Gordon Brown at Bay

Argus title :

Gordon Brown is in deep trouble and British voters have a dilemma. We face a choice between a whey-faced prime minister tormented by the ghost of Tony Blair – or a Blair lookalike in the person of David Cameron.

There is nothing new and fresh about Cameron. He has the overt or covert support of the newspaper owners who backed Tony Blair (including influential people within the traditionally Labour newspaper The Guardian), not because he represents a departure from the old, but because he offers a continuation of the same – dressed in a cloak of what appear to be progressive new ideas.

Despite Brown’s great admiration for the USA, the US government would certainly prefer a Blair or a Cameron to him. Brown may not have acted acted courageously and swiftly enough with regard to withdrawal from Iraq, but equally he has not scampered to obey White House orders as Blair did. His genuine concern to end world poverty cannot play well with Washington’s hawks. And Brown’s recent decision to face down the military and commit the UK to a ban on cluster bombs will have infuriated many powerful Americans.

In the UK the business interests which supported Blair, and now support Cameron, have no true party political loyalty and will go to whoever best protects their profits. This is why money is now flowing freely into Tory coffers and draining away from Labour’s. Only this week the Guardian reported that the Labour Party is struggling to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors. The total debt, with interest, is reported to be £24m. There is a real risk of bankruptcy.

When Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party, after the tragedy of John Smith’s death, it was all very different. There was great excitement that this highly charismatic, personable young man had taken control. The former MP Tony Benn warned sombrely that Blair would be the most right wing leader Labour had ever seen. It was an uncharacteristrically ungracious comment from the famously polite Benn, but of course he proved to be right.

The British electorate hoped for great things from the Blair government, but over time was bitterly disappointed. There were achievements which eased the plight of the poor, but overall it was a timid government, wedded to Thatcherite principles, in the grip of corporate and media bosses and in thrall to the USA. Inequalities of wealth increased and public services were undermined.

A divided Tory party and a series of incompetent Tory leaders eased Blair’s way and he continued to do well in the polls. However, the bloody invasion of Iraq and the growing awareness that Parliament had been misled created public fury. It was obvious Blair had to go, but there was no obvious Blairite successor.

In 2003 Brown had made a barn-storming speech to Party Conference, apparently heralding a bid for party leadership, stating that Labour is “.best when we are Labour.” This was widely interpreted as a rejection of Blairism.

Blair stayed on in office while his supporters frantically searched for a possible opponent to Brown – all the while feeding negative news stories about Brown to the media. Brown was elected unopposed, but arguably too late and weakened by negative spin.

It was clear that if he was to assert his authority he needed to make decisions visibly different from Blair’s discredited policies. However, he did not. Seemingly transfixed by the need to keep Blairites on board, he either made changes so quietly that the public was barely aware of them or courted possible backbench rebellion by needlessly persisting with deeply unpopular policies, such as proposals for 42 day detention.

A very laudable intention by Brown to end a culture of authoritarianism and media “spin” has resulted in a media free for all in which Blairites and the Tories call the shots. Brown has allowed a level of latitude to his critics which Blair would never have permitted.

Each error Brown has made has been mercilessly exposed by a hostile media, while the Tories – aware that Brown’s greatest assets as Chancellor were his perceived persistence, strength and ability – have successfully presented Brown as “dithering” , “weak” and even “incompetent”. He seems frozen in the Tory headlights, not least because – having finally escaped one Blair – he is faced by another.

In David Cameron the electorate is confronted by another charismatic young leader who like Blair tells them that the days of class division are over, while promising radical change, low taxes and a better deal for poor families. On some issues, he appears more progressive than Labour.

David Cameron has committed himself to make Britain more “family friendly” saying: “That includes paying couples to live together rather than apart, and more help for parents in the crucial early years, through reforms such as a massively expanded health visitor service and flexible parental leave.” He has indicated that mothers of small children who wish to remain at home will be supported to do so.
The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland has recently asked how Cameron would achieve this given that he wants to take Britain “out of the European social chapter, which guarantees some of the employment protections essential for family life”. He also asks how Cameron would pay for it.
Cameron says that, “instead of using the old-fashioned mechanisms of top-down state control, we will use the modern mechanisms of civil society – whether it’s businesses … social enterprises … or charities and community groups.” It is difficult to imagine how charities could achieve this given the chronic underfunding of the sector.
There is no reason to believe the Tories will increase funding. In fact, Oliver Letwin, Chair of the Conservative Party’s Policy Review, said recently “Many things that are done by the government or the private sector could be done more effectively or more cheaply by the third sector”.
I fear a hidden agenda. I suspect that not only will charities be expected to pick up the slack, but that even more unpaid women will be deployed as unpaid service deliverers. In fact, whenever I hear the phrase “support for families” I start to feel the chill of sharp steel at my back. I mistrust politicians who say they want to assist mothers of young children to stay at home.
It’s fine if staying home is mothers’ free choice, but there are suggestions Cameron’s Tories may offer inducements to do so – and fund them by cuts to childcare services. So women will have less choice. When I hear that the Tories want to provide tax benefits to married “couples”, I fear a return to the bad old days when married men received tax advantages from which their families rarely benefited.
If Gordon Brown wants to win the next election – and this is still possible – he needs to pursue a few imaginative and progressive policies which are obviously different from those of the Blairites – and do so before Cameron can make the running on them. If he doesn’t, he’s sunk.
Brown’s principled decision to ban cluster bombs was a great step forward. A specific and well-publicised commitment to require the USA to remove its stockpiles on UK soil within the 8 year limit would be fully consistent with this decision and gain huge public support – not least because it would reveal a British prime minister standing up to the USA.
It’s said that the botched 10 p tax was “Brown’s poll tax”. I disagree. It is the closure of post officers which comprehensively besmirches Brown’s government – revealing it as indifferent to the plight of the elderly, the poor, the disabled and small business people – as well as entire rural and urban communities. If Brown acts decisively to stop the closure, he will at a stroke draw many millions of voters back to Labour.
Brown needs to focus upon the elderly and this country’s army of unpaid female carers. Instead of announcing a review of payment for elderly care services, which from the start excluded the possibility of free care, Brown should first have committed the government to provide free care to those elderly and disabled people whose lives would be at risk without it. The entire country knows he could pay for it by fair taxation of the corporations and wealthy individuals who have done so well under Labour – or by scaling back Britain’s military adventures.
The media would condemn him, but then they already do. The voters, in contrast, would greatly approve.

They’d recognise courage when they saw it. And that’s what is urgently needed.

Fistula

argus title : fertility control essential for all women

This week Parliament rejected attempts to reduce the time within which a woman can legally obtain an abortion.

In the days before the vote, I was struck by the anti-abortion lobby’s energy and its continuing ability to set the terms of the agenda despite considerable public disagreement with their position.

I wondered, not for the first time, why anti-abortion campaigners, if they are indeed “pro-life”, don’t campaign for legislation to oblige the state to resuscitate late foetuses if there is potential for viability. This would not deny women the right to end late pregnancies, but would oblige them to accept that if a viable foetus left their body, it would be the sole responsibility of the state, with a duty to protect its interests as a separate human being.

I can only assume that anti-abortionists don’t campaign for this because the real issue is not the “life of the child”, but a desire to control women’s fertility. The leaders of the religious right, who set the agenda on this issue, have no place for women’s rights. They know that without control over their bodies, women have little real chance of equality.

It is true that in the USA and Europe women have gained some control over their fertility, although as we have seen it remains constantly under threat. However, in other respects, even in the West, women continue to have far less control over their bodies than men, with only limited ability to prevent domestic violence, sexual exploitation and rape.

In many developing countries the situation is far worse for there many women have no control at all. All too often young girls, weakened by malnutrition and exhausted by heavy work, walk for miles to collect water or fuel. Many are forced into early marriage, in some cases well before their bodies have fully developed. Thereafter they are at risk of domestic violence and rape. Without access to contraception or abortion, they give birth in agony and many lose their children. Those who attempt illegal abortion, often die.

As Kate Hawkins of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies said this week “Every 8 minutes a woman dies in the developing world due to unsafe abortion in countries where termination of pregnancy is illegal or safe services are unavailable.” She points out that throughout the world “at least 13% of maternal deaths are due to unsafe abortion.”

Regrettably, there is no very vocal lobby to end these maternal deaths or the deaths of, or injuries to, mothers and children resulting from childbirth in unsafe conditions. Many churches pray for an end to abortion, but few for an end to infant or maternal injury or death.
One of the common causes of child deaths and maternal injury is obstructed labour in conditions where caesarion sections are not available or unaffordable. Deaths and injuries often occur. Where mothers do not die, a result is often obstetric fistula – a dreadful complication which in the West was eradicated in the late 19th century, but in developing countries continues to blight the lives of millions of women. It is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Fistulas develop over many days of obstructed labor, when the pressure of the baby’s head against the mother’s pelvis cuts off blood supply to surrounding tissues, which necrotize and rot away. The dead tissue falls away and the woman is left with a hole between her vagina and her bladder (called a vesicovaginal fistula) and sometimes between her vagina and rectum (rectovaginal fistula). This results in permanent incontinence of urine and, in 20% of cases, faeces as well.

A majority of women who develop fistulae deliver dead babies and are subsequently abandoned by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, both because of their inability to have children and their foul smell.
It is estimated that in Ethiopia there are some 100,000 women suffering with untreated fistulae. The World Health Organisation estimates that approximately 2 million women worldwide have untreated fistulae and that each year around 100,000 develop the condition.
Less than 6 in 10 women in developing countries give birth with any trained professional, such as a midwife or a doctor. In Ethiopia, it is 1 in 10. When complications arise, as they do in approximately 15% of all births – not least because of the incidence of female genital mutilation – there is no one available to help the woman.
The experience of Berhane, a fifteen year old Ethiopian girl, is typical. Berhane was pregnant with her first child. She squatted for days on the mud floor of her husband’s hut with no one to care for her, but her mother in law. In agonising pain she was unable to cry out for fear it would disturb his husband’s sleep. By the third day she was sure her baby was dead. It was not until the sixth day that she delivered her tiny dead baby.
She cried herself to sleep that night and awoke to find her bed soaked in foul-smelling urine. Despite her efforts to keep clean, her husband left her, her family disowned her and the villagers shunned her.
According to pioneering Australian obstetrician Dr Catherine Hamlin, the root causes of fistula are poverty and the low status of women and girls, which amongst other factors cause malnutrition, small stature and stunted growth. She said: “Poverty is the basic factor. The girl child is the last one to be fed in the family, she has to look after the old people first, the men, then her husband and or her brothers. Lastly she will get food because she is the last person to be of any importance in the family…the girl.”
But, fistula is both preventable and treatable. Dr Hamlin, who with her late husband Reginald co-founded the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, has been has been successfully treating women and girls with fistulae without charge for almost 50 years. Berhane was one of them.
The Hamlins came to Ethiopia in 1959 and found a country with virtually no services for expectant mothers and none for treatment of obstetric fistulae. In fact, when they arrived they had never even seen one.
Reginald and Catherine quickly began to learn everything they could about obstetric fistula and perfected a surgical technique to mend the injuries. In 1974 they set up the Fistula Hospital, which over the years has treated over 30,000 women.
Many patients are very young, though others have suffered for decades. Many have walked for hundreds of miles to reach the hospital, enduring great hardship and humiliation as they travel. Though some are helped by their families, they are unable to use public transport because their smell is so offensive. Some have experienced years of social ostracism.
Currently, the hospital is able to successfully treat over 90% of the fistulae that present to the hospital. Of those who are successfully treated, many go back to their families. Some are able to give birth and are offered caesarian sections if they return to the hospital.
Some women choose never to return home, remaining at the hospital where they receive an education and in some cases are trained as nurses. One remarkable former sufferer is now able to skillfully perform the operation which saved her.
Sometimes the injuries from the obstructed labour are so extreme that the patient can never be completely cured. They may require ongoing medical care and can never return to their villages. They too are offered employment in the hospital where they are able to help others with similar disabilities.
Catherine Hamlin, now well into her 80s, still operates and has fundraised to set up several other hospitals. She has ensured that the issue of obstetric fistulae is securely on the UN agenda and has received numerous awards and accolades, including nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite increasing fame, Hamlin’s priorities remain the same. She tells of a father who had sold his only ox to travel many miles with his daughter so she could be treated. She asked him how he would manage on the farm without an ox and he replied “I don’t mind, I want my daughter to be cured”. A few days later some visitors to the hospital heard his story and collected enough money to buy him two oxen.

The daughter, who had serious injuries and will probably never be able to marry again, now works as a nursing aid in the hospital.

To support the work of the Fistula Hospital contact “Ethiopiaid” on 0207 201 9981.

Gene Robinson

Argus title : Why this openly gay bishop is a hero to me

As a child I had many heroes. I admired people like Robin Hood and Joan of Arc and Oliver Cromwell. I liked the idea that Robin took from the rich and gave to the poor.

My battered children’s history book had an illustration of the young Oliver Cromwell refusing to kiss the hand of the boy prince who later became Charles 1. I don’t know if the incident ever happened, but I thought it was pretty impressive. Best of all was Joan of Arc who spoke to angels, rejected housework, dressed up as a man and led an army to victory.

One of the hardest aspects of growing up was losing the capacity for innocent hero worship – though some fine souls survived my increasing scepticism about the motivation of leaders. I continue to admire reformers like Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler and Martin Luther King. Archbishop Tutu remains a definite hero and has featured in this column.

Another hero is Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, best known for being the first bishop of the Anglican tradition to be openly gay and non-celibate.
Nothing has come easily to Robinson. His parents were poor tenant farmers, in rural Kentucky. As a baby he was temporarily paralyzed and so seriously ill that the doctor was certain he would not survive.
Robinson had a very religious upbringing within a small strict non-conformist Christian church. It’s difficult to imagine a more restrictive and difficult environment for a young man who was beginning to question his own sexuality.
He was a bright student, and though he might have been better off at a more liberal university, won a full scholarship to the University of the South in Tennessee, and so attended there.
He discovered the Episcopal Church and very soon began to consider the ordained ministry. As he puts it “The Episcopal Church got a hold on me”. He graduated in 1969 then studied at the General Theological Seminary in New York City.
While serving as a Chaplain at Vermont University he met a young woman whom he grew to love and to whom he later proposed. Robinson was honest about his sexual confusion and at one point they considered breaking their engagement. However, they proceeded with their marriage in 1972 and he was ordained a year later.
The couple had 2 daughters in 1977 and 1981, but some time after that, during the early to mid 80s they began to realise that Robinson’s sexuality was an insoluable impediment to their marriage. They agreed to divorce, though both continued to care for their daughters, to whom they are devoted.
In 1987 Robinson met his current partner Mark Andrews and has lived faithfully with him ever since. Andrews helped care for Robinson’s daughters.
Robinson and his former wife remained on terms of affection and respect and later, when he was consecrated as Bishop, his former wife and 2 daughters were there in the front of the cathedral, smiling broadly and supporting him in the most public way possible.
Despite the fact that he had been democratically elected bishop in 2003 – unlike bishops in England who are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister – theologically conservative US Episcopalians aligned themselves with conservative bishops throughout the world to try to dislodge him.
In the same year Jeffrey John, a Gay priest in a longstanding reportedly celibate relationship, was nominated Bishop of Reading. The furore that followed was so intense that Archbishop Rowan Williams, although known to have liberal views on this matter, urged him to stand down. Dutifully John complied, but it did little good. Conservative elements within the church – already battle-hardened by opposition to women priests – had found a new issue around which to organise. They’d also scented blood.
Since that time the situation for openly gay people in the church has been even more difficult than before. People seeking ordination are now actively questioned about their sexuality. Some are prepared to lie, but many of the best of them are not. I personally know of one woman who believes she has a vocation and I’m sure would make a good priest. However, she’s unable to put herself forward for training because she’s unwilling to lie.
In a recent interview with the Church Times, Bishop Robinson said: “I’ve met, what, probably 300 gay, partnered clergy here in the Church of England, and I could tell you stories that would make you weep about what life is like for them, and the fear with which they live: the difficulty in having their bishop come to dinner at their home, with their partner, have a lovely time, and the bishop be fully affirming of them — and to have the bishop say: “You know, if this ever becomes public, I’m your worst nightmare. I will see to it that you are punished.” Now that does something not just to the bishop and to the couple; that does something to the Church.”

Some argue that Gay priests should quietly get on with their ministry, but Robinson says:
“The degree of openness with which one lives one’s life is a very personal choice…..The question for any gay or lesbian person is: “Is the price that I’m paying for being quiet exceeding the benefit?” When the negative consequences of that secrecy begin to outweigh its rewards, then that’s a dilemma.”

He goes on “What is the cost to the Church of secrecy? And I think this especially true here in the Church of England. What does it say to the Church when a vicar gets into a pulpit and calls the congregation to a life of integrity, when it is so obvious to the congregation that the vicar is himself not able to grasp at that straw of integrity? There’s cost to the people themselves, and there’s a cost to the Church.”

The Lambeth Conference of Bishops is due to take place this July in Canterbury. Regrettably, the Archbishop of Canterbury has given way to pressure from conservative bishops and has failed to issue a full invitation to Bishop Robinson. There has been an outcry from the US church, which asserts that as a duly elected bishop he is entitled to attend as a full participant.

Bishop Robinson says he will attend with the aim of increasing awareness. In June, just one month before the conference takes place, Bishop Robinson and his partner plan to contract a civil partnership with a church blessing. Some have criticised him for the timing, but he says:
“if we’d waited until after Lambeth to announce our intentions, I’d be just as severely criticised for having been disingenuous and secretive about the civil union to assure an invitation to Lambeth. There is no time when our civil union will be acceptable to many in the Anglican Communion. But I will not be irresponsible to the partner and love of my life just to avoid giving offence.”
When questioned about the timing by journalists, Robinson’s usual media-awareness deserted him. He responded unguardedly, though very amusingly: “I’ve always wanted to be a June bride”. He was widely criticised by conservative bishops.
He later commented: “What I should have said was something like this: “Gay and lesbian people grow up with the same hopes that other people do – that they’ll be able to celebrate their love for one another with family and friends gathered around, pledging their support for the faithful, monogamous, lifelong-intentioned, holy vows they’ve just taken. I, too, have always longed for such a day.”
He added ruefully“… it’s reminiscent of the years and years that I had to self-censor everything I said, so as not to give away the fact that I was gay. Gay and lesbian people learn at an early age to filter every single word before uttering it, straining out anything that might indicate who we really are on the inside. I know from my own experience, and from that of countless others, that this is an exercise in self-alienation.”
He said “This may not sound like oppression – it’s not the same as being thrown into prison or burnt at the stake – but it’s one of the silent, painful results of oppression. The result of any oppression is living in fear – fear of discovery, rejection and retribution. It’s what most gay and lesbian people live with every day, all over the world.”
He added poignantly: “It takes a toll on our souls.”
Gene Robinson’s book “In the Eye of the Storm” is published by Canterbury Press.