{"id":37415,"date":"2017-02-26T03:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-02-26T08:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37415"},"modified":"2017-03-03T16:34:26","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T21:34:26","slug":"julie-burchill-on-harriet-harmans-memoir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/02\/26\/julie-burchill-on-harriet-harmans-memoir\/","title":{"rendered":"Julie Burchill on Harriet Harman’s memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Spectator<\/em>, Julie Burchill<\/a> isn’t a fan of Harriet Harman’s recent political tell-all, A Woman’s Work<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Like the awful Diane Abbott, Harman is one of those thoughtful, serious-minded Labour women who seems to come alive when saying silly, thoughtless things. She even has the Voice \u2014 that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger Sunday-school drone which remains convinced that if it keeps repeating itself in ever slower permutations, opposition will do the decent thing and crumble. Brexit, of course, was the ripest raspberry ever blown in the face of such wheedling arrogance. Still, it\u2019s hard not to warm to her sharp-nosed, clear-eyed young face on the front cover, peering bravely into a future of policy reviews and quangos galore. Sadly her writing style is so dull it makes ditchwater look like a dry martini \u2014 if you had to guess the MP author, you might hazard John Major in his pedantic pomp \u2014 and this is rendered comical by the three dynamically named sections of the book: \u2018Upheaval\u2019, \u2018Transformation\u2019 and \u2018Challenge\u2019.<\/p>\n

With almost three decades on the front bench, twice acting deputy leader and the first Labour woman to feature at Prime Minister\u2019s Questions, Harman is the definitive Nearly Woman \u2014 as are all capable Labour women, trapped in a party which having signed up to the brotherhood of man seems quite happy to ride roughshod over their sisters, forever promising them jam tomorrow so long as they themselves pick the fruit, boil the berries and write the labels. At a time when the Conservatives are on their second female leader and Labour are led by a man who seems as impervious to sexism as any other weirdy beardy from Real Ale Society to mosque, Harman\u2019s book seems especially poignant. But I must say that any sympathy I had for her went out of the window in the first 40 pages when, having already suffered physical and verbal gropings from lecturers, employers and comrades without complaining about it, she gets stalked by a nutter whose case she has been bothering the poor police about through her job with the National Council for Civil Liberties. \u2018He was menacing and angry. Having been his solicitor, I was fully aware of every detail of his record of violent crime. I knew that he didn\u2019t just threaten violence, he carried it out\u2019 \u2014 and yet she doesn\u2019t tell the coppers for years, until he actually threatens to kill her. \u2018As I tipped out the carrier bags full of just some of the letters I\u2019d kept, the police were aghast that I\u2019d done nothing about it before.\u2019<\/p>\n

Here is the masochistic madness of do-gooding socialist feminism laid bare \u2014 and Labour wonder why women vote Tory! While we\u2019re on the subject of perverts, instead of unreservedly presenting the NCCL as a heroic \u2018thorn in the side of government\u2019 forever fighting for the rights of the little man, Harman might have seen fit to mention that, during her time there, they also granted the Paedophile Information Exchange formal affiliate status at a time when this vile lobby group was suggesting that the age of consent be lowered to ten. A little mea culpa<\/em> might not have gone amiss. Still, it\u2019s in the nature of the great and the good not to admit to anything which might reveal them as the entitled, woolly-minded mediocrities they generally are, and Harman \u2014 despite her admirable work for women\u2019s rights \u2014 is no exception.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Kathy Shaidle<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Spectator, Julie Burchill isn’t a fan of Harriet Harman’s recent political tell-all, A Woman’s Work: Like the awful Diane Abbott, Harman is one of those thoughtful, serious-minded Labour women who seems to come alive when saying silly, thoughtless things. She even has the Voice \u2014 that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger Sunday-school drone which remains convinced that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,53],"tags":[86,143,458],"class_list":["post-37415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-politics","tag-criticism","tag-labour","tag-parliament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Jt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37415"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37547,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37415\/revisions\/37547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}