The End of Women? Notes on ‘a divided sisterhood’

My head is still buzzing from yesterday’s discussion ‘The New World of Working Women: a divided sisterhood?’ put on by the RSA.

Prof. Alison Wolf, whose book The XX Factor was also released yesterday, had lots of data to back up her claim that educated and ambitious women have almost reached parity with their male peers in the workplace. In fact, Wolf argues that debates about the number of women CEOs and company directors are mostly symbolic at this point, and meaningless to the vast majority of women. That’s because these high flyers, says Wolf, have left the remaining 80% of their ‘sisters’ who don’t hold professional or senior managerial jobs mired in the gendered muck of low wage, low status and unstable jobs.

While I’m unconvinced that high flyers’ career trajectories are as smooth as she makes them sound, Wolf’s thesis is not especially controversial in light of reports that seem to come out weekly about the massively disproportionate effect of austerity on women. It’s widely known that the majority of civil servants – the ‘enemies of enterprise’, according to David Cameron – are women, as are the majority of hospital workers, social workers, carers, secretaries and sundry other ‘support’ staff. They’ve been hit hardest by government cuts and no one seems to give a hoot. (‘Collateral damage’ in the noble battle to ‘live within our means’ appears to be the unchallenged rationale.)

Statistics aside, there was lots to take issue with in Wolf’s presentation. For instance, the way her unquestioning view of ‘success’ led inevitably to the corollary that no meaningful proportion of men would ever be willing to trade career advancement for a better work-life balance. (I’ve read interviews with lots of men who’d disagree…) Or the tight, bright smile with which she announced that maternity leave that stretched a moment beyond the perfunctory should be expected to throw one’s career under the bus.

But it was the journalist Bidisha, chairing the discussion, who acknowledged the ‘elephant in the room’ – namely, class. Admittedly, she tried to put a positive spin on the issue by reminding us that education can transform one’s life chances in the market-defined sense, whilst acknowledging that tuition fees make it even harder for the less well-off to use education as a ladder.

Of course, expectations of a 50 minute long lecture that includes a 20 minute Q&A should necessarily be limited but I nonetheless left the RSA feeling irritated and unsatisfied by the way the class question was left. Indeed, it drew my attention back to what had originally irked me about the title of the lecture. ‘A divided sisterhood’ is a rather misleading phrase here, deploying as it implicitly does the notion of ‘sisterhood’ as a stand-in for ‘women’. Wolf’s lecture was about how women as a category are divided: by class, education, expectation, opportunity, and wealth. By contrast, sisterhood isn’t a category; it’s a relationship.

I’ve argued here before that the idea that anyone can speak ‘for women’ is unrealistic by definition, and tension about this question dates back to the first wave of the feminist movement. Recently, I read a profile of the sixties American feminist Shulamith Firestone, who died last August, which reminded me that those radical days featured as many implosions as they did confrontations with vested interests. Firestone herself was drummed out of pretty much every feminist group she ever joined, not to mention a few she founded, while Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking Sexual Politics, was driven into a psychiatric institution after she was exposed for not ‘really’ being a lesbian (she was bisexual).

But yesterday’s RSA lecture nudged me further down a road that actually feels somewhat more dangerous and unfamiliar. I’ve begun to wonder whether debates about ‘women’ as a category are meaningful in today’s workplace. Wolf cited lots of statistics, but curiously absent were OECD figures showing that social and economic mobility in the UK have virtually stalled, leaving the country among the least fluid of any developed nation. The US – which is further ‘ahead’ of us in terms of women’s advancement within the upper echelons of the workforce, according to Wolf – has the lowest economic mobility of any OECD country. It strikes me that class and wealth have surpassed gender as meaningful categories by which to judge the ‘fairness’ of workplace attainment.

I’m not suggesting that issues like rape and domestic violence, female genital mutation, forced marriage and a litany of other horrors are not perpetrated against women as a category. Moreover, workplace sexual harassment is directed predominantly at women. But if you look at the loudest and fiercest battles about women at work, they’re invariably organised around benchmarks like women leading FTSE 100 companies and whether quotas would address the problem of their small numbers. In fact, I attended an Evening Standard debate on that very topic just a few months ago, featuring the likes of Helena Morrissey CBE  and Cherie Blair.

But if Wolf is right that these battles are mostly symbolic by now, why isn’t the Evening Standard hosting debates about the effect of the austerity agenda on women, surely a more newsworthy question that affects an exponentially larger number of women in ways that are dramatic, practical and profound. Indeed, why is the only broad public debate about women at work conducted and dominated by those who’ve nearly reached the top? And when we do look beyond them, why do we focus so feverishly on whether these women are pulling others up behind them, while collectively blanking the ordinary and uncertain work performed by the vast majority of their ‘sisters’, and the concerns that arise from that work?

There’s no doubt that the recession and the inequities of the austerity drive it has justified have exacerbated existing tensions about social and economic mobility for men and women alike. Nowadays most people are struggling simply not to fall behind.  There’s also little doubt – for me, anyway – that the New Labour project drove the last nail into the coffin of a politics informed by empathy, fairness and justice, which are now derided as unaffordable and woolly headed. Between the shrill hectoring of a predominantly right wing press and a Chancellor who ties receiving benefits with burning your children to death, defending the disadvantaged has become politically toxic.

So where does gender fit into this brave old world of strivers and skivers? Well, that really depends on your post code.

 

Darya, who would have been 48

Today
There is no journey to trace
No perfume to smell
No food to taste
No song to play
No sun or wind with its hand on my face
Just the whole of missing
To attend to

There it is in that poem, Sky
By Szymborksa (who’s left us too, did you know?)
The one you gave us to read at your funeral
It would take her endless sky
Her moon and stars
Her planets and all their deputies
To fill the hole (with room to spare)
You left us with

But today
There’s no such work to be done
No shifting or heaving
No map to chart
No special pleading
Just the whole of missing
To attend to

 

With friends like this: What’s Cristina Odone done for stay-at-home mothers?

At first I thought it was a joke. Well, maybe not a joke per se, but certainly a spoof. How else to construe the wildly over the top rantings of Cristina Odone in the Telegraph, condemning measures announced in Wednesday’s budget aimed at addressing the UK’s stratospheric childcare costs?

Specifically, the government will cover £1200 per year in childcare costs for those who earn under £150,000. Odone denounced the measure as a victory for ‘hands-off parenting’ and a slap in the face of women who stay home to take care of their children.

First, some context: it’s a widely acknowledged fact that UK childcare costs are the highest in Europe. In an article entitled ‘How the cost of bringing up baby is bankrupting middle Britain’, The Guardian reported last October that British parents spend an average of 27% of their income on childcare as compared with 5% in Sweden and 13% in Europe as a whole. Think about it: that’s more than a quarter. Costs are so high that they often obliterate a second income which means some couples have opted to have one partner – usually the woman – stay at home as the more economical solution. Needless to say, the government have been under some pressure to act.

First, they took the highly questionable decision to change the ratio of children to carers in childcare settings, which prompted widespread alarm from people who know what it’s like to change one kid’s nappy while watching two others fighting in the corner over a toy, and a fourth working out how to turn the door handle all by themselves. This government habitually regards experience as a form of bias, so no one had solicited their view, of course.

And now there’s to be direct financial aid to offset childcare costs. 

The coalition government has quite rightly been accused of being no friend to women. Last month, The Observer reported the results of research that showed that in the last 10 years Britain has dropped a whopping 27 places – from 33rd to 60th – in international league tables of women in elected office. From austerity cuts that have been shown repeatedly and convincingly to have a vastly disproportionate affect on women, to the paltry number of women in the Cabinet let alone David Cameron’s ‘inner circle’, there’s a growing view that the country is being run by a boys’ club who don’t know or care about women’s concerns. And it shows in the polls, with a declining number of women supporting the Tories and fewer still swallowing George Osborne’s austerity doctrine.

Having said all that, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to Odone’s point than you might think. Childcare is one of the many forms of unpaid labour women undertake, on which the economy relies significantly but which is never acknowledged as work. As the mother of 18 month-old twins I can state unequivocally that I don’t recall being more exhausted in my life than I am now. Not during end of term exams at university, not working 12 hour days planting trees in the Canadian wilderness, not during the four years I spent launching and then running my own business.

What mystifies and alarms me about Odone’s argument, though, is not so much the claim that childcare by a parent is hard work just as it is for those who are paid to do it, and that the government ought to acknowledge that. It’s the dizzying speed with which she dispenses with her critique of government policy – ‘Their motive is clear: mothers who are not at home are in the office, stoking the economy’ - to deploy the familiar weapons of guilt and fear in order to attack mothers who work. 

First, she trots out Youth Justice Board statistics on the cost of dealing with young reprobates to make a tenuous, unscientific and decontextualised connection between youth offending and absent mothers. ‘No one claims that all children who get into crime have an absent mother,’ she concedes. ‘But if their mother were at home, and felt that being at home was a choice the government rated – and rewarded –  the child would feel monitored by a respected figure of authority. Most children would modify their behaviour accordingly.’ Says who? 

She then announces that ‘stay-at-home mothers believe that a mother’s presence makes a difference to a child’s well-being. They believe that crèches and child-care centres cannot replace mother.’ Yes, that’s right. All of them. And I’m guessing that for Odone the ones who say they want to work – indeed, even enjoy it – are either stooges for this productivity-obsessed government, lying, or criminally negligent parents who would happily hand off their child to a passer-by on the high street so they can enjoy a bit of ‘me’ time.

It’s an uncomfortable but predictable irony that I’m writing this blog precisely two weeks after International Women’s Day when I wrote another piece, ‘Who Owns the Sisterhood‘, about the harm women do to each other, with no help from men. With surgical – albeit unintended – precision Cristina Odone has illustrated far better than I could ever describe the ugliness that erupts when we presume to speak for some women, while demonising those who don’t conform. For all her righteous indignation and putative defence of stay-at-home mothers, Odone has done no one a favour.

 

Who Owns the Sisterhood? (with addendum)

I grew up among sisters, both biological ones and those with whom I’ve felt common cause. They’re often women I don’t know, but whose lives I think I know something about. Of course, ‘sister’ is how second wave feminists, and sometimes even women who don’t call themselves feminists at all, refer to each other, and it’s meant to denote an essential interconnectedness and mutual support. For instance, a ‘sister’ would never steal someone else’s husband, or overlook a talented female colleague because she feels threatened by her, or cross the picket line of a strike for equal pay or better working conditions.

But the truth is that as someone who has real sisters alongside this putative army of symbolic sisters, the symbolic sisterhood often doesn’t feel very sisterly to me. No, it feels a lot more like the cops, there to protect you occasionally but just as quick to lock you up when you transgress.

Take a look at the furore surrounding Can Women Have it All: The Myth of Work-Life Balance, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article that appeared last summer in The Atlantic Monthly in which she argues that women can’t, in fact, ‘have it all.’ In the piece, Slaughter – who was the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department - tells us why she couldn’t, and concludes that if someone as privileged as she can’t, then it must be pretty much impossible for women who aren’t ‘superhuman, rich, or self-employed.’

These are controversial assertions so you’d expect a robust debate, and to date the piece has generated 2660 comments on The Atlantic website. But what’s alarming is the backlash. Slaughter tells us that a senior White House colleague expressed horror when she  mentioned the idea of writing the piece, advising Slaughter in effect that her obligation to women she would probably never meet but to whom she would be a role model should trump whatever concerns she had about her role in the lives of her teenage sons. (I can feel the sisters’ fingers twitching on their keyboards about how I chose to construct that last sentence. Ho hum.)

Meanwhile, some accused The Atlantic of conspiring with Slaughter to push a retrograde agenda. ‘A new Atlantic cover peddles one of the most dangerous myths about modern women,’ raged Salon, the ezine that’s cornered the market in liberal piety (and of which I admit to being a regular reader and occasional fan.)

SLAUGHTER’S FALL FROM GRACE

From the sounds of it, Slaughter was no Tiger Mother afflicted by Perfect Madness, but merely a bright, ambitious and sensitive woman who felt her kids were at an age when they needed her around a little more. Nonetheless, her decision to leave a ‘dream job’ in Washington and return to life as a lowly Professor at Princeton so that she could be closer to home, and then to flaunt it in print, was construed as a betrayal of both those who’d helped her get there and those who might follow. In short, her gender was the only filter through which we were permitted to view either Slaughter’s upward career trajectory or her self-inflicted fall from grace.

Slaughter’s piece came to mind recently when I began ploughing through the avalanche of articles in the papers about Lean In, the new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. I haven’t read it (though I did read an in-depth profile of Sandberg in The New Yorker last year) but Sandberg calls the book ‘a sort of feminist manifesto’, which includes observations such as this one: ‘Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.’

Sandberg’s book, no doubt filled with outrageous claims like the one you just read, has produced a barrage of indignant ad hominems that can be summed up thusly: ‘how the hell would she know?’ The most entertaining of these comes from The New York Times‘s reliably pithy Maureen Dowd, who wrote off Sandberg as ‘a PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots.’ Ouch.

The point that Dowd and Sandberg’s many other detractors are making, of course, is that a woman in her position can’t possibly even know about the challenges other women face, let alone pontificate about how to address them.

WHAT WAS MAUREEN DOWD WEARING?

At the risk of sounding glib, I’d ask you to consider this: aside from a smirk, what was Maureen Dowd wearing when she wrote that sentence? Can the women in Birkenstocks speak for the Prada pack? Or to put it more broadly still, precisely who is the paragon who can ‘speak for women’?

Now I should confess that I disagree with both Slaughter and Sandberg on the work-life balance question. I’m drawn instead to a different analysis altogether. In ‘Why Gender Equality Stalled?’ Stephanie Coontz argues persuasively that women ‘can’t have it all’ because public policy has failed to keep pace with attitudinal shifts that are reflected elsewhere, and which include men. You needn’t look far to find them, either: consider The Good Men Project and the Dad 2.0 Summit in the US, or the Fatherhood Institute here in the UK. Given these changes, Coontz says that ‘not having it all’ is an accommodation to prevailing conditions, not a repudiation of any particular desire.

The critical point is that in making these observations, Coontz challenges an assumption at the heart of the debate about women’s choices – namely, that men can and do have it all. I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb by saying that feminists often tell ourselves that we’re the ones who make the sacrifices. Can we accommodate the idea that men’s choices are constrained too, by cultural pressures about their roles, bosses who think less of them for requesting flex time, the twin burdens of wage stagnation for all but the wealthiest and inflation for everyone, and myriad other concerns? I’m not so sure.

PROFOUND GENERATIONAL HOSTILITY

Admittedly fault lines like these have long existed within feminism. There’s a ton of evidence that during the ‘first wave’ of the women’s movement, working class women felt that their economic status rather than their gender was the most compelling and tangible challenge they faced and that the middle class feminist movement with its obsession with abstract ‘rights’ was out of touch with their lives and concerns. The Sandberg saga tells us that these class-based tensions still exist. I uncovered a parallel phenomenon in an article in Harper’s a couple of years ago, about profound generational hostility amongst women attending the National Organization for Women’s annual conference, which crystallised around a nasty battle over its next president. In short, young feminists didn’t think their old school ‘Moms’ had a clue.

Arguably, these tensions are natural but it strikes me that a movement must feel itself fundamentally besieged if it has no mechanism for absorbing the shocks they produce. I proudly call myself a feminist but I’m often disheartened by how readily we choose self-defeating turf wars aimed at shutting each other up over the pursuit of a more nuanced and multi-faceted vision of what a ‘woman positive’ world might look like. It’s true that not everything is feminist just because someone calls it that. But it’s equally true that feminism isn’t just one thing, and no one owns it. There is no paragon who can speak for women; there are lots of us.

Addendum (26/03/13): while the debate around Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg’s views is pressing and relevant, it nonetheless sits at a slight remove from my own life. Recently, though, I came up against the phenomenon of sister v sister in a more personal and frankly creepy way that perfectly illustrates the distasteful dynamic I’m talking about here.

For a few months, I’ve been following a blog of often thoughtful and sometimes provocative ruminations on feminism and motherhood. Yesterday, I spotted a post about recapturing a sense of our bodies and our sexuality within the identity of being mothers. By the time I got there, the comments had mostly digressed into a nasty discussion of avatars in social media, and why some people use images of their children to represent themselves.

One woman (who ‘confessed’ to being a non-mother) said rather apprehensively that she finds it an odd practice, especially among those she hasn’t seen for a while and whose children she doesn’t know or recognise. She was immediately attacked from all sides – for not really ‘knowing’ her Facebook friends, for judging the women she does know…for having an opinion at all, really, to which she clearly wasn’t entitled as a non-mother.

Sympathetic to her effort, I foolishly stepped in, saying that when I see kiddie avatars in action I sometimes think it suggests a kind of ‘boundarylessness’ or loss of self. Now I expected disagreement, of course, but I hadn’t clocked the ruthlessness with which the blog comments were being policed on a hunt for ‘mother shamers’, ‘selfies’, and other dissenters. In the midst of a discussion about why some people use these avatars, I was told it was ‘presumptuous’ of me to analyse their motivations and chucked in the doghouse alongside Katie Roiphe. In case you don’t know her, Roiphe is the anti-feminist anti-Christ who dared to write about how women ‘disappear’ inside motherhood. (In another comment, Roiphe’s musings were denounced as ‘concern trolling’.)

It turns out that ‘mother shamers’ are those who dare even to wonder aloud if there’s a questionable psychological impetus for using your child’s photo in place of your own (and a whole range of other ‘shaming’ activities, I’m sure). ‘Selfies’ (often one and the same people) are the vain and narcissistic women who – wait for it – use their own photos to represent themselves on their social media profiles. As in, ‘Oh her, she’s a real selfie. She even washes her hair sometimes for God’s sake. Like, who’s looking?’ As the vigilantes tell it, these selfies’ vanity is so profound and their desperation to erase evidence of the physical demands of motherhood so acute that they hire photographers and arrange elaborate photo shoots with make-up and ‘professional lighting’ to create their Facebook profile mug shots.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I made all of this up; if so, you’ll have to take my word for it as I’m reluctant to name and shame a blog some people like. As for me, I was so put off I’ve stopped following it altogether, just as I would any other form of consensus culture with so little tolerance for nuance, let alone outright dissent. No true sister would behave that way, and I’m relieved they’re not mine.

 

Sally Roberts’s Cancer Battle

On a shortlist of parental horrors, having your child face a life-threatening illness is surely among the top three. I’m certain most of us squeeze our eyes shut and try not to think about it, but the other day I found myself thinking about Sally Roberts, the mother who tried to refuse surgery and then radiotherapy for her son Neon’s brain tumour.

Ms Roberts wasn’t convinced the treatment would work and feared the side-effects would be worse than the illness. After absconding with Neon and getting caught, last December she took her son’s doctors to court. Ms Roberts lost the battle to stop radiotherapy, and was excluded from any decision-making about Neon’s future treatment.

She turned up on LBC last Tuesday where she was lambasted on Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show for insisting that she was right to challenge her doctors’ view when her child’s life was at stake. She featured later on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s call-in as well, and whilst many callers presented as proof of their own emotional acuity the rhetorical pronouncement that a parent should ‘do anything’ to save their child’s life, it soon became clear that they didn’t really mean ‘anything’ after all.

For instance, they didn’t mean she should take him to a spiritual healer or make him drink green tea or have him swim with dolphins. Nor did they mean she should learn everything she could about his condition and treatment options so she could take an informed decision. Apparently, ‘anything’ meant unquestioningly accepting the doctors’ advice and suppressing her own anxiety and judgment. ‘They’re the experts, aren’t they?’ the host demanded repeatedly. By contrast, Ms Roberts was cast as a reckless and irresponsible flake.

This blind faith in expertise echoed the unsurprising position The Daily Mail took in December. With its populist heart reliably pumping hysteria about the meaningless and the mundane (always the thin edge of the wedge, apparently), in Neon Roberts’s case the paper urged us all to prostrate ourselves at the altar of authority. Specifically, The Mail revealed that it had called in an ‘expert’ who confirmed that Ms Roberts should heed the ‘experts.’ The mob did its bit in the comments section, shouting down anyone who dared to disagree.

I admit that I’m no expert, but the experience I do have tells me that the debate is less clear-cut than these smug certainties suggest. In fact, its horror lies precisely in its moral and medical complexity.

My sister died of breast cancer on 16^th November 2011, two months to the day after my twins were born. She was 46. I live in the UK and she was in Toronto, so I couldn’t be part of the ‘inner circle’ who kept her company at chemo sessions, took notes and asked questions at oncology appointments, and sat for hours on her sofa, drinking tea and watching re-runs of Rhoda, an American sitcom we loved as kids. Instead, I did what I could which meant spending months researching clinical trials, alternative therapies, dietary considerations. I read books and articles, and spoke to doctors and researchers in New York and Beijing and Helsinki. I scoured online forums for leads and joined discussion groups. I prayed to a god I don’t believe in, and anyone else who might be listening. I would have done ‘anything’ to save my sister’s life.

The only expertise I discovered through her illness and treatment was in love and sorrow, but along the way I learned a thing or two about cancer.

I learned that it’s a fiendishly complex disease, that’s actually a whole range of diseases. I discovered that it’s fiendishly clever, too, and can quickly outwit the drugs designed to fight it. I read that some cancers are lethal by the time they’re detectable by any medical instrument. I learned that treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy are crude and brutal, and some research suggests they increase the likelihood of metastases. (In fact, my stepfather had refused to join ‘the chemo club’ and survived the cancer he was assured would kill him.) An American researcher told me that aggressive, late-stage cancer is a highly individualised illness that ‘mass medicine’ lacks the capacity to address. And I observed that caring and well-meaning doctors are sometimes afflicted with an instinctive fraternalism that means they’ve got each other’s backs.

My sister told us often that she received good care at the Toronto hospitals where she was treated. She decried the contempt for the medical establishment of many alternative therapy proponents and practitioners, when it was researchers and frontline doctors who were ‘doing the heavy lifting,’ as she put it. She believed they were doing their best.

She died, so I remain unconvinced, but I often ask myself what I would do. The unsatisfying truth is that I really don’t know, and I’m rather surprised that so many people seem dead certain that they do.

 

Letter opposing the Justice and Security Bill

I sent this to my MP; you should send it to yours

Dear Sir

I write to express my alarm at the government’s proposed Justice and Security Bill, and to urge you to vote against it.

Given the Draconian nature of this putative ‘security’ bill, the government should have shown unequivocally that its proposed radical departure from common law traditions is justified by an imminent, material and significant threat. Instead, the coalition is attempting to shove down our throats a bill that reflects the values and practices of tin pot dictatorships with an indifference to its implications that is chilling.

Anxiety about terrorism has already been exploited by both the coalition and the previous Labour government to transform the UK into a surveillance society on an unprecedented scale. Please do not assist the government in exacerbating the dire state of civil liberties in this country by allowing this rancid legislation to come into law.

Sincerely,

Juliana Farha

 

Horsemeat and Other Toxic Assets

Have you ever seen anyone carrying a single Primark bag? I’m pretty sure I haven’t; they always seem to come in multiples, and while I’ve never actually shopped at Primark I’m pretty sure the bags contain multiples, too: cheap vests, 5 for 10 quid, for instance.

I’m no Marie-Antoinette and though I don’t shop at Primark I understand why people do. They’ve got cheap stuff that sometimes looks ok, and when you can walk out of a shop with several bags heaving with goods you might feel that as long as you can still ‘treat yourself’ life’s not so bad.

In fact, faced with a rack of basic tops at H&M which I’m convinced will ‘go with everything’, I’ve been known to indulge occasionally. Nonetheless, I’m perfectly aware that I’m participating in a grand deception that started a long time before Lehman Brothers collapsed. It started when the haemorraghing of manufacturing jobs during the 1980s was neatly camouflaged by the exponential increase in the availability of cheap, imported goods. Turns out wage stagnation and lost jobs didn’t need to put a dent in the frenzied consumerism that would ensure no one felt deprived, and that the economic model in which consumption was the chief measure of the nation’s health would survive unscathed. ‘Sales executives’ were hired in droves to replace mere ‘shop assistants’, selling back to consumers cheaper versions of the goods they used to make themselves. In stores like America’s Walmart, union activity was busted both to keep wages low and to guarantee a market for the goods the stores were selling. In short, Walmart was the only place its employees could afford to shop.

Meantime, a predominantly right-wing press ensured that anyone who questioned the dubious claim that ‘the markets’ were simultaneously demanding ever lower wages for less skilled workers and infinitely higher salaries for the ‘highly skilled’ executives who directed and presided over these shenanigans was denounced as a moron, a Marxist or both. In the capable hands of a corporatist media, the notion of ‘quality’ was cast simultaneously as a leftist intellectual conceit promulgated by urban elites who use words like ‘promulgate’ and spend weekends at farmers’ markets, and a nostalgic fantasy cooked up by Middle Englanders wallowing in a remembrance of things past.

Indeed, this model was so successful that it was tweaked and copied all over the economy. No house, no downpayment, and no assets? In America, outfits like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could manufacture a mortgage that would put a roof over your head, and help maintain the inflated value of that roof by offering other people just like you the same mortgages. Salary frozen, partner laid off, and the local Sure Start centre shut down? Ditch the picket line, what you need is a holiday: Ryanair will fly you to Majorca for pennies, thanks in part to the low wages of its non-unionised staff, as long as you don’t take any clothes or need a loo during the flight. Anyone who questions the sustainability of this model of tourism is denounced as a snobbish killjoy who’s probably a regular at the aforementioned farmers’ markets.

So this is what 21st Century capitalism calls ‘demand’, and it seems that as long as we could keep on shopping we were happy to go along with it.

Which brings me to horsemeat. To the extent that there might be some ‘criminal conspiracy’ here, as the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has suggested, I’m paraphrasing John Harris in The Guardian by calling it a ‘crime of opportunity.’ I’ve heard some grumbling that it’s consumers’ own fault for buying cheap, prepared food rather than making everything from scratch, an unsurprising perspective that chimes well with the current fad for blaming people for their own misfortune. Nonetheless, while I may have frequented too many farmers’ markets, I don’t believe people eat lousy food on a regular basis (as opposed to indulging in the odd McFlurry) because they want to; they do it because they have to, because they don’t have other options.

Just a few weeks ago, the Telegraph warned of dramatic food inflation with ‘produce such as bread and vegetables [becoming] up to five per cent more expensive because of poor crop yields leading to a shortage of supply’. Why the poor yields? Because of record rainfalls and flooding, of course, but that’s where the Telegraph story ends. What it doesn’t mention are the vast sums of money super-rich business people like the Koch brothers pour into the coffers of the anti-climate change lobby and politicians for hire, in order to shut down debate about poor crop yields that mean poorer people can’t afford decent food, and unwittingly buy horsemeat instead.

Meantime, Harris reports on a Unison study that shows that the number of scheduled food inspections by the Food Standards Agency has declined by more than a quarter over the past couple of years as trading standards and environmental health services see their budgets and workforces slashed. Smells to me like government aiding and abetting the putatively criminal horse-trading of meat suppliers which it now denounces, packaged and sold as an austerity measure.

And so it goes: the virtuous circle wherein we just keep eating what we’re fed because it tastes good. Or that’s what it says on the label, anyway.