Valerie Stevens guest-blogs for SheBlogs on the newly-released movie The Iron Lady and its wider political context.

The social media has over the last month or so has been full of discussion about the new film released about the life of Margaret Thatcher. There has been much debate about the quality of the film and a great deal of praise for Meryl Streep’s performance.

Of course a film, unless made as a documentary, is always fiction like all the war films made with American characters in places they never fought in produced to sell the film in the US.

A film about such a divisive politician as Margaret Thatcher was always going to be controversial especially as she is still alive and not in a position to be properly involved.  I don’t wish her dead. As democrat I believe that she won elections fairly exactly in the same way as Tony Blair in the system that we have in the UK. What I have not done is see the film. I don’t go to see films about vampires either or mass violence.

I sent a tweet to a friend recently and said living through the 1980’s was enough drama for me without being reminded all over again of the devastation wreaked by her Tory Government.

I was first elected as a councillor in 1979 for a seat with a high percentage of people of Pakistani origin. A number came after removal of Bhutto in Pakistan. 1979 was the year that Thatcher made her “swamping” speech. Let’s not have a debate about immigration let’s just say we are being swamped. A classic Tory line when elections need to be won. I was elected in May to Manchester City Council and the Tory Government  was elected in that year.  It was a dreadful time, for years and years, to be in politics. The Labour Party was in turmoil, local government was in revolt and people lost their livelihoods and communities were destroyed. The almost final destruction of manufacturing was completed during these years. Nigel Lawson, the then Chancellor, stated that the service sector was to be the new economic model. The UK is living with the consequences of this today and as ever the Tories have conveniently forgotten their decisive role in the destruction of the UK’s manufacturing base.

Much was made at the time of her being the first woman Prime Minister and what a breakthrough for women. I don’t think she represented women or wanted to for that matter. She represented that strand of small minded, petty bourgeois thinking that the Tory Party has always appealed to in elections. Until Ted Heath they had not let its representatives rise to positions of power within their ranks. They are much more comfortable with the Camerons and Osbornes than the Majors, Heaths and Thatchers.

I don’t hate an old woman with dementia but I hate what she did and I hate what her successors are doing now. It’s a film after all and fiction but yes I will forgo the pleasure of Meryl Streep’s performance as the reality behind the fiction is still fresh in my mind even after 30 years.

Val Stevens

Former Deputy Leader Manchester City Council   2006-10

Now retired.  Member of Labour International  CLP and Parti Socialiste

The Guardian today reported that L’Oréal has been forced to pull ad campaigns featuring Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts and supermodel Christy Turlington, after the advertising watchdog upheld complaints by Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson that the images were overly airbrushed. This is part of Jo’s long-running campaign to take action regarding unattainable images of women in the media.

Read The Guardian’s article online here.

The murder of an Indian girl is a symptom of a culture which does not allow women to flourish

The Guardian has reported on yet another brutal assault on a young woman in India. According to journalist Kishwar Desai:

“Sonam, a 14-year-old, was allegedly raped and murdered last week in Lakhimpur, an obscure village in Uttar Pradesh. The main reason it is in the news is that the state goes to the polls early next year. It is unlikely that the dead girl or her family will ever get justice – but a huge amount of din and photo opportunities will certainly be created for politicians, including those from the Congress party, which is in opposition in the state.”

Read the article in full by clicking here.

The Guardian has reported on how anti-violence measures have been agreed in Afghanistan, but the safety and rights of women and girls are not protected on the ground. The report focuses on the gap between legislative advances to protect the rights of women and the reality on the ground.

Read Ivan Simonovic’s account in The Guardian here.

Half of refuge and outreach services could face closure, reveals survey

A Women’s Aid survey launched on the eve of International Women’s Day reveals that over half of domestic and sexual violence services, refuges and outreach services could face closure.

The survey shows that 60% of refuge services have no funding agreed after 1st April 2011 and 72% of outreach services have no funding agreed after 1st April 2011. read more…

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) said the UK Government plan to tackle violence against women and girls does not go far enough to help victims of ‘honour’ based violence.

Diana Nammi, from IKWRO said, “Every single day girls and women in the UK are locked up, threatened, beaten, forced into marriage and even murdered by their families in the name of so called ‘honour’.

“While promising to increase training for police and prosecutors, the new action plan does not do enough to protect these vulnerable women and girls. The government is talking about rolling out training promised three years ago, but what it really needs is a national strategy to get to grips with this problem.” read more…

The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has announced 26 seats in which it intends to select parliamentary candidates at the earliest opportunity.

A new selection process will apply in respect of these seats. Labour Women’s Network will be publishing details of the new process shortly. If you want to receive full information about the new procedures, as well as the opportunity to attend parliamentary training, join the Labour Women’s Network at www.lwn.org.uk.

The 26 seats, all of which are marginals and 50% of which will be applying an All-Women Shortlists, are as follows (* denotes an All-Women Shortlist):

Reading West*  Dover*  Harlow*  Peterborough* Stevenage* Swindon South*  Worcester*  Hastings and Rye*  Northampton North*  Brighton Kemptown*  Lincoln*  Thurrock*  Milton Keynes South  Chatham and Aylesford  Crawley  Loughborough  Warwick & Lemington   Ipswich  Corby  Hove  Bedford  Stroud  Waveney  Norwich South.

Burton on Trent and Redditch, one of which will be AWS, will select early and discussions with the local parties are ongoing.

I recently interviewed Jim Murphy MP, the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, for the magazine Progress:

What happened to the Tories in Scotland could yet happen to Labour in southern England, Jim Murphy warns

The sound of laughter reverberates down the corridor outside Jim Murphy’s Westminster office. Inside, Murphy is sharing a series of bad jokes with Tristram Hunt, who is seeking inspiration to lighten a speech he is preparing to deliver. It’s the end of a gloomy January day and the atmosphere is relaxed and informal. One of the few adornments in the otherwise sparse office is a funny cartoon of Murphy, bedecked in the green and white stripes of his beloved Celtic Football Club. It’s not long before the conversation swings round to football, and even when we get down to discussing political reform the footballing metaphors continue thick and fast.

Yet, while Murphy is certainly known for enjoying a joke, the relaxed persona masks serious political convictions. Having won the formerly safe Conservative seat of East Renfrewshire in 1997 (a seat which he describes to me as ‘the most middle-class in Scotland’ where ‘for the first time ever I just got 50 per cent’ of the vote), he was propelled into parliament as Scotland’s youngest MP. The experience was a steep learning curve which Murphy seemed to take in his stride, steadily climbing the ministerial ranks to become secretary of state for Scotland in the last government and now shadow secretary of state for defence. During last year’s leadership contest he argued repeatedly that Labour should be proud to defend its record in government. Since then, Murphy has been outspoken about his frustration at the coalition’s success in undermining Labour’s economic credibility. He is clearly a man in a hurry, keen to see Labour move up through the gears into attack mode. Yet, when asked what success in the May 2011 local elections would look like for Labour, his answer is decidedly restrained.

‘Success is getting more seats than the other guys. We’ve got to prove that we’re back in business.’ Is that the limit of his ambition? What about places such as Sheffield, where Labour hopes for an authoritative win? He readily agrees that ‘we’ve got to take the argument to Nick Clegg’s own doorstep’ but he won’t be drawn on the specifics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his chief concern is what is likely to happen in Scotland. ‘The biggest contest is Scotland, just because of its national significance, its multibillion pound budget. [But] the electoral system is … designed to prevent someone winning an outright majority.’ This raises the question of a coalition government, an interesting prospect given the options which may be open to Labour. A Labour coalition with the Conservatives in Scotland seems unrealistic, as does a coalition with the SNP. What, then, are the prospects for a Lib-Lab coalition at Holyrood? Murphy shifts in his seat with a smile, aware of the dangers of acknowledging this very real possibility.

‘The Lib Dems would love to go into coalition with Labour, I suspect, to prove that they’re not Tories.’ And Labour? When pushed, he notes that a coalition must logically be one option on the table. That prospect is tantalising in a national climate where the Labour party seems obsessed with Liberal Democrat-bashing at the expense of targeting the Tories…

… Read the full interiew on Progress’ website via this link: http://www.progressives.org.uk/articles/article.asp?a=7455

A colleague of mine from chambers, Daniel Stilitz QC, has argued in The Guardian that our cultural reticence about revealing earnings provides a cloak for perpetuating inequality, and pay transparency is the answer:

” A telling side-plot in the debate about bankers’ bonuses is the banks’ reluctance even to disclose how much they are paying their staff. There are a number of reasons for this. Such disclosure, of course, would only serve to fuel the public outrage at the large sums earned by bankers when others are facing unemployment, real-terms pay cuts and the sharp end of the government’s austerity cuts. Banks may fear that disclosure of their top earners’ remuneration would assist competitors seeking to poach their best performers. At a deeper level, the public disclosure of individuals’ remuneration goes against the grain of our particularly British sense of privacy. One doesn’t talk about money in polite society. How many of us, even now, would be comfortable about revealing our earnings to all but our closest family and friends?…”

Read the full text of Daniel’s article on The Guardian‘s website here.

Anna Bird of the Fawcett Society takes a look at equal pay in 2011 for the left-wing blog Left Foot Forward:

“ While equality in the workplace has come a long way, the gap in earnings shows just how much further we have to go. The Annual Survey of Hourly Earnings 2010 published last month found that while men’s mean hourly earnings were £16.25, for women that shrank to £13.73, giving a national average gap in pay of 15.5 per cent.

More than 40 years after the Equal Pay Act, women working full-time in the UK are still paid on average almost a sixth less than men. These figures make a mockery of any suggestion that the fight for equal pay is over. Expecting the pay gap to go away by itself isn’t working – we urgently need a new, more proactive tack to ensure men and women are paid fairly…. “

Read the full article on Left Foot Forward’s website www.leftfootforward.org

Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison by Iran’s judicial authorities.

She is also barred from practicing law or leaving the country for 20 years after being found guilty of “acting against national security” and of “propaganda against the regime.”

Shirin Ebadi from the Wall Street Journal who is also a friend of Sotoudeh said, “Nasrin’s only crime has been her passionate defense of Iran’s most legally vulnerable citizens: juvenile offenders facing the death penalty, human rights campaigners, and prisoners of conscience.”

Ebadi said after the contested presidential election of 2009, she took on the widely publicized case of Arash Rahmanipour, a young man who was arrested and later executed for his alleged involvement in unrest following the election. Sotoudeh has argued Rahmanipour confessed only after Iranian authorities made threats against his family.

In September last year she was arrested and officials offered to release her if she participated in a televised confession of her guilt and speak out against other colleagues. She declined.

According to Ebadi one of the officials said to her, “I will ensure that you stay in prison for over 10 years, and that by the time you’re released your three-year-old son will have grown into a man taller than you.”

She said she is in solitary confinement and speaks to her husband only once a month, from behind a glass window and through a phone that is monitored by prison officials. However she has been refused of seeing her two small children.

A revolutionary court has summoned her husband and her attorney, Nasrin Ghanavi, and threatened to charge them as well.

She has protested the unfair trial and plans to appeal.

[With thanks to Women's Weekly News for the content of this post]