Honorary Woman
The newspapers report today that UK Labour leader - Ed Miliband - is to become an 'honorary woman' at this year's party conference - to hear first hand from angry female members.
Apparently men will be banned from a special 'What Women Want' session of the conference - except Ed of course - and as leader Ed will make a short speech followed by an open microphone session.
Sounds interesting - but I can't think why they wouldn't do this at the separate Labour party women's conference - assuming that such an event still takes place of course.
What surprises me is that none of these Labour politicians - women or men - have had anything much to say about equal pay for the past ten years.
People are happy to bang on about the need to more women - in leadership positions.
Yet when it came to standing up for the lowest paid council workers - who are predominantly women or course - they just looked the other way.
The reason is that they would have had to criticise Labour-run councils and Labour-supporting trade unions - for failing to tackle the big pay gap between traditional male and female jobs.
But they didn't - they took the easy way out, sat on their hands - made a great big fuss anout other, arguably less important issues - and hoped the whole thing would just go away.
So I wish Ed Miliband well - maybe he will become Labour's answer to Mrs Doubtfire.
But if he really wants to know 'what women want' - he could do worse than speaking to just a few of the women in Scotland - who are still fighting for equal pay.
Apparently men will be banned from a special 'What Women Want' session of the conference - except Ed of course - and as leader Ed will make a short speech followed by an open microphone session.
Sounds interesting - but I can't think why they wouldn't do this at the separate Labour party women's conference - assuming that such an event still takes place of course.
What surprises me is that none of these Labour politicians - women or men - have had anything much to say about equal pay for the past ten years.
People are happy to bang on about the need to more women - in leadership positions.
Yet when it came to standing up for the lowest paid council workers - who are predominantly women or course - they just looked the other way.
The reason is that they would have had to criticise Labour-run councils and Labour-supporting trade unions - for failing to tackle the big pay gap between traditional male and female jobs.
But they didn't - they took the easy way out, sat on their hands - made a great big fuss anout other, arguably less important issues - and hoped the whole thing would just go away.
So I wish Ed Miliband well - maybe he will become Labour's answer to Mrs Doubtfire.
But if he really wants to know 'what women want' - he could do worse than speaking to just a few of the women in Scotland - who are still fighting for equal pay.
