British Politics Thread

Look again and you will see the way in which a substantial number of women who quite rightly take time out with maternity leave to look after their newborn child end up finding themselves reduced in their work when they get back, discriminated against, or lost a place in the hierarchy in the company or place that they work. It's got to stop, it's got to end, and the behaviour of companies that encourages an ethic of early evening socialisation in order to promote themselves within the company benefits men who don't feel the need to be at home looking after their children and it discriminates against women who want to, obviously, look after the children that they've got. It's a lot of subtle discrimination as well as the most overt discrimination that has to be dealt with.

The Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has called for an end to the late-night boozy culture surrounding stereotypical networking events.

Carolyn Fairbairn has claimed that these events ostracise female executives who have children, as they are less likely to stay and 'bond', instead preferring to go home and see their families. Talking to The Daily Mail, Fairbairn explains that this system makes many professional women uneasy.

She said: “I have noticed in my career that quite a lot of things that are set up around business life, that happen outside work, don’t include women that easily. One example that is quite obvious is the business dinner.

“A lot of women – and I was one of them, because I was bringing up three kids – just want to go home. And we wonder why business dinners are 95% men.

“I went to the Rugby World Cup final and I looked around and I could see the men thinking: 'How did she get in here?'

“A lot of the friendship building, the networks, the support that, frankly, becomes really important when you start getting to the top, are being formed in ways that exclude women.

“Here at the CBI I have said: 'Let’s have a look at other ways of doing things – can we have early evening events where we have a nice glass of wine and a nice presentation and then we all go home?' A lot of men would just like to go home as well.”

She went on to note the difficulties of balancing a family life with a successful career, explaining that she had to be “absolutely ruthless” about switching off from the office when she was at home.

Fairburn, a former Director at Lloyds Bank and Capita, went on to say although she is extremely proud of her achievements, the fact that it took CBI this long, 50 years, to recruit a women at the highest rung of the company is “a reflection of British business.”

Following Fairbairn’s remarks Enei Chief Executive Denise Keating commented: “The business dinner is a great example of corporate vanity creating barriers to inclusive workplaces. Corporate functions are almost always outside of the normal working day, and simply aren’t practical for parents to attend, whether male or female.

"However, due to the majority of the childcare burden falling on mothers, these events are particularly damaging to women, who face greater difficulties balancing work and home life, and correspondingly are at greater risk of being overlooked for promotion due to not being part of the work in-group.

“Employers currently have a huge deficit of women in senior management positions, and all too often the barriers to progression for women are factors which do not directly relate to their actual performance, whether this is part-time working, childcare commitments or not being part of the workplace social life.”

Britain needs to be prepared for some "difficult times" ahead as it leaves the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May has said.

Speaking to the Andrew Marr Show - in her first major interview since taking office - Mrs May warned Brexit would not be "plain sailing" for the UK.

She said formal EU talks will not begin until 2017, but vowed the process would not be "kicked into the long grass".

Mrs May also ruled out a snap election, saying the UK needs "stability".

The former home secretary became prime minister after David Cameron resigned in the wake of the EU referendum - with the Brexit process likely to dominate the first years of her premiership.

I thought we weren't allowed to suggest that the process was going to result in anything other than sugar, bunnies and rainbows?

arack Obama has told Theresa May that the US will not prioritise a trade deal with the UK after the vote for Brexit.

Speaking at a joint press conference with May on Sunday ahead of the G20 meeting in China, the US president promised to work hard to stop “adverse effects” on the UK and US.

Obama raised the risk of some trading relations unraveling, but he assured the UK there was still a “very special relationship” between the two nations.

Fear of a public and right-wing media backlash could be holding back the funding of a new “game-changing” preventative HIV treatment, according to the leader of the drug's clinical trial.

The High Court last month overturned NHS England’s claim that it did not have the power to fund the prescription of pre-exposure prophylaxis (Pr EP) pills to people at high risk of HIV infection.

NHS England is appealing the ruling, which sparked angry criticism from right-wing politicians and commentators – with some dubbing the new treatment a “lifestyle drug” and “promiscuity pill”, reported the Daily Mail.

Looks like the "put the ideology before the people" runs even deeper.

Keith Vaz plans to stand aside as chair of the House of Commons home affairs committee after he was accused of paying for the services of male prostitutes in a Sunday newspaper sting operation.

The Labour MP and former Europe minister, who has chaired the high-profile committee for nine years, apologised to his family for the distress caused and condemned the conduct of the Sunday Mirror as “deeply disturbing”.

Vaz’s committee is carrying out an inquiry into prostitution, focusing on whether “the balance in the burden of criminality should shift to those who pay for sex rather than those who sell it”. In July, it published an interim report saying it was not yet convinced that buying sex should be outlawed, but that soliciting by sex workers should be decriminalised.

In his statement to the Mail on Sunday about the Mirror story, Vaz reportedly said: “I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children. I will be informing the committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the committee with immediate effect.”

According to the Sunday Mirror, which has illustrated its report with a picture showing Vaz with a man said to be one of the escorts, the MP met two eastern European male sex workers eight days ago in a flat he owns in north London.

According to the paper, Vaz asked one of the men in a text message sent before the encounter to bring poppers, the sex-enhancing drug used by gay men that the government came close to banning in a law passed this year.

Vaz argued in parliament that poppers should not be included in a list of substances banned by the Psychoactive Substances Act and in the paper he is quoted as telling the escorts that he did not use them himself.

Vaz, who reportedly told the men his name was Jim and that he was a washing machine salesman, is also quoted discussing with the men the possibility of obtaining cocaine for the next time they met, although Vaz reportedly said he would not want to take the drug himself.

The paper says two payments of £150 each were made into a bank account before the 27 August encounter after one of the escorts supplied the account details to Vaz.

In a statement, Vaz said: “It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way. I have referred these allegations to my solicitor Mark Stephens, of Howard Kennedy, who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly.”

According to the Mail on Sunday, although Vaz is standing aside as chair of the Commons home affairs committee, he wants to see how much support for him there is on the committee before making a decision about whether to resign fully.

A Labour party spokesman said Vaz had been elected chair of the committee and that his future on it was a matter for him and the Commons.

Nicola Sturgeon has spoken for the first time about having had a miscarriage at the age of 40.

Scotland’s first minister, who has been the subject of relentless questioning and speculation throughout her career about her childlessness, said she hoped her honesty “might challenge some of the assumptions and judgments that are still made about women – especially in politics – who don’t have children”.

She tweeted on Sunday: “By allowing my own experience to be reported I hope, perhaps ironically, that I might contribute in a small way to a future climate in which these matters are respected as entirely personal – rather than pored over and speculated about as they are now.”

Sturgeon, 46, told author Mandy Rhodes that the loss of a child was not something she wanted to be defined by but that she was now prepared to discuss the circumstances because she did not want young girls who consider her a role model to conclude that she had deliberately sacrificed parenthood for success as a politician.

Interviewed by Rhodes for the book Scottish Leaders, serialised in the Sunday Times, Sturgeon said she hoped she would still have gone on to be first minister if she had had children.

“If the miscarriage hadn’t happened, would I be sitting here as first minister right now? It’s an unanswerable question. I just don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know the answer. I’d like to think yes, because I could have shown that having a child wasn’t a barrier to all of this, but in truth I don’t know.

“Having a baby might have so fundamentally changed our lives that things would have taken a different path, but if somebody gave me the choice now to turn back the clock 20 years and say you can choose to start to think about this much earlier and have children, I’d take that. But if the price of that was not doing what I’ve gone on to do, I wouldn’t accept that, no.”

For when parliament returns this week it will be a reminder that her structural position is weak. The Conservatives have a working majority of just 17, which is smaller than the number of people she sacked from the government when she culled the Camborne circle. If there was a common denominator to her purge, it was that the sacked were allies of the previous prime minister or friends of the former chancellor. The dispossessed may have lost their ministries, but they are still MPs. They will bide their time and nurture their wrath, waiting to unleash it when Mrs May starts to trip and fumble.

She has so far defined herself more in words than deeds. Mrs May is a relatively blank canvas on which Tories of different persuasions can paint their hopes, their dreams and their fantasies. Trouble will start when she starts to put flesh on Mayism. We have had a couple of harbingers. One was the negative reaction to the decision to water down the government’s anti-obesity strategy. Another was the recent revelation that £3,150 will buy you into a “business day” at the Tory conference, Mrs May’s presence included in the price of the ticket. People make the point, no less potent for being obvious, that offering companies the chance to purchase access to the prime minister sits badly with her rhetorical flourishes about being on the side of the many, not “the privileged few”.

Labour’s travails are a mixed blessing for the Conservatives. A weak opposition encourages two dangerous traits of the Tory beast: arrogance and ill-discipline. When I recently suggested to one of Mrs May’s cabinet that the implosion of the Labour party was not good news for the Tories over the longer term because it would foment their own divisions, he replied: “I regret to say that I think you are completely accurate.”

The immigration system lauded by Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and other top Brexit backers has been rubbished by Theresa May in a move that could spark fresh Cabinet divisions.

The Prime Minister said there is “no silver bullet” for tackling immigration and that it was not clear that a proposal for an Australian-style points based system, that formed the corner-stone of the Leave campaign’s referendum pitch, actually worked.

She also paved the way for allowing EU citizens preferential treatment in any Brexit deal, and would not commit to other key promises of the leave campaign - such as removing VAT on fuel or giving freed-up funds to the NHS.

The merits of a points-test system should be examined in the context of a global and highly mobile workforce, and as part of each country’s broader economic migration policy.

In Australia, the system only applies to some permanent skilled visas as part of an overall mix of skilled visas that include employer-sponsored, temporary work, and business visas.

In Canada, all skilled migrants are subjected to a points test – but any applicant with an offer of employment is immediately ranked higher than those without a job offer.