for Denmark, they have a lovely song, but also one that's not desperately original or likely to reach out of the screen and grab people on a first listen.

Having eliminated virtually everyone else's chances, could this then be one of those rare years where a song wins purely on quality? Serbia, Spain and Iceland are the class songs of the field in my opinion, and in comparison with the competition they all look ideally placed. And with Serbia having the Balkan bloc vote behind them, and with the name/face recognition factor of their performer (Željko Joksimović), they would be my hot tip for the time being.

And then of course there's Jedward. Ahem...

I had them all wrong...

From a hard-headed political point of view, it's such a pity that Alex Salmond has had to pull out of tonight's edition of Question Time due to a family bereavement, just one week out from the local elections. But no-one can doubt that he has his priorities firmly in order. And it's noteworthy that he hasn't, as you might have expected, been replaced by another SNP representative. That neatly answers David Dimbleby's sneering question from a few months back about why Alex Salmond only accepts invitations onto the programme when it is held in England. It's now plain for all to see that if he accepted invitations to appear in the editions in Scotland, those would be the only ones in which the SNP were represented at all, and they scarcely happen that often. It's an uphill struggle for the SNP to get their fair share on "national" TV as it is.

One good thing to have come out of Salmond's withdrawal, though, is that I now realise I've totally misjudged the Tory Herd over at Political Betting. They did themselves proud yesterday when the news broke. To be absolutely honest, I would have expected them to make fools of themselves by instantly jumping to silly conclusions, but they didn't - they simply waited patiently until the full facts presented themselves. For example...

Next : LOL

The Watcher : One wonders what Salmond is running away and hiding from.

Slackbladder : And the brave, brave brave Sir Alex bravely ran away...

The Watcher : It's as if he has something to hide.

Chris g00 : Gordon Brown: Author of the book 'Courage'
Alex Salmond: Braveheart

What does it say about Scotland's two most senior politicians, that they prefer to run and hide, rather than stand and fight?

AlanBrooke : non-story, nothing to see [note : intended as hilarious sarcasm]

The Watcher : Is Alec [sic] making time for a 'date night' with Rupert?

Chris g00 : BBC Question Time

"Question Time is in Romford tomorrow with Chris Grayling; @HackneyAbbott ; @pollytoynbee ; @Nigel_Farage and Simon Hughes. #bbcqt"

No Alex? Leadership brought to you by the SNP.

And then, just after that, the news filtered through that the reason Salmond had withdrawn was because he was attending a family funeral. Any expressions of contriton or mild embarrassment? No, curiously enough, they all suddenly found they had other subjects to discuss as a matter of some urgency.

* * *

Sticking with the subject of Question Time, I was reflecting on the discussion during last week's show about the proposal to dock the child benefit of parents whose children persistently truant. It made me think back to the last few months of my own time at school, when the following sequence of events occurred more than once or twice -

1) My mother drove me to the front door of the school.

2) She watched me enter the front door.

3) I nipped out the side door.

4) I hid in some bushes for 40 minutes to avoid late-arriving teachers.

5) I made my escape.

I'd be fascinated to discover how the likes of Blair and Cameron reckon my mother could have been held criminally responsible for all that. Admittedly, it would be harder to get away with it these days, with the sudden influx of technology that can track the movement of pupils every second of the day. But that's scarcely progress - it just makes schools look even less like places of learning, and even more like day-prisons for non-criminals.

It's a shame you brought that up...

On this morning's thread, JPJ2 mentioned that he was the only person brave enough to have left a mildly critical comment on Jenny Kemp's piece about male violence against women at Better Nation. Ms Kemp later responded to his comment directly, and it was a fairly extraordinary contribution -

"It’s a shame that you want to get into this ‘what about abused men’ argument. This was a post about men’s power, privilege, and misuse of those, and the onus on men with public platforms to condemn abuse of women and not perpetuate myths surrounding it."

The problem here is that JPJ2 was in no sense changing the subject. One of the premises on which Jenny's argument and conclusions hinged was that domestic violence is essentially something that men do to women, and not the other way round. JPJ2's comment challenged that premise, and therefore could hardly have been more relevant. Jenny must surely have realised that, so to react by telling him off for speaking out of turn, rather than addressing the legitimate objection he raised, is on the face of it thoroughly peculiar. But it fits into a wider pattern with radical feminism - namely, that certain articles of faith are not up for debate. They don't need to be tested or justified, they're just facts. If you don't find them convincing, it's not the philosophy that's wrong, it's a personal failing on your part. Or perhaps you just haven't been browbeaten hard enough yet. It's not uncommon to hear the phrase "we need to educate men" - not listen to, not engage with, simply educate. In most cases, that's code for stop thinking, and start accepting.

"Of course no-one should ever have to accept domestic abuse, and any men who experience it should be supported, but it’s a different issue."

I would suggest that the first and most important step towards "supporting" men who have been abused is precisely to admit that the issue is not "different". Does a punch to the face feel different if you're a man? Is being struck with a blunt instrument less stressful if you're male? Do men bleed differently to women? Of course not, but by peddling the idea that in some magical, unspecified way it's completely different for men (and by logical extension that men are lesser victims), Ms Kemp is perpetuating the very stigma that makes life so intolerable for many male victims. The radical feminist message in relation to domestic violence is "men are all-powerful, women are passive" (ironically, a profoundly conservative and sexist notion), so if a man admits to being abused it's a strike against his masculinity. Or he'll be told that it can't be as bad as all that, or that he's lying. Is that Ms. Kemp's idea of being supportive?

Another theme of the article was that because men generically are 'to blame' for violence against women, there is a responsibility on all men, whether they are perpetrators or not, to do something about it and "challenge" that violence. They are being negligent if they fail to do so. So if we are expected to believe that female-on-male domestic violence is of an entirely different character, does that mean women generically are 'to blame' for it? We can only assume not, because Jenny sees no irony in the fact that she has effectively been negligent by not actively challenging that type of violence herself - indeed in her article she did the opposite of challenge it, she wrote as if it didn't exist. So it seems we must conclude that male violence against women is "gender-based", but female violence against men is not.

But how can that possibly be? If female-on-male violence proves that human beings can occasionally be violent against their partners in a sporadic way that is not rooted in "patriarchy", "matriarchy" or any other type of "-archy", surely the same must sometimes apply to male-on-female violence? How can all male-on-female violence be "gender-based" (and thus something that the male gender is collectively responsible for), when no female-on-male violence need ever trouble the conscience of any other woman? It's just nonsense, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that the real problem with male victims, and this need to swat them away, and tell them "it's a shame" when they don't keep their noses out of all this, is less to do with protecting female victims of violence, and more to do with protecting a treasured belief-system that countless lifetimes of political activism would be rendered meaningless without. That was of course the point that JPJ2 was making - that this isn't a gender-exclusive issue, and that the most effective way to help all victims, including female victims, is to move beyond that warped and harmful paradigm. Is Ms. Kemp actually interested in discussing what might be effective, or do we have to sign up lock, stock and barrel to her ideology before our voices can be considered legitimate?

"Women experience a whole continuum of abuse from men (sexual harrassment, domestic abuse, sexual violence, forced marriage, exploitation in prostitution, stalking, genital mutilation etc etc) in a way that men don’t."

OK, let's take those one at a time -

Men experience sexual harrassment. If anyone claims they don't, it's only for the same reason that men supposedly "can't be raped by women", ie. the act is either defined in law or in the interpretation of the law in ludicrously gendered terms. Men experience harrassment at the hands of both men and women, just as women do. So this is not an exclusively male-on-female problem.

Men experience domestic abuse, as Ms Kemp herself has conceded. They experience it at the hands of both women and men, just as women do. Again, not an exclusively male-on-female problem.

Men experience sexual violence, at the hands of both men and women. As noted above, the only reason they "can't be raped by a woman" is that the law defines rape in gendered terms.

Men experience forced marriage. Women experience it more frequently because of gender discrimination in the societies they live in or their societies of origin. However, the perpetrators of forced marriage are both male and female.

Men experience exploitation in prostitution. But it's hard not to suspect here that Ms Kemp probably takes the "Swedish model" view that all prostitution, however scrupulously consensual, constitutes violence against women, again relying on the sexist and discriminatory worldview that only men are responsible for their actions, and women don't know their own minds.

Men experience stalking, at the hands of both women and men.

The closest Ms Kemp gets to a genuinely gender-exclusive problem is genital mutilation, but even this is something that boys are routinely subjected to as well, albeit in a different form.

"And the root cause of this is women’s wider inequality, in a patriarchal society."

So for the "root cause" of an exclusively male-on-female phenomenon that demonstrably does not actually exist, we're offered an evidence-free affirmation of blind faith in the concept of "patriarchy"? Wow.

"The experience of male domestic abuse victims are really quite different and not something I want to get into here."

And how is it different? She'll tell us later. Maybe.

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm convinced.

Zero tolerance - but only of some domestic violence

It was an exasperating experience reading the Better Nation guest post on the subject of domestic and sexual violence from Jenny Kemp of the Zero Tolerance campaign. She makes a number of points that I agree with and which are important - for instance, that Bill Walker can no longer represent his constituents with any credibility, and that he is disturbingly incapable of spotting the contradiction between his admission of violence and his denial of assault. But the conclusion she invites us to draw is an utterly incredible - albeit depressingly familiar - one. It's ironic that someone who draws attention to contradictions in the words of others is unable to spot the equally disturbing contradictions in her own.

"So, having reminded ourselves of various men who have failed to challenge violence and abuse, I can’t help wondering, who will be next?..

...What I hope is much less certain is that he (or very occasionally she – let’s not forget the deep sexism of Nadine Dorries MP, who has blamed girls for their own sexual abuse) will get away with it. Bill, William and Ken might be safe – although in the case of Mr Walker that’s by no means certain – but I hope that whoever next reveals he doesn’t know or care about men’s violence and abuse will not be left standing, so essentially undamaged by the ordeal. What kind of message would that send out to women seeking justice or recovery from domestic abuse or sexual violence? That the establishment is a safe place to hide if you are a bigot and a misogynist? That the male protection racket is alive and well? That, frankly, we don’t care? That’s not a message I find tolerable or acceptable."

I'm not going to say that Jenny doesn't care about male victims of domestic or sexual violence committed by women or by other men. I'm not going to say that she doesn't care about female victims of domestic or sexual violence committed by other women. But it is a fact that she doesn't seem remotely interested in them. It is a fact that she seems to tacitly deny the possibility of their very existence. She practically defines domestic and sexual violence as something that "men" do to women. She acknowledges that most men don't do it (thanks for that), but as "men" generically are the problem, only men can provide the solution by speaking out. That solution does of course require that the men speaking out think only what they are told to think about the subject, which seemingly will consist of a fair dose of self-loathing -

"If we only ever involve women in tackling this problem, which is caused by men..."

Good grief. Heaven forbid that both men and women might want to be involved in tackling a problem that is caused by individuals of both genders, and which individuals of both genders suffer from. Jenny talks about powerful men who don't "get it", but she's in a position of some power as well. She notes that there is already a "cross-party consensus" against domestic violence (in the terms that she defines it - exclusively male-on-female), so where on earth has that consensus sprung from if the bastard "men" are the only ones with power in this country? It's there because Jenny and those who share her views carry disproportionate influence, to the point where the worldview she promotes is practically unchallengeable in some (notably Scottish Labour) circles.

Now, there isn't a "female protection racket" that deliberately trivialises the impact of female-on-male (or female-on-female or male-on-male) domestic or sexual abuse. But there are people in the elite, of both genders, who are emotionally wedded to an antiquated ideology of mono-directional power relations between men and women, which means, to coin a phrase, that they simply don't "get it" about what happens in the real world. Jenny is outraged about the "message" that powerful men belittling violence against women send out, but I despair to think what message is being sent out by her own celebration of a cross-party consensus that seeks to silence the voices of a large number of victims of domestic violence. Indeed, a consensus that chillingly tells those victims that they themselves are the "cause" of domestic violence, through the very fact of their gender.

A couple of housekeeping points

Just to let you know that you can now subscribe to this blog by email. I've been very reluctant to enable that feature, because I assumed it sent out posts as soon as they were published. That would have made me a bit paranoid, because I've had a few disasters where I've hit 'publish' before a post was properly ready. But apparently it doesn't work like that - a digest goes out every day at a set time (but only if there's been a post in the last 24 hours, of course). You can find the subscription form near the top of the sidebar.

Spurred on by the comment from Lupus (I think?) the other week, I've also taken the plunge and joined Networked Blogs. But the widget is far too large, so I had a look at what LPW has done, and instead set up a Facebook page for this blog, and installed the widget from that. (Scroll down the sidebar to see it.) In theory the feed from Networked Blogs should go to that page, and also to Twitter. What could possibly go wrong? Ah well, I'll just regard it as a trial run!