There was a really interesting documentary about Sylvia Pankhurst and her life after being a suffragette on Radio 4 last night - she spent a lot of time campaigning on behalf of Haile Selassie,. protesting the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. It's available on Listen Again until next Monday.
On the Today programme this morning, by contrast, they were discussing the new Tory policy of giving tax breaks of around twenty pounds a week to married couples. John Humphrys, who seems to be growing ever more offensive, was at his very worst here - the interview starts about ten minutes in - talking to a married woman and a woman who had been with her partner for fourteen years and had two children without marrying.
The unmarried woman said quite reasonably that to have the wedding she'd like would cost money that she would rather spend on a holiday - Humphrys retorts 'You could have a quick registry office job, couldn't you? Only cost a couple of quid!'. The Tory claim that married couples are financially less well off than cohabiting couples went pretty much unquestioned, as did the married woman's claim that people in a stable relationship who are married are making more of a 'contribution to society' than people who are unmarried. It also became clear but wasn't discussed that in the case of the two women being interviewed, the unmarried couple were better off because both partners went out to work, while the married woman stayed at home.
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> It also became clear but wasn't discussed that in the case of the two women being interviewed, the unmarried couple were better off because both partners went out to work, while the married woman stayed at home.
You what? So they weren't even comparing like with like? That's ridiculous.
That's like comparing my income with the income of a man who works for Goldman Sachs and saying I make less because I'm female. I make less because I don't work for Goldman Sachs, and if you want a proper comparison you need to compare the man with a woman who works at Goldman Sachs. If that makes sense.
It was the worst kind of 'let's talk to *real people*' interview - they obviously had just pulled in a married woman and a cohabiting woman, paying no attention to the similarities or differences to their lives. I though Humphrys's point about the cheap registry office wedding was most offensive, though - the implicit suggestion that maybe they hadn't got married because of some unspecified financial benefit to cohabiters, and the idea that marriage is somehow the norm was really pathetic.
BTW, anybody interested in Sylvia Pankhurst's Ethiopian career can find out more in a really interesting book about modern Eritrea called We didn't do it for you by Michaela Wrong.
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