Will Welfare to Work?

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Today is Day 1 of the Welfare to Work Programme. This is the Government's strategy to halve long-term unemployment and as far as I can judge from the coverage, as launches go, it's on track.

Respite care row drags in social enterprise

Yesterday Chris Smith from Swarm Communications wrote a really good piece in the Guardian  on the desperate need for social enterprise to communicate to those outside our cosy tent, what we are and why we matter. I would say that as he generously quotes me, and other than the rather challenging photo of me in what I now regard as dodgy earrings, I come off rather well as do SEL members Fifteen, Belu, Greenworks, Divine and our old friend Rob Greenland the man behind the fantastic Social Business Blog.

SEL staff have had some fun with the above photo today with an impromptu caption competition, front runners at the moment are "How big!?" and "This big". Feel free to join in, you can only do better.

The point Chris makes, that the wider public need to get what we do in order to join us, you might think is self evident in its urgency. He goes on to say that our recent association with the Big Society might have got us out to a wider audience but that could be tricky as the Big Society remains rather ill defined itself. Getting stories out about the smaller, newer, cutting edge social enterprises like Bikeworks or Responsible IT is the job of agencies like SEL and I hope we are doing our job well but I agree we need to do more and fast. Worth a read.

This morning the row over cuts to respite care for families of disabled children is a case in point. On BBC Breakfast the manager of the Watford MENCAP centre for respite care was interviewed and was angry at the cuts, and angry about "all this talk about social enterprise". "What was it?" she asked. "Where are the models for us to follow? How will it help us with these cuts?" she went on to say. These are all good questions and just as Government talks enthusiastically about social enterprise they must offer people support to explore the model. It is the screaming absence of specifics or resource to access expertise that leads to people getting angry, and angry with us. As Chris Smith says, social enterprise needs to communicate its story, we need to do this so that folk in Watford can make an informed decision about whether its right for them.  

Suzanne Moore calling all Angry Birds

Today Suzanne Moore published an excellent piece entitled 'It's time to get angry, all this polite and smiley feminism is getting us nowhere' in the Guardian telling us there is a need for women to start getting angry about inequality. Moore, like me, has long since been irritated by the term 'post feminism'. All the women I know who have been active within the feminist movement struggle to recognise any development that would allow us to consider that job done and the emergence of a subsequent, distinct reconstructed era. Moore's piece takes a deliberately controversial stab at unpicking what has happened there and as such is really worth a read, but its the comments that followed that were really heart stopping.

As soon as I had sunk my first cup of tea at around 9am, watched the fab Campbell Robb, ceo at Shelter tell us on BBC Breakfast to be concerned about the crisis in housing shortages, the stream of bile was well under way. From mostly men but some women as well, the feed tells you everything you need to know about the current status of feminism in the UK. Read it and weep. It is quite clear from the comments that the truth is feminism isn't unnecessary because we have achieved equal pay, have equal access to senior jobs or are anything other than a risible minority of FTSE 100 board members or MPs. No we have not 'arrived' and not for the want of trying, but because some men really, really don't want us to have those positions and aren't going to 'give' them to us or indeed tolerate any position that describes the current state of inequality as even unfair.

My own comment on the piece, left a few moments ago was as follows:

If anyone was puzzled about the context of this piece they only have to read the majority of the comments that followed it, spiteful, defensive miopic sexism dressed up as counter balance. To put her thoughts in the context of my own week I got involved in an interesting twitter dialogue earlier on when I tweeted my surprise during Monday's Panorama, that the ceo of the Mother's Union was a man. Several women picked up this point and agreed, the next day the Mother's Union tweeted me back to point out that they have an equal opportunities policy and my comments were sexist. Really? In establishing the selection criteria for the job of representing the Mother's Union, clearly being a mother didn't even make it onto the essential list. Now every point made to emphasise the most important job in society, that of being a mother, is made by a man. Which other special interest groups do that? Would Fathers for Justice have a woman as their figurehead? The Muslim Defence League elect to be run by a non-Muslim, the NAACP select a white spokesperson? When the gauntlet of equality is laid down it seems only women are scrupulous enough to pick it up, everyone else steps over it and carries on shouting. So maybe we should stop being so reasonable, so measured and take a leaf out of Moore's book? In my own world of social enterprise the majority of my members are women led companies and yet the vast majority of our spokespeople are men, white men to boot. Day after day I go to meetings that are dominated by men, attend conferences where all male panels discuss the issues and key note after key note is a white man, often of a certain age, all offered up and passed out without comment. There are exceptions to this silence though, recently I attended a good conference on the future of public services at the RSA where, sadly, the plenary was all male even though the audience contained some of the country's leading female experts on the subject. After the coffee break, and without even discussing it, those women returned early to the auditorium and occupied the entire front row and then the rows immediately behind, causing raised eyebrows from almost every man who entered the room and eventually leading to a comment from the panel. I think we do have to make an effort to avoid invisibility, especially the most senior of us, as economic austerity gives those in authority every excuse not to do what they didn't want to do anyway. We should assert ourselves as women, not just for our sake, not just for our daughter's but our son's too. A peaceful, powerful, careful society is a fair one and women have so much to contribute to that, to call it a job done without them is illusionary.


We shall see if anyone picks that up, but in any case my point is we all need to be vigilant. Girls are getting distracted by media, the cult of celebrity, and terms like 'post feminism' and in the great scramble for the few remaining jobs and the female economic independence a civilised society is predicated on, they are, almost inevitably, missing out. Suzanne wants to recruit an army of 'Angry Birds', she can count me in.