Ten Ways

Catherine Lafferty writes:

What do you call a man who has become the leader of 600 million women?

Pope Francis.

Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergolio, as he was, is an unassuming Argentinian Jesuit. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he acquired a reputation for a concern for social justice and eschewing the Episcopal limousine in favour of travelling by bus.

The vast institution he now leads is the oldest in the western world; its relationship to women characterised by paradox. Its priesthood is all male and apart from Eastern Catholics and Anglican converts, unmarried. Yet the most important saint in its communion, revered as the Theotokos (God-bearer) and Queen of Heaven, is the Blessed Virgin Mary and women, who tend to be more religious than men, form the backbone of its congregations. Despite this modernity poses new challenges for Catholic women particularly in the realm of sex and reproduction. As he gets ready to lead the Church through its great feast of Easter for the first time as supreme pontiff, Pope Francis also faces the task of renewing the Church’s relationship with women. Here are ten ways he could do that.

1. Start in the Vatican itself. There is a broad consensus that the Vatican’s bureaucracy, the curia, is in urgent need of reform. The curia in its current state is also marked by its dearth of women: the highest-ranking woman in the Vatican is a Salesian, Sister Enrica Rosanna who is undersecretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. The clamour for curial reform affords Pope Francis a golden opportunity to sweep out the back-scratching, occasionally backstabbing bureaucratic old guard and promote female excellence in the corridors of power.

2. Direct the reforming spirit downwards and outwards. Just as bureaucratic ineptitude isn’t limited to the Vatican; neither should a drive for professional civil servants with representative numbers of female staff end there. Church agencies, Bishops Conferences, diocesan offices should be dragged out of their sleepy complacency and firmly manoeuvred into a new era of industry and competence. As part of that drive female talent should be identified and nurtured.

3. Turn all Catholic workplaces into centres of excellence for family-friendly employment. Catholic social teaching stresses that access to employment and the professions should be open to all without unjust discrimination. The principle is a noble one but it needs to be underpinned by action to remove barriers to employment and the ones which women face are strongly linked to their family roles. Flexi-time, workplace crèches, allowance made for women who have had to take career breaks, all these should be the norm in the 21^st Century Catholic Church workplace.

4. Take a lead in providing affordable childcare. The Catholic Church teaches that couples should be open to the gift of life, a principle which is made harder to live up to by women’s economic needs. At the same time research suggests women in the UK are not having as many children as they would want and that one of the obstacles they face in combining their reproductive and economic aspirations is a dearth of inexpensive childcare. We are used to free Catholic schools, why not free or cheap Catholic-run nurseries available to Catholics and people of all faiths and none too?

5. Invest in research into fertility awareness. One of the key areas of contention between Catholicism and feminism is the Church’s rejection of contraception. Yet the Catholic Church also accepts that “responsible parenthood is exercised by... those who for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts decide not to have additional children.” The Catholic Church can plough funding for research into fertility management which complements rather than compromises its core principles.

6. Put women and their needs at the heart of its Pro Life activism. The Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion is where its most significant confrontation with feminism occurs. Elective pregnancy termination is also a commonplace in modern industrialised nations. A creaking Pro Life lobby is ill-equipped to consider why women opt to have abortions and what they need to continue their pregnancies willingly. Enlightened leadership by the new Pope would see a rejuvenated Pro Life lobby being as tough on the causes of abortion as abortion itself.

7. Education as a good in itself and a key to women’s liberation. The Catholic Church was a pioneer in educating women and today educates ten of millions of women and girls worldwide. This is good but there’s still for improvement. Education leads to quantifiable improvements in women’s lives yet some 61 million children, an estimated 60 percent of which are girls, are denied access to education. The new Pope comes from an order, the Society of Jesus, which is justly famed for its educational mission; a campaign utilising the Jesuits’ centuries of experience and expertise to provide an education to every child in the world would ensure Francis’ papacy left a lasting legacy of good for women worldwide.

8. Women’s rights are human rights. Vatican documents are studded with references to the dignity of women and decrying their mistreatment. The Holy See also has Permanent Observer status at the UN and diplomatic relations with 176 states. The Catholic Church is thus uniquely placed to advocate for and assess progress on women’s rights at the local and national level. Inspired leadership from Rome could see use made of existing diocesan and parish structures to advance women’s rights, not just in lofty international conferences but on the ground, from the grassroots upwards.

9. Continue to lead opposition to Population Control campaigns; do so intelligently. From Peru to Mexico, India to China, the crimes which have been and still are being committed against women, especially poor and ethnic minority women in the course of population control campaigns is shocking. The Catholic Church has been the most consistent voice of opposition to these human rights violations yet time and again she has been outmaneuvred at the conference table and her efforts cynically misrepresented to the detriment of countless women living under authoritarian regimes. Effective action against population control must be prioritised by Pope Francis as a matter of urgency.

10. Spread the Word. In a world where crimes against women continue to stun, the Catholic Church’s insistence that women are not to be reduced to mere instruments for the satisfaction of men’s desires is more boldly countercultural than is realised. Under Pope Francis, the Church’s teaching that women have equal dignity to men should be boldly proclaimed. Some 50 years ago the reforming Second Vatican Council was in its first year. In its closing address, the Council declared, “the hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved.” The vision is a stirring one, time will tell whether it will be any further to being realised under Pope Francis' pontificate.

Fifty Years On

Mick Whelan writes:

Ernest Marples was the Conservative transport minister who commissioned Dr Richard Beeching to write his 1963 report in favour of slashing Britain's railway network. Beeching's brief left little doubt as to what it was to conclude. The railway was to be made into a profitable business and "must be of a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects. In particular, the railway system must be modelled to meet current needs." It was plain from the outset that the notion of rail as a public service was not to be a consideration. Beeching's report was to justify savaging the country's rail network.

Quite apart from instigating this railway vandalism, Marples was an unsavoury character. When Harold Macmillan appointed him minister of transport he owned 80 per cent of Marples Ridgway, a road-building company. Even Tories could see this was a conflict of interests, and he said he'd sell his shares. In fact, he didn't until after his firm was awarded, by his department, the tender to build the Hammersmith flyover - rejecting a lower tender in the process. To be fair, he did later sell his shares in the road building company. He sold them to Ruth Marples, his wife.

When Lord Denning investigated the Profumo affair he told Macmillan that Marples was a regular visitor of prostitutes - and in 1975 he was revealed as a tax-dodger when he scooted off abroad to escape paying his dues, using a company he owned in Liechtenstein. So we're dealing with a pretty unpleasant man.

But even these crimes paled into insignificance when, as the Conservative minister of transport, he appointed Beeching as chairman of British Railways with the mission of destroying Britain's rail network. Beeching, with his business background at ICI and no experience in the rail industry, was observed to have his head very deep in the trough even in his early days as a "public servant." He demanded a salary considerably more than the prime minister, and he got it.

It seemed a large amount of money - but, in their terms, he earned it. He did his master's bidding. The report he wrote led to 4,000 miles of track being torn up almost immediately, and a further 2,000 destroyed by the end of the 1960s. Quite a coup for a transport minister with business interests in constructing roads.

Beeching called the report his master required Reshaping Of British Railways, which is almost as large an affront to the English language as its contents were to the railways. It was a breathtaking distortion. By "reshaping" he actually meant vandalising, destroying and obliterating. It's like saying that the allies "reshaped" Cologne towards the end of the second world war.

The "Beeching axe" is discussed today as if it were an attack on railways. In fact it was more than that. It was an assault on public transport as a whole. It was the victory of the individual in a self-contained tin box over collective travel - it is part of the Tory dream of the end of social society. It is a concrete vision of what Thatcher envisaged when she said: "There is no such thing as society - there are individual men and women, and there are families." 

Individuals sit in cars, remote from their kind. Trains provide travel where people interact, exchange and socialise. Public transport is anathema to the right. So who better placed and motivated to destroy it than a combination of a government minister with a vested interest and an overpaid sycophantic lap dog installed as the head of British Rail? Yet to label Beeching as the single evil character in this mugging of public transport is misleading. He was by no means the "lone gunman." He was a piece in the jigsaw, part of what Richard Faulkner in his recent book Holding The Line defines as a conspiracy.

There were the self-interested grasping managers who crop up everywhere, prepared to toe whatever line their paymasters invent - administrators lacking imagination, loyalty or morality. There were the councils, like Blackpool, that shoved aside the railway on which its prosperity had been based in favour of building a motorway into the town. There are always hands ready to get grubby in exchange for money or position.

Beeching's cuts robbed remote areas of any train service and made them reliant on the car. Then the British car industry disappeared and that reliance was exported. The opportunities for future growth, including the attractiveness of rail as a tourist attraction, were crushed as the rails were hacked up and the locos smashed. Beeching buried his dead lines.

This short-term thinking continues today in franchising. Now 15-year franchises are touted as the solution to providing efficient rail services. It is ludicrous. Railway planning has to be considered for generations ahead. The only thing that can be done in a hurry is destruction - which is so often regretted later. We would be a cleaner, more efficient and socially accessible country if branch lines had not been turned into scrap.

The real tragedy is how slowly we learn from experience. Rail, and that includes rail freight, has a central part to play in any thriving green economy. But instead of planning now to hand on a national integrated rail network to a future generation, the government concentrates on linking a handful of main cities on a north-south axis, while whole regions are ignored.

HS2 should be a start, running the whole length of the country, with building beginning in the north and the south and meeting in the middle, while providing the backbone of a network that reaches out to provide reliable rail to the whole country.

Beeching, Marples and the other vandals made this difficult, but despite them rail doesn't just remain, it grows, to all our benefit - social, environmental and commercial. In the last three months of last year, over 385 million passenger journeys took place on our railways. I see that as 770 million fingers raised in celebration of the fact that ultimately Beeching failed. 

The same newspaper editorialises:

The 50th anniversary of the Beeching report throws up many lessons for the present and future. There can be few people now who do not regard the plan to abolish almost one-third of the rail network, including 6,000 miles of railway line and 2,000 stations, as an utter disaster. Dr Beeching's medicine not only came close to killing the patient, it ripped the heart out of hundreds of local communities, destroyed 100,000 jobs and turned many surviving stations into unsafe spaces.

One purpose, we were told at the time, was to stop wasting so much public money "subsidising" an inefficient and bureaucratic nationalised industry. The reality was that for most of its history under nationalisation, the British Railways Board had been making a gross surplus - but was crippled by the cost of replacing clapped-out infrastructure and rolling stock inherited from the private railway magnates.

While the remaining network benefited from Beeching's modernisation proposals, our society still suffers today from the legacy of his giant act of vandalism. Many rural communities have withered or died, motorways and trunk roads have stamped their giant carbon footprint across the landscape of Britain and the surviving railway network struggles to meet the growing demand for safer, cleaner and quicker travel.

So what are the lessons for today?

First, that when the crumbling industry was taken out of the hands of greedy private monopolies in 1948, it was an act of capitalist nationalisation rather than one of progressive or democratic nationalisation. The railway industry was rescued in order to serve the interests of the capitalist economy as a whole.

Many of those appointed to the new management boards were ex-directors in the rail and other industries. Workers and their trade union representatives were excluded from policy-making bodies altogether. Compensation paid to the old private shareholders continued for up to 40 years after vesting day, a financial millstone around the neck of British Rail. Overcharged passengers and the public purse financed a massive programme of modernisation, ripening the industry for a return to the profiteers in 1993.

Secondly, the Beeching report was largely implemented because strategic planning in the public sector was subordinated to the short-term interests of capitalist profit. The road-building, road haulage and motor vehicle corporations and their suppliers piled up the profits as roads replaced railways. Tory transport minister Ernest Marples controlled motorway builders Marples Ridgway through his wife's shareholding. He had appointed Dr Beeching to chair the British Railways Board and later fled the country to avoid taxes and lawsuits.

Today there is no strategic planning worth the name in any major industry. All are run in the interests of giant shareholders who put profits before any wider economic, social or environmental considerations.

The results are plain to see: underinvestment in key industries such as gas and water; a fragmented railway system in which public money subsidises the profits of most train operating companies and will pay for badly needed infrastructure development; and a dysfunctional banking system rescued by bail-outs of public cash that make the subsidies to the old nationalised industries look like petty cash. 

The failure of the rail unions in 1963 to unite in action against Beeching was an unmitigated disaster. Today we need the unity of those unions and of the wider labour movement to tell the Labour Party leadership: don't just moan about re-privatisation of the East Coast main line and the Air Rescue service - boldly put the case for economic planning based on progressive, democratic public ownership.

Sandancing In The Street Tonight

I am delighted that a torturer is leaving Parliament. Very good riddance indeed.

Merely an incompetent Schools Minister, he was a morally reprehensible Foreign Secretary. Now, he seems to be off to oppose the very policies that he once pursued.

As Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Tony Blair, David Miliband devised the whole of the Coalition programme and more. But he, Blair and Alastair Campbell could never get a lot of it past Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.

This is the night when Blairism finally died as a force within the Labour Party. Had it happened before the workfare abstention, then that obscenity might never have been uttered.

Liam Byrne can now be sacked without any fear that he will participate in any kind of pro-cuts, war-with-everywhere insurgency, since such an insurgency is now impossible. Its previously potential participants can and must be deselected forthwith. It is not as if there are very many of them, anyway.

Now, to the business of the South Shields by-election. They'll have someone lined up, of course. Yes, already. But those of you who remain Labour Party members, get your CVs in. Give them a run for their money.

Shrewdness About Shrewsbury

First Hillsborough. Then Orgreave. Now this needs one hundred thousand signatories by 27th June in order to secure a debate in Parliament. But they have mysteriously been going astray:

In 1972, building workers held their first ever national strike for decent pay and health & safety at work. Five months after the strike ended, 24 trade union members were charged with offences allegedly arising from picketing in Shrewsbury in September 1972. They included individuals who were convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to imprisonment. Government files relating to the strike have been withheld from the National Archives even though more than 30 years have passed.

We call upon the Government to release all Cabinet minutes, documents, discussion papers, civil service notes, reports and telephone records produced from 1972 to 1976 by Government departments, agencies and prosecuting authorities relating to the strike, the building workers' unions, the arrested pickets, the prosecutions at Mold and Shrewsbury and the subsequent appeals, as well as any other material pertaining to the case that fall outside the above time period.

Not Getting Any Younger

Young Independence, the youth wing of UKIP, has just held its internal elections.

There were 123 votes in the election for National Chairman, 117 in that for Grassroots Officer, and 115 in that for Universities Officer.

Read those national figures over again.

Building BRICS

Here. 

We ought to be in this, along with at least two other Commonwealth countries (like Cyprus).

Not necessarily to the exclusion of other things, although this is an emerging institutional organ of the rising rather than the declining world.

Nevertheless, we ought certainly to be in it.

But we won't be.

Search and Rescue, Indeed

I have absolutely no doubt that the Bristow Group is very good indeed at what it does. But there are agenda here. This is a blow to the Royal Navy, and a heavy blow to the Royal Air Force. Why is there no money with which to buy the helicopters for this essential public service?

The Navy may like to consider that it is instead being spent on Trident, along with the money for all manner of other things that have been, are being and will be cut from the naval defence of this island nation. Even all but one of our remaining Overseas Territories are islands or collections of islands, and that other one is surrounded on three sides by the sea. Neither the foreign claim to there, nor the far more active and pressing foreign claim to one of those collections of islands, is remotely deterred by the white elephant that is eating the Royal Navy along with everything else.

But the situation is even more dire for the RAF. The people who now run the Conservative Party, and who are also taking over UKIP if they have not already done so, have long wanted to abolish it altogether. In fact, they are not very pro-military across the board. All for wars. But not for the Armed Forces. Look at this Government's record and plans. The point is made.

They cannot very well bring forward a Bill to abolish the RAF. So they are grinding it down, slowly but surely. As the Westminster Village voice of American neoconservatism, the Henry Jackson Society (which is very close to The Commentator and to the Murdoch papers, themselves at least well on the way to staging a coup within amateurish, easy-prey UKIP) has since its inception openly advocated a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command, but under the day-to-day control either of Germany or of France, depending on which happened to be in favour at the Court of Commentary at the time of writing.

Within that, the United Kingdom would be permitted only a single service broadly on the model of the Israeli Defence Force or of the United States Marine Corps, which latter, of course, is an elite force within a much larger structure and system, unlike this. But, as the above-linked article by a stalwart of the HJS makes clear, no Air Force, a humiliation inflicted by the victors upon the vanquished ever since the Treaty of Versailles.

Would any person serious about a military career join such a thing? One would not have thought so. But with the French Foreign Legion perhaps also gone, although that is extremely improbable since the French are nothing like the soft touches that we are, what would he or she join instead?

Why, the Armed Services of the United States, of course. After all, we are really a single country, aren't we? One of their companies even provides our Search and Rescue these days, doesn't it? And if a private, including a foreign, company can take over one of the functions of our Armed Forces of most regular and immediate benefit to the general public, then why not any and everything else that our Armed Forces might happen to do?

Meanwhile, back in the days when New Labour was led by Tony Blair and the other lot was led by Michael Howard, deeply disillusioned former Cabinet Ministers from both sides implored me not to write, even in jest, that our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds should be conscripted directly into the IDF, on the grounds that, "if the wrong person reads that, then it will happen." They were not joking. (I was later informed that, entirely independently, something very near to that IDF scheme had been seriously considered within the Blair inner circle. That was how far beyond satire things had moved in the last days of Tony Blair.)

Today, we took a significant step in each and all of those directions. Must Jim Murphy go, as urgently as must Liam Byrne and Stephen Twigg, following David Miliband into well-deserved oblivion?