Tim Collard's blog on (and off) the Daily Telegraph

This blog is based on the one I write on the Daily Telegraph website (blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/timcollard). But it also contains posts which the Telegraph saw fit to spike, or simply never got round to putting up.

I'm happy for anyone to comment, uncensored, on anything I have to say. But mindless abuse, such as turns up on the Telegraph site with depressing regularity (largely motivated my my unrepentant allegiance to the Labour Party), is disapproved of. I am writing under the name which appears on my passport and birth certificate; anyone else is welcome to write in anonymously, but remember that it is both shitty and cowardly to hurl abuse from under such cover. I see the blogosphere as the equivalent of a pub debate: a bit of knockabout and coarse language is fine, but don't say anything that would get you thumped in the boozer. I can give as good as I get, and I know how to trace IP addresses.

Sunday, 18 April 2010

The Monstrous Regiment marches on

Following last week’s dramatic events (link to previous blogpost) I am now free to apply myself to the campaign trail. As I keep pointing out, I am not campaigning for New Labour or Lord Mandelson or even the much-maligned Prime Minister; I am campaigning for our local candidate. He is not a sitting MP and therefore untainted by scandal, local, hard-working, honest, decent, intelligent – and male.

Does the last element matter? I’m afraid it does. Not that I have any objection to female candidates; it’s the All-Women Shortlist issue. As well as barring able men from some of the most winnable seats, it will tend to deter women from applying to those seats with open selection. They will consider their chances will be much better in an AWS seat, and male rivals might be heard to grumble “Why can’t she run for one of ‘their’ seats and leave this one to us?” I would be interested to know how many female candidates have been chosen from mixed-gender short-lists.

One would imagine, therefore, that in the Parliamentary Labour Party shortly to be elected the majority of the women MPs will have been chosen from all-women shortlists. They will not be able to escape the charge of tokenism, however unjustified. All this will be forgotten if some stellar performers arise from their ranks, but the experience of the Blair Babes of 1997 hardly predisposes one to optimism. Debarring the majority of party members from running in a constituency is hardly the recipe for ending up with the best candidates. The whole point of All-Women Shortlists is to get candidates elected who would not have got in under an open selection policy.

I was delirious with joy when I read last year that the Cameroons were considering imposing All-Women Shortlists on their own constituency associations. The Tory vote decimated at one fell swoop, and Gordon to go on and on and….you get my drift. A shame that Dave re-engaged his brain at the last moment. A disastrous policy, both for the party and for the cause of more equal political representation; women MPs will look more, not less, like second-class representatives, however unfair that may be. But, as you can imagine, my view is somewhat easier to put over in a blog on the Daily Telegraph than in a Labour Party committee room. As Orwell almost said: both genders are equal, but one is more equal than the other.

Assault: Vindicated. Possession of a Y chromosome: Guilty as charged, m'lud

Apologies for recent absence from the blogosphere, but I think I have a decent excuse. (It’s been quite a week for excuses: on Thursday I had to e-mail a Brazilian friend that I would not be able to meet her at the weekend because a volcano had erupted in Iceland, quite a tall order to put into Portuguese if one doesn’t really speak it.)

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was undergoing a period of homelessness, without giving details. These can now be provided: just before Christmas my wife decided to end the marriage in spectacular fashion. I shouldn’t perhaps be giving people ideas, but it is well for my male readers to be warned; if a dissatisfied female partner can contrive a vaguely plausible accusation of assault, you are in big trouble.

The Old Bill were called, and duly put the cuffs on me for a nineteen-hour sojourn in the cells. This was the first night of the ferocious weather conditions which we all remember from last Christmas, and the cell was far too cold to permit sleep. Next day, in a state of zombification, I was interviewed, charged, and told I would need to find a bail address because I would not be allowed home for the foreseeable future. This being 20th December, I was more or less compelled to fall back on my mother, with whom I spent a perfectly pleasant Christmas.

But a man pushing fifty cannot really be expected to set up home in his mother’s spare bedroom. Besides, my mother lives 160 miles away. I don’t actually have a job requiring daily attendance, but I’d love to know what happens to those who do when the Old Bill bar them from their homes. As I blogged in early February, I spent the early part of 2010 lurching from pillar to post in a somewhat battered Saab. My wife, had she really been living in terror of me, had a married sister living in the same town; but of course she, as the innocent party, could not be expected to inconvenience herself by moving out of the house.

“As the innocent party”? When the case finally came to trial, last Wednesday, it was decided by a court of law that the innocent party was in fact myself. The prosecution case imploded spectacularly. It did not seem to have occurred to the lady that it might be a good idea to play the poor, oppressed innocent abroad, and to save the Medusa impression for another occasion. When the magistrates retired to consider their verdict, the prosecuting counsel was called into their chamber and emerged looking as if he had been given six of the best. I rather fear he had been given a royal dressing-down for bringing such a shambolic case into court.

Let’s face it: the real charge against me was possession of a Y chromosome. I could be locked up for nineteen hours and barred from my home for two months, having committed no crime, purely on account of my gender. When the police summary of the case was read out in court, I noticed that I had been referred to by my surname only; my wife, who has a different surname, was given a respectful “Ms.” They clearly “knew” who was the guilty man.

The excuse for this is “compensation” for the tendency of the police of an earlier era to ignore “domestics”, thus leaving women without protection from husbands’ or lovers’ violence. I understand, but fail to see why I should be made to pay that compensation. I entirely agree that male violence against women is a serious and despicable crime; but let’s save our anger for those who have actually committed it, eh? We don’t yet acknowledge crimes so serious that they are exempt from the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. I am afraid that the restoration of gender equality will require a bit of a backlash. I will be returning to this theme in the next few days.

Yes, I was entirely vindicated in court, but that is not enough. Can I now sue for the return of four months of my life? Anyway, now to the divorce courts. Heigh-ho. They’re always fair, aren’t they?