• Bullying Brits

  Posted Sunday, March 29, 2009 9:11 AM | By June Thomas
  
  
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  Sometimes in politics a sudden spewing of bile means that the target of the nastiness is doing something right—at least that’s how the negative attention recently directed Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party feels to me. Last Friday, a Daily Telegraph columnist referred to “the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman.”
  
  Harman has been an MP since 1982, serving in a number of Cabinet positions since Labor took power in 1997. She has always come in for scorn: She’s a serious person whose earnest demeanor doesn’t win her points in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the House of Commons. A civil rights lawyer before she went into Parliament, she’s done a lot of work on social-justice issues that, outside the writings of Dahlia Lithwick, rarely lend themselves to laughs.
  
  In the last month or so, though, the anti-Harman murmurs have become a clamor. With Gordon Brown traveling the world, she twice substituted for him at Prime Minister’s Question Time and was mocked and bullied both times. Of course, mockery and bullying are the prevailing tone of PMQ, largely because of the old boy’s club atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament. In his (not terribly kind to Harman) Guardian review of her March 4 PMQ appearance, Simon Hoggart described the Tory opposition acting like “playground bullies [who] had caught the whiff of [Harman’s] victimhood.”
  
  Harman is certainly not blameless—she made some unwise populist comments about banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose remarkably generous pension plan is more or less the British equivalent of the AIG bonuses—but I suspect the negativity has more to do with Gordon Brown’s sinking popularity. The bookies have Harman as the favorite to succeed him, so, for the ambitious members of her party she is now a serious rival. Apparently, she tends not to brief against her parliamentary colleagues, which means she’s no favorite of political journalists.
  
  But take a look at the video of the March 4 PMQ. When William Hague, her main opponent for the day, brought up Harman’s political ambitions, the Guardian’s Hoggart described her zinger-less response to Hague’s taunting as being made “in the tone of a girl reprimanding her little brother for saying ‘poo.’ ” It’s true that after sitting stone-faced while her fellow MPs indulge in shoulder-shaking laughter at her expense, she simply stands up and launches into a rather dull description of the government’s ideas about “mortgage support.” But these days, isn’t helping people stay in their homes more important to most people than political infighting? When ordinary voters see videos like this, I suspect they’ll relate more closely to earnest Harman than to an entertaining bully like Hague.
  
  
  Filed under: politics, sexism, Britain, uk, labor party, bullying, harriet harman
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