• 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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• All Goody, All the Time

  Posted Monday, March 23, 2009 7:28 AM | By June Thomas
  
  
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  I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
  
  Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
  
  What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
  
  Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
  Filed under: celebrity, Britain, Tabloids, jade goody, uk, press
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