I got an email last week from London 2012, advertising a Cultural Olympiad gig in a park in Hackney. In the footer I noticed something bizarre: The email listed the Olympic and Paralympic corporate partners, and number one on the Paralympic list was Atos. Atos, who administer the deeplyflawed disability benefits assessment. Atos, who play a leading role in the Tories’ production of class antagonisms, in this case between the able-bodied and the disabled.
The brazenness of it shocked me. It’s not as if the issue has faded away, though the stories have largely moved off the front pages. The Hardest Hit campaign (among others) is still going on, and there was an investigation into the computerised test in Monday’s G2. But deep cuts to legal aid are approaching. 46 percent of disability support allowance tests that fail are overturned upon appeal, and the majority of those who appeal are only able to do so because of legal aid. The appeals system is chaotic enough as it is, and it’s only going to get worse.
So I was angered by the presence of Atos’ logo, prominently displayed as supporters of the Paralympics. But I think this is a reflection of how the Olympics works as a corporate nostalgia machine par exellence. The Olympics operates in the public consciousness on the level of a festival of internationalism and sport, with implicit reference to times when things were supposedly better. In the case of London 2012, the particular referents are the 1948 games (the Austerity Olympics) and London in 2005 (when the games were awarded, pre-crisis and pre-7/7). This is the logic of that nostalgia: We should all pull together, and make do and mend, like after the War – while at the same time, we should think of the Olympics as something that’s still basically appropriate and affordable, like it was supposed to be in 2005 (it’s not).
While this nostalgia is how London 2012 works on an ideological level, the games are at heart a tool for the protection and creation of capital. The main beneficiaries of these Olympics have been private interests who have benefitted from land deals, advertising exclusivity and a massive public profile boost – for more on this I recommend Anna Minton‘s book Ground Control, which was recently reprinted with a new chapter on the Stratford site. It’s also worth noting that lots of people are concerned about the games’ material effects on East London as well as the economy as a whole – nostalgia is the ideological framework by which the games are approached, not a mass delusion. Plus, there have always been critical voices from the communities most directly in contact with the event.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the company sponsoring the Paralympics is also making disabled people’s lives a misery. We shouldn’t be surprised that Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and BP use the Olympics to sanitise their brands and receive a massive boost to their corporate profiles. We shouldn’t be surprised that London 2012 sponsors will control advertising across the city during the games, and we shouldn’t be surprised at the percentage of tickets that are going to corporate guests. This is what the Olympics are for. We can’t separate the corporate roadshow from the sport.
I’m not against the idea of the Olympics in principle – I’m a sucker for sport on telly, to be honest, especially athletics (I ran for Camden once upon a time). But I wouldn’t wish these particular effects of the Olympic circus on anyone, least of all my own city. It’s too easy to fall into defending a nostalgic Olympic ideal against the realities of the event.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
Seven million people watched the first episode of the new series of The Apprentice, which screened this week on the BBC. This means that seven million people should have gained a rather interesting insight into the economy, and the government’s plan for recovery. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to have happened so I thought I’d spell it out. The government tells us time and again that the route to recovery is through enterprise. By this they mostly seem to mean start-up firms, funded by venture capitalists. You get the idea from the Department of Business, Industry and Skills’ shiny new website “Business In You”. Clearly what the Government want the huge unemployed populace to believe is that the way out of the poverty of unemployment is to become an entrepreneur. What is imagined by enterprise, here, is something akin to a magic hat. And he who possesses the magic hat can pull endless value out of it, regardless of the rest of the economy. The magic hat will solve your poverty so long as you believe in it.
The problem is that believing in it isn’t so easy, and it is here that we turn to The Apprentice. For those who haven’t seen the programme, it involves 16 hard-headed, hard-faced business people, all “the best”, all wearing suits so sharp you could slit your wrists on them (oh how much I wish I could after an hour of this dismal television.) These people are apparently experts in the production of profit. They know everything anyone can know about producing and selling. These hard-faced businessmen and -women are split into two teams and are set tasks in enterprise by Sir Alan Sugar. Whichever team makes the most profit, wins.
Sir Alan Sugar: Business Twat
So in the first episode, the two teams were charged with starting a print business, in which they were given all the machines necessary for printing on to bags and tshirts, and then had to sell their products on the street. The two teams, with ridiculous corporate names Phoenix and Sterling, worked for two days and managed to make profit as follows:
Sterling: £214.80
Phoenix: £616.20
It may be worth getting out a calculator and having a think about what this actually means. Together, 16 highly talented people, with all of the experience in the world, made a total profit of £831. Now, assuming on each day of the two-day task each team member works for 8 hours (this is a generous estimate given that the show clearly shows them working for about 12 hours on the first day), this gives a total man-hours of 256. It is significant that under the conditions of The Apprentice, the contestants aren’t paid, but let’s look at what happens when we convert this profit into wages: each team member, each highly skilled business person, was making a totally huge £3.25 an hour. I am not a businessman, but even I can see that this doesn’t look like a great investment or a good use of one’s time.
£3.25 an hour is just over half of the minimum wage (which currently stands at £6.08 an hour), and converts into a wonderful annual salary of £6760 a year, which is significantly less than the minimum the government believes people need to live on, based on the rates of Jobseekers’ Allowance added to Housing Benefit. And indeed, all of these “highly skilled” business people would be eligible for Working Tax Credits of well over £2000 a year, just to keep them alive. Meanwhile, Sir Alan Sugar was in The Sun last week saying that the government ought to cut the benefits system. How strange that he wants this when he encourages business practices, which, without a benefits system, would lead people to total destitution.
But the story is worse than that: all sorts of help is given to the businesses in The Apprentice: they don’t pay rent on warehouses or on market stalls, they don’t buy any machinery, and liquidity with which they start is interest-free. And also we’ve made the assumption that all profit can become wages. This may, at a stretch be the case if you are running a business alone, but with an investor involved (as the government encourages), wages must be calculated as an added cost and not just as the profit. And in fact even for a one-person business, by the end of the challenge all the free liquidity has been used up, and some profit will be needed to reinvest and buy new stock. Adding in these costs, it becomes obvious that even for the “experts”, entrepreneurship is probably not profitable, and almost certainly will not pay you a wage.
Seven million people watched the programme. Seven million people watched all of these highly qualified people making piss-poor profits. What does it take for seven million people to put two and two together, and realise that the government’s deification of enterprise is a farce. Only enterprise, we are told, will deliver us, and surely we know already that it will deliver us only into poverty.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers have “banged” the table at a cabinet meeting to mark the impending passing of the death warrant on the needy, elderly, and disabled into law, Downing Street has said.
The Death to the Poor Bill, for England, has had a difficult passage through Parliament but was finally passed by the House of Lords on Monday.
The government hopes it will now enter law by Easter.
A Downing Street spokesman said “cross-party” celebrations had taken place.
But Labour have forced a Commons debate on Tuesday on whether MPs can consider planned executions for a final time before an assessment of the potential risks to the victims is published.
Afterwards, MPs will consider the amendments to the bill agreed by the Lords on Tuesday.
The legislation would abolish life and indeed any hope of surviving illnesses and give much greater control over the administration of death to those who may profit from it.
The bill has been the subject of a prolonged battle over the past year – with professional bodies representing doctors, nurses and other NHS workers resisting murder of the public.
There has also been criticism from several leading Liberal Democrats of Conservative Death Secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans.
But the prime minister’s spokesman said there had been “cross-party banging” of the table at cabinet to mark the imminent Royal Assent for the legislation.
He added that it would become law before the Easter Recess, which starts next Tuesday, commenting “Easter, the traditional time for the celebration of death, seems a fitting moment to implement this new law.”
But unions said they would not relent in their opposition to the bill once it becomes law.
“We will continue to campaign hard to try and mitigate the worst excesses of this bill,” said Unison general secretary Dave Prentis, adding that ministers were ignoring the “groundswell of opposition” to the proposals.
“Patients will have a two-tier health service and how much they earn will determine whether they are allowed to live or die.”
Members of Unison, which represents more than a million public sector workers, held a minute’s silence outside Parliament in protest at the changes.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
One of the classic responses I get from people when I tell them I am disabled is; ‘oh but you’d never know to look at you’. This is usually meant as a compliment. Yet I believe this twisted praise reveals the relationship between the perception of disability and the impact of that perception on the lived experience.
I was born with a condition called nystagmus. This means I am visually impaired. I am very short sighted, I have limited peripheral vision, compromised balance and very poor depth perception.[1] My vision is continually variable and it can go from my standard limited sight to total blindness as a result of environmental factors like stress, tiredness, heightened emotion (including arousal, always amusing), and substances like caffeine or alcohol. I have been registered as partially sighted since the age of twelve.
I was brought up to regard my disability as a challenge to overcome and not an excuse for a dependent lifestyle. I went to a mainstream private school and, at the age of 22, I am now doing a PhD at King’s College London. I live a high quality and ‘normal’ lifestyle the majority of the time.
I receive the lowest band of Disability Living Allowance. I get £19.55 a week for mobility reasons. ‘Individuals are entitled to the lower rate mobility component if they are so severely mentally or physically disabled that they cannot walk outdoors on an unfamiliar route without guidance or supervision from another person most of the time.’[2]
While I am relatively independent if I go to a new place somebody else has to show me to the toilet and generally explain the layout of the area. So I don’t crash into the Gents and can find my way back to where I was. I frequently fall over on unfamiliar routes if unassisted. I cannot judge the distance of a car speeding towards a pedestrian crossing. Sometimes I can’t use a knife to prepare a meal or monitor a boiling pan. I do not claim the DLA care portion of the benefit, while my partner does act as an informal carer on my bad days my lifestyle does not depend on him. The carer portion of the benefit is also £19.55 a week.
‘Individuals are entitled to the lowest rate care component if they are so severely disabled that they:
require another person to give them attention in connection with their bodily functions for a significant portion of the day during a single period or a number of periods; or
cannot prepare a cooked main meal for themselves provided they have all the ingredients and are aged 16 or over’
My disability is variable and this is the case with most individuals. Sometimes I have to lie down or rest in a safe quiet place until my vision improves. Sometimes I cannot complete my work, use the tube or recognise my friends. Under the Personal Independent Payment scheme I will be assessed by a panel for a few minutes in order to determine whether I will continue to be entitled to receive my £19.55. They will see a snapshot of my life.
David Cameron wants to cut the lower level of DLA under the Personal Independent Payments scheme. This lowest band covers many individuals who have mental impairments or long term illness. How independent is a person who needs mobility assistant occasionally or needs a meal preparing for them occasionally?
A small amount of money which enables people to work and access carer resources will be taken away based on the opinion that many disabled people generally cope. People like me will be forced to claim more benefits when they are unable to travel to work or lose the carer who helped them with meals. This will further create a culture which will force people into dependent lifestyles.
The fact I have overcome so many aspects of my disability and do live a relatively ‘normal’ life should not take way from the point that I was born less able than others. I am socially, economically and physically disadvantaged by being visually impaired. There are many people who have a similar condition to myself and claim more financial support because they have not had the opportunities or encouragement that I have had to overcome my disadvantages. I do not absolutely financially depend on my £84 a month as many do, but it certainly helps, and may one day be vital. Let’s face it in this current climate, who’s going to give a job to an academic that occasionally goes blind? I’m over qualifying myself just to prove I can work to a government and a society which increasingly sees people like me as a drain on the economy.
The worse thing about the Personal Independence Payment Scheme is that I will have to stand in front of a group of professionals, prove myself valid and beg for money that I have been rightfully entitled to for ten years. I ask, what is independent about that?
Just when you thought that Channel4′s advertising policy couldn’t get any worse, they start putting up billboards like this. No doubt they believe that disabled people are an easy target, who won’t kick up a fuss. Please share, complain, graffiti, or whatever you deem to be the appropriate response.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
A couple of weeks back the government the drew condemnation from certain progressive quarters, after it announced plans to restrict the numbers of skilled workers coming in to the UK. The response from some of my friends was disappointing but not altogether surprising. “Who will do all the jobs?”, was the question that some were rhetorically asking – thus invoking the idea that we need immigration, because Britain’s lower orders are so damn lazy. There are of course, many good arguments for migration. But the anti-working class case for open borders – the idea, put about in the Guardian and the Independent, that we need to import new people because Britain’s masses are so stupid and dissolute, this really does merit a hard slap.
Equally tiresome are the kind of pro-migration arguments put forward by the business lobby. As I remarked some months back, it was rather galling to hear the captain’s of industy exclaim that we needed to import more people to fill gaps in the labour market, while 2.7 million of our fellow citizens remain without work.
The response from business, is that many of that 2.7 million lack the “right skills”. This argument is less concrete than it appears. The skills people possess are not set in stone – people can be trained and retrained. Equally, the kind of work an economy provides, the kinds of skills that are demanded, this is not simply a matter of fate.
And this is where the issue of mass skilled migration comes in. In the chaos of our global economy, it is not infrequent to see rapid changes in the world of work. Shifting patterns of trade, and advancements in technology can rapidly make certain kinds of skills “useless”, as certain kinds of work become economic within particular parts of the world. And for far too long the burden of adjustment has fallen exclusively upon the working class. Businessese are not compelled to invest in training or retraining workers if they are able to handpick those with the correct skills from across Europe and, to a certain extent, the world.
Equally, it isn’t crazy to suggest that investment and economic activity ought to be focused upon making use of the skills that people actually have. Yet while labour markets remain wide open, the kind of activity in which businesses engage will be determined only by what can be sold most profitably, without reference to what the existing labour force is best able to produce. As I have said before, the scrap heap piles up, and piles up some more.
Many of us have supported open borders for the best of reasons – out of solidarity with those who happen to be born beyond these shores, and out of abhorrence for the idea that diversity makes society weaker. But the reality is that over the past decade and a half, open labour markets (amongst many other things) have enabled the business class to shirk many of the costs associated with gloablization while obtaining maximum financial benefit. As we look to build the good society, upon the ashes of the Blairite- Thatcherite mess, this is something that we would do well to consider.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
I watched the Kony video that’s been doing the rounds on facebook all day. I laughed briefly at the idea that capitalism offers the technologies for solving peoples suffering, and then felt miserable. Of course capitalism has brought more suffering, more civil war, more starvation, more illness from dreadful working and living conditions, generally more horror to this earth than ever before. If you want to help people who suffer try being antagonistic and confrontational towards all those systems that make them suffer. It might not feel good, and it might be hard work, but it’s a lot more useful than any of the following:
(a) funding well dodgy charities.
(b) funding any of those charities that don’t address deeper structural reasons for suffering.
(c) funding military intervention by armies known for raping and looting.
(d) making yourself feel better, or self-satisfied.
(e) ignoring politics, because, oh, in Africa that could never come into it.
(f) generally reasserting your dickheaded imperialist mindset.
(g) making your skin shinier so as to appear more authentically plasticy on film.
(h) believing that all suffering is a result of “bad people”.
(i) being so fucking ignorant that it takes a completely idiotic viral youtube film to make you realise, even fucking minimally, that people suffer a lot in the world.
If you agree, please repost.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
It’s no secret that things haven’t been great for the trade union movement in recent years, but sometimes it’s easy to forget quite how bad things are until you realise that so many apparently intelligent people in public life don’t even have the faintest idea of what they are or how they function. This was illustrated pretty well by the recent uproar over Len McCluskey’s Guardian interview last week when he dared to suggest that strike action during the Olympics might be justified.
‘I just think people will be gobsmacked, appalled, that someone thinks that at a time when we are finally hosting one of the greatest events in the world, he is calling for civil disobedience,’ Mr Clegg said.
‘I know he is the sort of paymaster of the Labour party but I hope Ed Miliband will rein him in.’
The problem here, I said on [10 O’Clock Live], is that Unite is Labour’s biggest donor, so it’s like Rudolph trying to rein in Santa.
Nevertheless he tried, condemning McCluskey’s remarks just like the government had told him to. But Cameron scented blood and called for Labour to “start turning back the money” that Unite provides. Obviously that can’t happen – Labour utterly relies on it. But the request reminds everyone of the party’s financially compromised position in relation to trade unions (something the political right somehow manages to portray as more embarrassing than their own reliance on business interests and expat plutocrats).
To David Mitchell’s credit, he does at least acknowledge that Labour’s financial support from the trade unions isn’t morally equivalent to that of the Conservatives’ reliance on the financiers and businesspeople who bankroll them. (Unlike Clegg and the Lib Dems, who tend to be only too happy to present themselves as the only party not beholden to ‘vested interests’, quietly overlooking the fact that their own biggest donor is a convicted fraudster.)
Even Mitchell, though, takes for granted that the fact that Labour relies on trade unions for funds means that the party is “financially compromised”, which is a flagrant non-sequitur. Do trade unions exert influence on the Labour party because of the funding they provide? To some extent, although when you consider things like Ed Miliband’s refusal to support the November 30 strikes you have to wonder whether they’re getting much for their money. But is having a say in how a political party is run because you’ve donated money to it necessarily illegitimate? Do Clegg, Mitchell and their ilk also think that individual party members who pay a subscription fee to join the party should also be excluded from deciding on what the party does? The whole point of joining a political party is that by doing so you play a democratic part in deciding what it does. Parties aren’t companies, their policies aren’t products being sold in a marketplace, and their members shouldn’t be treated like customers. Democracy is not consumerism.
But perhaps this is a caricature of Clegg and Mitchell’s position, and that what they really mean is not that people having influence on a party is a problem per se, only that trade unions have a disproportionate influence on the Labour party. That sounds more reasonable on the face of it, but still doesn’t actually make any sense when you unpack it. The decision about whether to donate money to Labour isn’t made by trade union leaders alone, but by every member of the union when they join – you as an individual have to decide if you want a portion of your subscription fee to go to the Labour party, so union bosses wield a lot less power in the whole process than is commonly portrayed.
Even if it was true that union leaders had total control over whether and how much money to give to Labour, however, it’s still wrong to equate this with contributions of comparable value from individual donors. As Unite General Secretary, Len McCluskey is the elected representative of more than a million workers who are members of his union. As such he’s accountable to and has a democratic mandate to act on behalf of those members, including donating money to political parties in a manner in which he and the rest of the union executive judge to be likely to be of benefit to them. And if those members don’t like what he’s doing with their money, they can vote him out. I’m not claiming that democratic processes in unions are anywhere near perfect or totally representative, but there’s clearly a massive difference between the elected representative of a million people giving a million pounds of their money to a political party and one rich person donating the same amount. Trade unions, for all their flaws, are probably the most democratic organisations in British civil society. The idea that they somehow impede or distort democracy simply by playing a role in the political process is ludicrous.
Like this article? Print it, email it, Stumble, Facebook and Tweet it:
While indulging in some guilty pleasure Daily Mail procrastination activity I came across the intellectually demanding feature, ‘Trick of the light? Samantha Cameron has ‘lollipop head’ look at charity event’. However it was one of the comments underneath this umpteenth article about SamCam’s weight / face / clothes which caught my attention and provoked a general grievance.
‘She’s trying too hard. We don’t want a celebrity PM wife. She should get into charitable work like the Duchess of Cambridge… all this “look at me me me” is boring.’ – Susanna Smith, Newmarket, 01/3/2012 22:52
Sixteen individuals have ‘disliked’ Susanna Smith’s comment. No likes so far for the Newmarket radical. So what does Britain want from the PM’s Mrs, and how important is Mrs Cameron’s image to Britain?
At a recent celebtastic event SamCam donned an appropriately overpriced outfit, which also received the praise and scathing criticism of the FeMail readers, (get it FEmail? Oh how we all giggled into our skinny lattes and got distracted by small fluffy things). Mrs C was the Downing Street host for the London Fashion Week party, and allegedly celebrated British designers along with fashionista dragon matriarch Anna Wintour. Now I’m all for British innovation, even if that innovation focuses on different bits of chiffon, but it disturbs me on many levels that SamCam has so firmly located herself in this camp. My issues with Fashion Week are a whole other kettle of feminist fish. However most of all I do not think it is appropriate for Samantha Cameron to endorse the objectification party.
My issues with the body dismorphic, child exploiting and materialistic joke that London Fashion Week represents aside. The fundamental problem with SamCam is that she is, as Susanna Smith of Newmarket so accurately pointed out, a celebrity PM wife.
Let’s deal with the wife bit first. Now obviously there is a deeply loving and affectionate connection between Sam and Dave which while difficult to understand must be accepted. Samantha has chosen to support her valiant husband in his premiership and frankly that’s fine. She loves him, they have spawned offspring together, and it would be odd if she didn’t occasionally get snapped by the paparazzi. Some have celebrity thrust upon them, agreed. But SamCam has created, or potentially lets be fair been encouraged to create, a specific wifely celeb role.
Unlike the U.S there is no official ‘first lady’ or ‘FLOTUS’ title for the Mrs of the PM. It is therefore somewhat flexible for the woman who finds herself in the role. As a feminist I believe in a woman’s right to choose. There is nothing wrong with being a ‘stay at home mum’. My own Mother made that choice for a considerable period of my childhood. However I believe Samantha Cameron is exploiting an increasingly celebrity role to forward a certain wifely ideal.
Let’s consider some other examples. The Labour spouses have played their part in shaping the role of the PM’s Mrs. Cherie Blair, notorious dressing gown wearer, legal eagle, politically outspoken and financially shady. Sarah Brown, twitter goddess and husband hero worshipper. Mrs Brown like Mrs Cameron gave up a successful career and devoted herself to political campaigning. Whereas we all know that Mrs Blair retained her professional status and maiden name in her formidable capacity as Cherie Booth QC.
Miriam González Durántez, Nick Clegg’s wife, when being interviewed around the time of the election stated: ‘I’ve said from the beginning that I was delighted to help Nick and the party, but that I wasn’t going to compromise my own life as a working mother.”[1] Ms Durántez has consistently remained out of the public eye.
Likewise Justine Thornton, also a barrister, has made a bit of a departure from the public roles utilised by her predecessors. She has allegedly been overwhelmed by media attention and unlike SamCam has continued her work, and does not have a team of aides:
‘Whereas Labour party conferences have come to expect the politician’s wife to be up on the stage after, and even before, the speech – when the leadership result was announced it was noticeable that Thornton kept well back’.[2]
One of the most suspicious developments has been the recent Miliband marriage. I qualify this by insisting that I have no problem with marriage, and Ed has mentioned that it was always potentially on the cards. However this relatively sudden and excessively private affair must surely be symptomatic of the model family ideal perpetuated by the Camerons. Marriage tax breaks and child benefit cuts seem to demonstrate that Mr Cameron has a very old fashioned idea of the modern British woman’s life. This perception of the Cameron gender agenda isn’t helped by Samantha doing very little in the public eye apart from turning up in a suitable outfit to fashion and charity events and schmoozing with celebs.
In a recent interview with The House Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls, said ‘I think David Cameron is completely out of touch with the pressures that a lot of women face. Some of it I think is a blind spot, some of it is also they just fundamentally don’t understand how important aspects of the public sector can be for working women.’[3] Cooper is currently tipped to be the next Labour leader, which would be thoroughly refreshing. The Guardian has suggested a Lasagna plot, the latest in a series of culinary political maneuvers.[4] Apparently Balls and Cooper are charming the party over this Italian specialty. Cooper declined to comment on the plot in the interview, but found the fascination with Ed’s cooking skills amusing. I have it on good authority that the lasagna is ‘mediocre at best’.
I’m not proposing Mrs C run for office, something which turned out to be quite the miscalculation for Mrs Blair. Neither am I demanding she instantly resumes her vital work designing expensive stationary. She, like the other political spouses, does her fair share of charitable and philanthropic stuff, which is perfectly commendable. Sarah Brown shaped her identity around supporting numerous family focused charities, her husband, and being a mother, perfectly valid, but there was just something more realistic about Mrs Brown. Of course she encountered the occasional actor, soldier, or monarch, but unlike SamCam she seemed to represent a particular life choice and was therefore relatable.
With the Baird report looming and expected to show the severely detrimental effects of the Coalition’s cuts on the lives of British women, surely SamCam image and lifestyle is inappropriate for a 21st century PM’s Mrs?
The most concerning thing about Samantha Cameron is that she is setting a precedent. Cherie Blair, while not my favourite person, tested the water with balancing a working life, motherhood, spousal duties and a political identity. Mrs Brown, González Durántez, Thornton and Cooper all battle with the delicate balance that their various roles entail. Not one is perfect, but that is sort of the point. They are just women occupying a precarious position in a political establishment. Whereas SamCam is a passive increasingly thinner clothes horse who is rapidly achieving celebrity status. I fear that when Cooper or Thornton are thrust further into the limelight SamCam may have done considerable damage. I just hope the future Mrs Prime Minister’s won’t be expected to sit on the front row at Fashion Week and not face criticism if they choose careers, independent thoughts and reasonably priced clothes?
