The Wonderful Co-op.

Co-op are not going to be stocking a number of exploitative magazines aimed at a manipulative and patronising construct of masculinity (my rather long winded avoidance of saying 'lad's mag's!). 

Wahooo!!!!

This is because those companies have refused to provide said magazines in sealed bags which would prevent people being able to see the content unless they actively wanted to and bought them. (Unfortunate that these have been referred to as 'modesty wraps')

The wonderful wonderful thing about this is that no one can call this censorship - it is not. The Co-op is, well a co-operative, and has a membership, a membership today I am very proud to be part of. This decision is a response to listing to that membership. Democracy at work. 

The publishers where given a choice and they made a decision, a decision I would imagine might bring the co-op many more customers and members. 

What I love about what's happened at the Co-op is that it demonstrates how alternative business structures bypass the debates other organisations will inevitably get tangled up in: Freedom of speech (aka I want to wank to whatever I like) vs. the right to live free of oppression and intimidation, everyone needs to be free to chose and we can't possibly do anything to effect our profit margins, etc, etc.

Members of the co-op said um actually no we don't like it so it's going - simple.

I suspect though that the co-op will be miss-understood and accused of censorship. Just as David Cameron fundamentally misunderstood the point of the 'No More Page 3 Campaign' . There seems to be a disconnect between campaigners using collective voicing of issues to challenge and change attitudes and practices and those who should understand democracy and the democratic process seeing calls for censorship everywhere.

There is a co-operative alternative to capitalism. 

Food glorious food.

Of course its more expensive to eat healthily than to eat rubbish. Anyone who has to do any sort of budgeting would know this. 

Also lets think of the advantages of eating healthily. You feel fitter, stronger, are more productive, happier. Why on earth would the current capitalist system want to encourage that? There are so many advantages to keeping the poor depressed, miserable and lacking the energy to fight.

Cooking food from the raw ingredients rather than pre-made tins, jars and microwave meals containing who knows what, is also time expensive. A family on a low income working all the hours sent on pitiful wages that have to be subsidised by the state, also lack the time to cook. They don't have 30 minutes and quiet frankly I have never cooked a 30 minute recipe in 30 minutes.

The parents who wonder home to a cleaner cleaned house, who's kids have been picked up from school by the paid for childcare arrangements,  rather than having to juggle favors between friends, have time to cook with ingredients most people have never heard of, picked in some far off countries by other people's children. 

Fresh fruit and veg is incredibly expensive it is much cheaper to fill your shopping basket with crisps. The farmers are all struggling though so who is getting all that money? But also could I be so bold as to suggest that if fruit and veg where properly affordable the rich wouldn't eat it? 

The state of meat we eat makes me want to cry. What we do to animals and what we put in our own bodies doesn't bear thinking about. Good sustaining meat is really really not cheap or affordable or available in your local supermarket.

Another observation I am sure I am not the only one who has made, is that a large number of people have become incredibly anxious about what they eat. This has lead me to the conclusion that there is a difference between healthy eating and eating healthily. Collective food anxiety has been fueled I would dare to say deliberately by those with a vested interest in selling gym membership, dieting foods, and an entire industry directed at making us 'healthy'. The actual aim of all these industries  obviously is to make money so keeping you in a state of constant paranoia about what you put in your mouth is good business for them. People who eat healthily are very few and far between.

A critique of what we eat and who eats what is desperately desperately needed. But focusing the blame or 'not being judgmental' questions at the "choices" of individuals is not going to take us very far forward. We need to ask questions of the structures people find themselves in, the choices they find themselves facing with regard to what they eat. 

Lets ask these sort of questions http://www.sustainweb.org/childrensfoodcampaign/our_campaigns/

British bank notes - Gender and class politics played out

Pride, Not Prejudice, we did it! 35K signed on @UKChange & @bankofengland will put a woman on banknotes http://ow.ly/i/2GVq6 

Is filling me twitter feed. Is it only me who feels a little deflated by this. Yes we have kept a woman on a bank note and the swap will happen at the same time as losing Elizabeth Fry from the £5. But lets be careful not to confuse a woman on a bank note with women on bank notes. There are 4 notes are there not and will still only be one woman (aside from the Queen). 

I did sign the campaign and am incredibly relieved that women have not been lost altogether and grateful to those women who tirelessly led the campaign at great cost to themselves, but at most this represents a stalling if not a slight regression and certainly not progress. Elizabeth Fry was an activist and reformer who called out abuse and exposed oppression. Jane Austin wrote love stories, which however subversive or radical they might have been at the time probably represent a message to women today to conform to a worldview that regards achieving matrimonial bliss and securing Mr Darcy and his large house as women's primary goal in life.

I am more interested in the outcomes of a review of selection policy which has also been announced and how that policy is implemented.  Currently the criteria requires that candidates be uncontroversial but Churchill made it through. How can anyone do anything significant and not be controversial? Churchill wasn't just the PM during the second world war he also fiercely opposed Indian independence and was no friend to women's suffrage, hardly. It is his memory which is supposedly uncontroversial not him himself.

Is it only me who in this age of cuts and shameless right wing propaganda feels uneasy that as a replacement for the social reformer Elizabeth Fry we have Winston Churchill. It just feels like a bit more hiding of a certain British history. Just like we saw at the jubilee and Thatchers funeral the right speak a narrative of our shared history many of us don't feel we share.

So sorry for not joining the party but while Jane Austin may have some feminist elements I can't see it as a massive achievement. Especially when she's got on at the expense of Elizabeth Fry - we should not have to have an either/or. Patriarchy pitting woman against each other on our bank notes. 

I know I'm spoiling the party. Sorry.